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cartergramiak

Opinion | 'Because of You Guys, I'm Stuck in My Room' - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...senior-living-coronavirus.html

Pandemic US history crisis culture

shared by cartergramiak on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Residents and caregivers at senior living facilities write about life during the pandemic — and trying to stay safe while facing the challenges of long-term isolation.
  • A former special education teacher, she told me she found the isolation and loneliness of lockdown “so heartbreaking.”
  • She said she gets frustrated when she hears about young people flouting social distancing rules. “I think, ‘Because of you guys, I’m stuck in my room. I would like to put you in my room for a week and see how you like it.’”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • My mom isn’t able to write or read after suffering from two strokes. In addition to early-stage dementia, she has expressive aphasia, which means she has difficulty talking. In early November, we received an email from her residential care facility saying that four staff members had tested positive. Mom tested negative. But soon after, she called telling me her next-door neighbor was sick with the virus. I started planning how I could remove my mom from the facility.
  • We waited until 4 p.m. for another test result, also negative, and I got her soon after. She had two bags packed and was practically running out the door — away from the boredom, loneliness, scary and confusing events, unknown staff members with covered faces.
  • When Covid-19 hit, all family visits were halted. Dorothy was OK at first, already accustomed to the staff feeding her twice a day. But after a while, I think it hit her. Her family was gone. We could not tell her why or where they were. We could not reassure her, although we tried.Dorothy slowly went downhill, and in July, she died. She is the collateral damage, the many who decline simply from the isolation and loss of routine, but most important, from the loss of the people who love them. She was one of many here, and she deserves a voice.
  • My mother is fortunate that she is in an assisted-living facility that cares. It adheres to the guidelines. Unfortunately, the very rules that keep its residents physically protected do not support their emotional health. There are no easy answers.
caelengrubb

5 key facts about language and the brain - 0 views

www.medicalnewstoday.com/...324529

shared by caelengrubb on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Language is a complex topic, interwoven with issues of identity, rhetoric, and ar
  • While other animals do have their own codes for communication — to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food — such communications are typically “repetitive instrumental acts” that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences
  • As Homo sapiens, we have the necessary biological tools to utter the complex constructions that constitute language, the vocal apparatus, and a brain structure complex and well-developed enough to create a varied vocabulary and strict sets of rules on how to use it.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Though it remains unclear at what point the ancestors of modern humans first started to develop spoken language, we know that our Homo sapiens predecessors emerged around 150,000–200,000 years ago. So, Prof. Pagel explains, complex speech is likely at least as old as that
  • A study led by researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that committed language students experienced growth in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with learning and spatial navigation, as well as in parts of the cerebral cortex, or the outmost layer of the brain.
  • In fact, researchers have drawn many connections between bilingualism or multilingualism and the maintenance of brain health
  • Multiple studies, for instance, have found that bilingualism can protect the brain against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
  • Being bilingual has other benefits, too, such as training the brain to process information efficiently while expending only the necessary resources on the tasks at hand.
  • Research now shows that her assessment was absolutely correct — the language that we use does change not only the way we think and express ourselves, but also how we perceive and interact with the world.
  • Language holds such power over our minds, decision-making processes, and lives, so Broditsky concludes by encouraging us to consider how we might use it to shape the way we think about ourselves and the world.
clairemann

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

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

shared by clairemann on 14 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • First, there is love of learning
  • Second, there is courage. The obvious form of intellectual courage is the willingness to hold unpopular views. But the subtler form is knowing how much risk to take in jumping to conclusions
  • Third, there is firmness
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Fourth, there is humility, which is not letting your own desire for status get in the way of accuracy.
  • Fifth, there is autonomy
  • Autonomy is the median of knowing when to bow to authority and when not to
  • Such a person is open to learning from anyone at any stage in life.
  • The median point between flaccidity and rigidity is the virtue of firmness. The firm believer can build a steady worldview on solid timbers but still delight in new information
  • Finally, there is generosity
  • the mind is embedded in human nature, and very often thinking well means pushing against the grain of our nature — against vanity, against laziness, against the desire for certainty, against the desire to avoid painful truths.
  • Good thinking isn’t just adopting the right technique. It’s a moral enterprise and requires good character, the ability to go against our lesser impulses for the sake of our higher ones.
  • wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing how to handle your own limitations
  • Montaigne once wrote that “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.”
  • Is it possible to display and cultivate character if you are just an information age office jockey, alone with a memo or your computer?
  • Some people are just more ardently curious than others, either by cultivation or by nature.
  • Javier E on 14 Sep 15
     
    willing to look at things that are surprisingly hard to look at.
huffem4

The Power of Positive Thinking: Too Much and Never Enough - The Bulwark - 1 views

thebulwark.com/king-too-much-and-never-enough

psychological COVID-19 current events

shared by huffem4 on 27 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Peale was exceptional for cutting the flock some spiritual slack, encouraging them to look for the sunny side and conquer their inferiority complexes. In his world, you can have the economic gains minus the guilt, which seems perfectly suited to the American sensibility.
  • The book sold millions of copies and was eventually translated into more than 40 languages, and Peale, from his pulpit at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, became central to the spiritual life of the family of Fred Trump Sr., his wife, Mary, and the four Trump children, including the future president.
  • it was also well suited to justifying and exacerbating the pathologies of the Trump family and businesses
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Mary Trump (the president’s niece who also happens to have a Ph.D. in psychology) paints a portrait of Fred Trump Sr. as a sociopath, utterly uninterested in entering into the moral, emotional, and psychological world of his family or its members. In keeping with Peale’s teaching, he would no more hear about his wife’s or children’s problems than he would accept a failed business deal
  • Fred would just say, “Everything’s great, right Toots?” refusing to acknowledge, much less accommodate, her illness. 
  • Fred Jr. was then further abused, repeatedly denied authority, second-guessed at every turn, and blamed for every problem, setback, and failure in a perverse tag-team between Fred Sr. and Donald. The abuse fed his alcoholism, which, in the family’s Peale-informed understanding, was not a disease requiring treatment but the result of Fred Jr.’s negative thinking
  • Peale wanted people to be hopeful, kind, and optimistic, and to become “people persons.” The Trump family heard the positive thinking, personal empowerment parts, which integrated easily with its win-at-all-cost ideology, but they, or at least Donald, missed the bits about seeking counsel from others and living a life of dependence upon God.
  • Fred Jr.’s deepening alcoholism only elicited increasing abuse from his father and brother seemingly under the theory that if they were hard enough on him he would turn around. Even in his final crisis, afflicted by fatal, alcohol-induced cardiac problems, no member of the family went with him to the hospital (Donald Trump went to a movie instead). Dying, it appears, is the result of late-stage negative thought.
  • The consistent element in each of these has been to deny negative realities and keep moving. The casinos, the airline, the football league, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump University . . . all bear the same markings of hyper optimism and overpromise/underdeliver salesmanship
  • Trump’s just doing what he’s always done: conquering the challenge by blinding himself to it, just the way Reverend Peale taught him and his father insisted upon. 
  • My AEI colleague, Brad Wilcox, documented that men who identified as “evangelical” but infrequently attend church were more likely to engage in domestic violence than evangelicals who regularly attended church, mainline Protestants and those who never attend church. Wilcox believes this results from a kind of doctrinal cherry-picking—big on authority, sovereignty, and power but closed to other-directed teachings like altruism and self-sacrifice. Weak attachment to religious faith tends to put some of the worst behaviors on steroids.  
  • These are the problem-solving strategies that Donald Trump brought to his marriages, six corporate bankruptcies, presidential campaign, and now, what increasingly appears to be a failed presidency.
  • “prosperity gospel” (a belief popularized by televangelists that God intends Christians to be healthy and wealthy)
  • The purpose of these psychological and spiritual practices is to free individuals from self-doubt and feelings of inferiority and help them to become the people God truly intends them to be: happy, wealthy, popular, and professionally successful.
  • Now we have Trump COVID-19 and it’s following the same pattern. The virus is “very well under control” and “going to fade away.”
pier-paolo

THE CLOSE READER; Powers of Perception - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ader-powers-of-perception.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Keller's writing jars the contemporary reader in three ways. First, she composes in the grandiose manner favored by the late-19th-century genteel essayist, with lots of quotations and inverted sentences. Second, she gushes with a girlish gratefulness that registers, in our more cynical time, as more ingratiating than genuine
  • Keller violates a cardinal rule of autobiography, which is to distinguish what you have been told from what you know from experience. She narrates, as if she knew them firsthand, events from very early childhood and the first stages of her education -- neither of which she could possibly remember herself, at least not in such detail.
  • When Keller's book came out in 1903, she was criticized by one reviewer for her constant, un-self-conscious allusions to color and music. ''All her knowledge is hearsay knowledge,'' this critic wrote in The Nation, ''her very sensations are for the most part vicarious, and yet she writes of things beyond her powers of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word.'
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  • Maybe Shattuck is right and we are all like this -- creatures of language, rather than its masters. Much of what we think we know firsthand we probably picked up from books or newspapers or friends or lovers and never checked against the world at all.
  • Her ability to experience what others felt and heard, she said, illustrated the power of imagination, particularly one that had been developed and extended, as hers was, by books.
  • What she knew of her own observation is exactly what we want to know from her. We want to know what it felt like to be Helen Keller. We want to locate the boundaries between what was real to her and what she was forced to imagine. At least in this book, she seems not to have known where that boundary might lie.
  • He tries to remember what he looks like and discovers that he cannot. He asks: ''To what extent is loss of the image of the face connected with loss of the image of the self? Is this one of the reasons why I often feel that I am mere spirit, a ghost, a memory?''
  • Keller, in short, matured, both as a person and a writer. She mastered a lesson that relatively few with all their senses have ever mastered, which is to write about what you know.
pier-paolo

How Play Energizes Your Kid's Brain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...play-brain-science.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • To the untrained eye, play can seem aimless, repetitive, wild or foolish. But play can offer a window into the developing mind. Piaget viewed certain kinds of play as milestones, signs that a child had reached a new stage of development.
  • nstead of simply making objects move through space, they begin to make believe. A banana might become a telephone and a pencil might take flight like an airplane.
  • That is, the ones who could imagine hypotheticals that hadn’t occurred were also the best at pretending to operate an imaginary machine with an imaginary zando.
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  • Mulling over past “what ifs” helps us better plan for the future.
  • “That’s a very important, very distinctive human ability,”
  • That means separating actual events from possible events and pretend play helps children do that. What would happen if I could use this banana to call my grandma? What if this pencil could take flight
  • by pretending, children are practicing deciphering others’ emotions and beliefs. But an alternate hypothesis is that pretend play helps kids develop a skill known as counterfactual reasoning.
  • Open the box, they told the kids, and you’ll be able to play with the toy.
  • They asked a quarter of the children to pretend to be someone else while they completed the task — Batman or an intrepid adventurer like Dora the Explorer.
  • And the kids did get frustrated. In an odd twist, none of the keys actually worked
  • The children who pretended to be the hardworking fictional characters stayed calmer. They also spent more time trying to open the box and tried more keys.
  • For kids, of course, play isn’t about learning or planning or regulating emotions. It’s about having fun. Play may be “evolution’s way of building in an insurance policy” to learn and develop, said Dr. Feigenson. It’s so enjoyable that most kids can’t resist, and along the way they develop the skills they need to succeed as adults.
caelengrubb

A new collaborative approach to investigate what happens in the brain when it makes a decision - 0 views

theconversation.com/when-it-makes-a-decision-85066

shared by caelengrubb on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Different areas process sounds, sights or pertinent prior knowledge.
  • neuroscience has operated in a traditional science research model: Individual labs work on their own, usually focusing on one or a few brain areas.
  • The BRAIN Initiative, which the Obama administration launched in 2013, started to encourage the kind of collaboration that neuroscience needs.
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  • The first question the collaboration is tackling focuses on decision-making by the brain.
  • By collating information from the eyes, the ears and so on, the association areas may give a more coherent, big-picture view of what’s happening in the world.
  • Then, there’s the frontal cortex, which is believed to play a role in controlling voluntary action. Research suggests it’s involved in committing to a particular action once enough incoming information has arrived.
  • Research on decision-making may also inform treatment of patients with other disorders, such as substance abuse and addiction. Indeed, addiction is perhaps a prime example of how decision-making can go very wrong.
  • In real-world decisions, you’re combining lots of different pieces of information – your sensory signals, your internal knowledge about what’s rewarding, what’s risky.
  • Even in the simplest, very earliest stage we’re looking at, where the animals are just making voluntary movements, they’re deciding when to make a movement to harvest a reward
anonymous

Can you trust your earliest childhood memories? - BBC Future - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...ur-earliest-childhood-memories

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.
  • Around four out of every 10 of us have fabricated our first memory, according to researchers. This is thought to be because our brains do not develop the ability to store autobiographical memories at least until we reach two years old.
  • Yet a surprising number of us have some flicker of memory from before that age
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  • Experts have managed to turn people off all sorts of foods by convincing them it had made them ill when they were a child
  • “People have a life story, particularly as they get older and for some people it needs to stretch back to the very early stage of life,”
  • The prevailing account of how we come to believe and remember things is based around the concept of source monitoring. “Every time a thought comes to mind we have to make a decision – have we experienced it [an event], imagined it or have we talked about it with other people,” says Kimberley Wade
  • Most of the time we make that decision correctly and can identify where these mental experiences come from, but sometimes we get it wrong.
  • Wade admits she has spent a lot of time recalling an event that was actually something her brother experienced rather than herself, but despite this, it is rich in detail and provokes emotion
  • Memory researchers have shown it is possible to induce fictional autobiographical memories in volunteers, including accounts of getting lost in a shopping mall and even having tea with a member of the Royal Family
  • Based on my research, everybody is capable of forming complex false memories, given the right circumstances – Julia Shaw
  • In some situations, such as after looking at pictures or a video, children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults. People with certain personality types are also thought to be more prone.
  • But carrying around false memories from your childhood could be having a far greater impact on you than you may realise too. The events, emotions and experiences we remember from our early years can help to shape who we are as adults, determining our likes, dislikes, fears and even our behaviour.
  • Memories before the age of three are more than likely to be false. Any that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video and experiencing a chronological account of a memory, could well also be made up. It is more likely that fuzzy fragments, or snapshots of moments are real, as long as they are not from too early in your life.
  • We crave a cohesive narrative of our own existence and will even invent stories to give us a more complete picture
  • Interestingly, scientists have also found positive suggestions, such as “you loved asparagus the first time you ate it” tend to be more effective than negative suggestions like “you got sick drinking vodka”
  • “Miscarriage of justice, incarceration, loss of reputation, job and status, and family breakdown occur,
  • One of the major problems with legal cases involving false memories, is that it is currently impossible to distinguish between true and fictional recollections
  • Efforts have been made to analyse minor false memories in a brain scanner (fMRI) and detect different neurological patterns, but there is nothing as yet to indicate that this technology can be used to detect whether recollections have become distorted.
  • the most extreme case of memory implantation involves a controversial technique called “regression therapy”, where patients confront childhood traumas, supposedly buried in their subconscious
  • “Memories are malleable and tend to change slightly each time we revisit them, in the same way that spoken stories do,”
  • “Therefore at each recollection, new elements can easily be integrated while existing elements can be altered or lost.”
  • This is not to say that all evidence that relies on memory should be discarded or regarded as unreliable – they often provide the most compelling testimony in criminal cases. But it has led to rules and guidelines about how witnesses and victims should be questioned to ensure their recollections of an event or perpetrator are not contaminated by investigators or prosecutors.
  • Any memories that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video, could well also be made up
  • While this may seem like a bit of fun, many scientists believe the “false memory diet” could be used to tackle obesity and encourage people to reach for healthier options like asparagus, or even help cut people’s alcohol consumption.
  • Children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults, especially after looking at photographs or films
  • And we may not want to rid ourselves of these memories. Our memories, whether fictional or not, can help to bring us closer together.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    This is a great and very detailed article about memory and how we change our own memories and are impacted by this change.
tongoscar

What's at Stake for Women's Rights in 2020? by Françoise Girard - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ts-by-francoise-girard-2020-01

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • EW YORK – From US Republicans’ effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s right to an abortion, to Poland’s increased restrictions on access to emergency contraception, to Brazil’s clampdown on sexual health education, this is a difficult time for women. But if the global feminist movement has proved anything over the years, it is that it can overcome powerful resistance to defend the rights of marginalized groups. In 2020, it will do so again.
  • According to “strongman” leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and India’s Narendra Modi, women are born to be wives and mothers; immigrants and racial, religious, and ethnic minorities are dangerous and inferior; and LGBTQI+ persons deserve ostracism, detention, or even death. These leaders have emboldened people who share their views to engage in discrimination and violent attacks against racial or other minorities, migrants, women, and other marginalized groups.
  • Achieving social change to protect marginalized groups is never an easy process. There are no quick victories over weak opposition. But, as feminists have proved time and again, with sustained commitment, changes that once seemed impossible can later seem inevitable.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Yet, as president of the International Women’s Health Coalition and a longtime women’s rights advocate, I have seen firsthand what the feminist movement can do. Consider Argentine feminists’ fight against highly restrictive abortion laws.
  • In the last year alone, there have been numerous examples of such changes. The Mexican state of Oaxaca and the Australian state of New South Wales decriminalized abortion, as did Northern Ireland, while others liberalized their laws, expanding the circumstances in which women can access safe, legal abortion services. In April, South Korea’s Supreme Court struck down the country’s abortion law as unconstitutional, setting the stage for decriminalization this year.
  • Particularly inspiring are the young female and non-binary activists who are leading movements for transformative change. For example, Emma González is demanding gun reform in the US; Bertha Zúñiga is defending the land rights of Honduras’ indigenous people; and Jamie Margolin and Greta Thunberg have emerged as leading climate activists.
  • Feminist activists will continue this work at the Beijing+25 Generation Equality Forum, convened by Mexico and France, in Mexico City in May and Paris in July. There, they will call for bold new commitments to address crosscutting challenges like climate change and the refugee crisis.
  • This broader perspective is vital. In fact, feminists must strengthen their alliances with other progressive movements, especially those fighting for environmental sustainability, racial justice, and LGBTQI+ rights. Only by mobilizing together and supporting one another’s agendas can we overcome white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal, and exploitative forces to build a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.
tongoscar

New York Theater Guide News | NewYorkTheaterGuide.com - 0 views

www.newyorktheatreguide.com/...ll-extends-at-vineyard-theatre

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The Vineyard Theatre has now announced a 2-week extension for the current New York premiere of Dana H., written by Tony Award nominee Lucas Hnath, adapted from interviews with Dana Higginbotham conducted by Steve Cosson.
  • Synopsis: "Dana was a chaplain of a psych ward where she met a charismatic patient, an ex-convict searching for redemption.
  • Under the direction of Les Waters and co-produced by the Goodman Theatre and Center Theatre Group, the creative team features scenic design by Andrew Boyce, costume design by Janice Pytel, lighting & supertitle design by Paul Toben, and sound design by Mikhail Fiksel.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The world premiere of Dana H. was staged at the Kirk Douglas Theatre at Los Angeles' Center Theatre Group in June 2019, which was followed by a Chicago production at The Goodman’s Owen Theatre in September 2019.
annabaldwin_

How Getting Enough Sleep Can Make You Less Afraid - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...543573

REM study sleep brain-activity fear

shared by annabaldwin_ on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • A new study suggests that people who naturally get more REM sleep may be less sensitive to frightening things.
  • For the study, a team of researchers from Rutgers University sent 17 subjects home with sleep-monitoring devices—headbands that monitor their brain waves, wristbands that track arm movements, and sleep logs—and asked them to sleep as they normally would for a week. They were monitoring how much sleep they were getting—especially REM, or rapid-eye-movement sleep.
  • Each night, most people sleep about seven or eight hours, about two hours of which is REM sleep, the stage of sleep in which the body relaxes fully and most dreams occur.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The researchers then conditioned the participants to be afraid of certain images by showing them pictures of ordinary-looking rooms lit with lamps of various hues, some of which were paired with a mild shock to the finger. Through the shocks, they were taught to fear the rooms that were lit by certain colors.
  • The subjects with more REM sleep also had less activity in those areas of the brain. That suggests that the more well-rested subjects may not have been hard-wiring those fears into their brains quite as strongly.
  • PTSD is already known to be associated with sleep disturbances, and past studies have shown that sleep-deprived people have more activity in their amygdalae upon being shown upsetting pictures.
  • “REM is very unique because it’s the only time that area of the brain is completely silent,” said Shira Lupkin, one of the study’s authors and a researcher with the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University.
  • Because of that, people who get plenty of REM sleep might be less reactive to emotional stimuli.
  • If the study is replicated, there could be real-world implications for stopping trauma—before it starts.
tongoscar

Singapore's climate change plan needs more ambition | ASEAN Today - 0 views

www.aseantoday.com/...hange-plan-needs-more-ambition

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Each person in Singapore produces more greenhouse gas emissions than their counterpart in Indonesia, China or the United Kingdom. The city-state may be responsible for just 0.11% of total global emissions, but Singapore ranks 27th out of 142 countries in terms of per capita emissions.
  • In 2015, Singapore pledged to reduce its emission intensity, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions for every dollar of gross domestic product (GDP), by 36% from 2005 levels come 2030. The city-state also committed to stabilising and capping its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.  
  • Countries are expected to update their climate pledges by the end of this year but do not necessarily have to submit completely new ones.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Singapore’s climate pledge in 2015 was deemed a “stretch target” that would not be easily met, as efforts towards sustainable development in the country were still in their nascent stages.
  • Singapore has installed large-scale floating solar panels in its reservoirs and coastal shorelines. Efforts are also being made towards making 80% of the buildings in the country green by 2030. Come 2040, only 10% of rush-hour commutes in Singapore will be made via private transportation.
  • Protecting Singapore against climate change will be costly. Up to S$100 billion will be poured into measures to cope with rising sea levels caused by climate change. Prevention is better than cure. Singapore, and countries around the world, must identify their vulnerabilities and undertake the actions required to defend their long-term national interests. But these measures should not become a substitute for ambitious efforts to reduce emissions and prevent temperatures from rising wherever possible.
anniina03

Don't Scream: Why do we find things scary? - BBC Three - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...55-00a2-4e34-ac68-369c53567b82

science psychology brain science

shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Spiders? Clowns? Really tall buildings? There are lots of things that might make you scream — but why is it that we get so scared and what can we do to control these fears?
  • "It's evolutionary, it's biological and essentially it's about survival," says Dr Warren Mansell, a psychologist at the University of Manchester and author of a book about coping with fear."Our bodies need a way of getting ourselves prepared to either escape or defend ourselves against some kind of threat.""Being able to recognise and respond to a threat quickly and to get away is essential," adds sociologist Dr Margee Kerr, who specialises in the study of fear. "It's definitely kept us humans alive."
  • The most common way we deal with fear is the "fight-or-flight" response, when your heart rate increases and your pupils dilate.
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  • There's also the startle response — when you jump out of your skin — which is a way to get yourself away from something when you haven't got the time to even work out what it is, but it's coming at you very suddenly and very loudly.
  • First up, there's the classic jump scare, explains Andy Nyman, co-creator of the long-running London horror stage play Ghost Stories, which was also turned into a 2017 film starring Martin Freeman. "Often people think that's a bit of a cheap thing to do but the reality is that it's actually quite a sophisticated thing to pull off."If you can get it right, misdirecting an audience properly and then giving them a jump scare is a really wonderful thing because you're properly catching them off guard."
  • Then, Andy goes on, there's the type of scare that you can't shake off. "These are the scares that are attached to imagery or a moment that means when you close your eyes that's all you can see. These are much deeper-rooted."
  • If you're a very jumpy person who gets scared easily (or if you have a specific phobia, a severe form of fear that impacts on your life), there are things you can do on your own and with a therapist to help you improve
  • "The first thing is to realise that it's best to take things at your own pace and that may mean you don't need to face that fear right now but you're going to do it when you're ready."Most things that frighten people can be broken down into smaller, more manageable sections
  • And Dr Kerr has some practical tips, too, including exposure therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy and breathing exercises.
katherineharron

CES 2020: Toyota is building a 'smart' city to test AI, robots and self-driving cars - CNN Style - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • armaker Toyota has unveiled plans for a 2,000-person "city of the future," where it will test autonomous vehicles, smart technology and robot-assisted living.
  • "With people buildings and vehicles all connected and communicating with each other through data and sensors, we will be able to test AI technology, in both the virtual and the physical world, maximizing its potential," he said on stage during Tuesday's unveiling. "We want to turn artificial intelligence into intelligence amplified."
  • The project is a collaboration between the Japanese carmaker and Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which designed the city's master plan. Buildings on the site will be made primarily from wood, and partly constructed using robotics. But the designs also look to Japan's past for inspiration, incorporating traditional joinery techniques and the sweeping roofs characteristic of the country's architecture.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Smart technology will extend inside residents' homes, according to Ingels, whose firm also designed the 2 World Trade Center in New York, and Google's headquarters in both London and Silicon Valley.
  • "In an age when technology, social media and online retail is replacing and eliminating our natural meeting places, the Woven City will explore ways to stimulate human interaction in the urban space," he said. "After all, human connectivity is the kind of connectivity that triggers wellbeing and happiness, productivity and innovation."
tongoscar

Germans divided over plans for Tesla electric car factory | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...environmentalists-tree-felling

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • German environmentalists and political leaders are at loggerheads over a proposed Tesla electric car factory in woodland outside Berlin, with the government warning over the future of a project seen as key for its support of green technologies and regeneration in the east of the country.
  • The environmentalist group Grüne Liga Brandenburg (Green League Brandenburg) said the US company was being given “preferential treatment” and should not be allowed to start felling trees until it had been granted full building permission.
  • “To fell half of the forest, when many aspects of this process are yet to be clarified seems fairly problematic, which is why we have asked the court to deal with it,” said Heinz-Herwig Mascher of Grüne Liga. “It is not that we have something as such against Tesla as a company or its objectives. But we are concerned the preferential treatment they’re being given could set a precedence.”
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  • The project’s future is far from certain. It was hailed as an economic breakthrough for the underdeveloped region when it was announced by Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, in November.
  • Grünheide residents are divided over the issue. The town, home in the 20s to a bakelite plastics factory, has repeatedly missed out on any big economic success in the decades since reunification.
  • “Of course you always have to weigh up the economic interests with those of environmental protection,” he told Die Zeit. “It’s important to involve the locals in the discussion from an early stage, and that simply did not happen here. The people are supposed to feel blessed by the fact that Tesla is coming and bringing many jobs with it.”
katherineharron

Trump pursues his political obsessions as stark 100,000 coronavirus deaths landmark looms - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 26 May 20 - No Cached
  • Sometime in the next few days, the 100,000th American will succumb to Covid-19 in a pandemic that President Donald Trump once predicted would just "miraculously" disappear.
  • In his most politically significant maneuver, he heaped intense pressure on North Carolina's Democratic governor to permit a normal, crowded Republican National Convention, despite fears such a mass gathering could seed virus hot spots. Trump warned he could pull the huge money-earner out of Charlotte, which was picked to play host in August.
  • And he indulged his preoccupations on his tax returns, Hillary Clinton, Fox News, slanders against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, the Russia investigation, Joe Biden's mental health, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mail-in voting in November and highlighted dangerous and unproven Covid-19 therapies promoted on conservative media he has tested himself.
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  • "For as long as we have citizens willing to follow their example, to carry on their burden, to continue their legacy, then America's cause will never fail and American freedom will never, ever die."
  • But that doesn't mean it isn't jarring, as the most wrenching moment so far approaches in the nation's battle against a pandemic that while ebbing in terms of total deaths is trending up in 18 states, is steady in 22 and easing in 10 more. More than 98,000 people in the US have now died from the coronavirus and more than 1.6 million have been infected. More than 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and the unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels.
  • There was little evidence of a deeper meaning to his presidency at this stage than personal and political grievances.
  • No White House could have been fully prepared for the disaster and subsequent economic hollowing of this year's pandemic
  • Trump spent much of Memorial Day, fulminating against Cooper, complaining that the North Carolina governor was "unable to guarantee" the arena for the convention in August can be filled to capacity. The President is determined to deploy the full pageantry of convention season to portray a nation and economy in the full throes of what he calls a "transition to greatness."
  • Yet such a spectacle as the Republican convention seems utterly incongruous with real-world events. Sports teams that use such arenas are expecting to play without fans for at least months in a bio-secure environment. The prospect of thousands of delegates pouring into convention cities from all over the country, including coronavirus hotspots, is a huge headache for organizers.
  • "In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space."
  • It was not immediately clear whether Trump and the Republican National Committee are serious about pulling the convention from Charlotte.
  • Trump has used federal resources multiple times to fly to his resorts and golf courses. Trump's two rounds this weekend struck critics as inappropriate during a national crisis and on a weekend when American remembers its war dead.
  • "Nearly 100,000 lives have been lost, and tens of millions are out of work. Meanwhile, the president spent his day golfing," Biden wrote in a tweet accompanying an online ad Saturday.
  • Trump may not come under such criticism had he not been so dismissive of Obama's afternoons on the golf course -- and saying he wouldn't have time to play golf if he was elected president.
Javier E

Merck CEO Ken Frazier Discusses a COVID Cure, Racism, and Why Leaders Need to Walk the Talk - Harvard Business School Working Knowledge - 0 views

hbswk.hbs.edu/...-leaders-need-to-walk-the-talk

role model racism Black career life leader

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Frazier: It means that no matter where you are in the world, you should have access to this vaccine because it is a global pandemic. And my view is unless all of us are safe, none of us are safe.
  • when you think about the world that we live in with climate change, with ecosystem disruption, with populations moving around the way they do with human mobility the way it is, this pandemic is just the first of many that we could experience as a species because those conditions are only going to get worse going forward.
  • Neeley: The EU union has barred Americans from traveling to Europe. Frazier: Yes, because they see the spikes in this country, which goes back to the fact that we aren't doing the things that we could do to suppress the epidemic. We Americans, we value liberty. I know this is not a political science conversation, but the fact of the matter is if you think about the United States of America and its history, liberty has been a very strong theme in our politics. And I've always believed it's because historically, we've had these two big, beautiful oceans protecting us from the rest of the world. And so we could say it's all about my liberty. It's not about security or group security.
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  • Harvard Business School, I think put out a study a few years ago, showing that something like 30% of all hiring for what's called sort of bachelor's level jobs are for skill sets that don't require a bachelor's. So that alone exclude something like 70% of African Americans for no reason.
  • This whole pandemic, what it's done, it's unmasked the huge disparities that exist in our society already. I mean, the fact of the matter is this educational one we just talked about in terms of access to broadband and hardware. But you look at the disparities. I mean, the African American according to a study at Yale is 3.5 times more likely to die from COVID than a white. Somebody who's Latinix is three times more likely to die. So this has unmasked these huge structural elements of racism that existed in this country for a long time. And we need to step up to those structural elements that determine the lives of so many people.
  • Well, this virus doesn't really care about that. And if you're going to do it, if you're going to exercise your liberty at my personal expense, then we can't control the pandemic. And the Europeans are looking at that and they're saying, "We don't want you bringing that into our shores."
  • We have to have the psychological armor to defend ourselves against the racism that's all around us, that's the first piece of advice.
  • The second piece of advice I give is that, you really can't plan your career. You have to take advantage of all the opportunities that you have before you. And I believe that at least in my own instance, what helped me a lot was that I wanted a certain level of autonomy and accountability. And when you do that, you get more responsibility because you are willing to go outside the lane of what most people do.
  • it's sort of humorous to me when people say to me, "I don't see color. I don't even notice that you're a Black man." Every minute of my life, I realize I'm a Black man. How they don't realize it is beyond me. But I really think it's important for young African Americans to have their own communities, to reinforce one another so that they can deal with that incoming.
  • My father Otis Frazier 's father, Richard Frazier , was born in 1861. And so I have only one generation between me and slavery, which is quite unusual for someone at this stage. And my father only had a third grade education and what passed for third grade education for an African American child in South Carolina, between 1906 to 1909. But he was self-taught. He had immaculate habits of speech and dress and behavior, and he was his own man. And he gave me the single most important piece of advice I've ever had when I was growing up in the inner city. And here it is, he would say to me, Kenny, what other people think about you is none of your damn business. And the sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be
  • now I can see when you're running a company like Merck and Wall Street is criticizing you because you don't do what they want you to do, I can hear my father saying, you know what they think about you is none of your damn business.
  • And that is what it meant to be a man to me, was to get up every morning, go to work, take care of your family, take your family to church on Sunday and to make sure that your children understood the importance of education and opportunity. And so, while I was born in a really tough inner city neighborhood, I always tell people I had the good fortune to be born in my mother and my father's house. More my father, because my mother died when I was really young and I was raised by a father who was not sentimental about his children, but had high standards. And it helped me a lot to have to live up to my father's standards, which I'm still living up to.
katherineharron

Lawmakers around the nation are proposing bills for -- and against -- vaccinations - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • At a time when almost everything is politicized, vaccination has planted itself squarely on the national stage.
  • On one side of the debate are parents who are rebelling against settled science and calling on states to broaden vaccine exemptions. They cite their faith or believe vaccines pose danger to their children, even though no major religion opposes them and claims of vaccines' link to autism has been long debunked.
  • "I won't be surprised if we see many pro-vaccine bills this year," said Dr. Sean O'Leary, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. "The measles outbreaks were really a wake-up call, showing legislators that maintaining high vaccination rates is not just a theoretical goal."
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  • An overwhelming majority of American adults (88%) say the benefits of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine outweigh the risks, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.And last year, 14 states proposed eliminating religious exemptions for vaccines -- a marked increase from years past, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
  • "When you choose not to vaccinate, you're putting your child at risk of disease, but you're also putting other people at risk," O'Leary said.
  • "We need to have the ability in our country, if we find a commercial pharmaceutical product is not as safe and effective as we're being told it is, we should have the right to make informed consent to use the product," she said.
  • "When vaccination rates fall, we see disease, and people suffer. Protecting children in schools is a worthy goal of government, regardless of political affiliation," he said. "There's really no good reason to exempt your child from vaccination -- only medical."
  • "Science is really on the side of vaccinations," said O'Leary, who is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "They're one of the best public health interventions in history in terms of the numbers of lives saved. The benefits far outweigh the risk."
  • New York, California and Washington state took action after massive measles outbreaks in 2019, a year that saw the highest reported measles cases since the disease was declared eliminated nationwide in 2000.
  • Many of the religious exemption laws are not new. Several states first passed them in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to an influx of lobbyists from the Christian Science Church, which doesn't ban members from using vaccines but encourages healing through prayer.
  • Supporters of vaccine exemptions see laws like those passed in New York and Washington as "fundamentally a threat to their ability to make informed consent about vaccinations," said Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center.
  • Proponents on both sides of the debate have found allies across the political spectrum. Republican lawmakers have sponsored stricter bills, and Democratic governors have drawn the line at mandating vaccines.
  • "It's a tough balance, but you're using a public -- and private -- resource in conjunction with lots of other kids," Harris told CNN. "There are other venues where they can be educated, they can still have their freedom, but they're not going into a public school and spread their disease."
manhefnawi

Just one night of poor sleep can boost Alzheimer's proteins | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...boost-alzheimers-beta-proteins

Poor Sleep

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Healthy adults built up Alzheimer’s-associated proteins in their cerebral spinal fluid when prevented from getting slow-wave sleep, the deepest stage of sleep, researchers report July 10 in Brain. Just one night of deep-sleep disruption was enough to increase the amount of amyloid-beta, a protein that clumps into brain cell‒killing plaques in people with Alzheimer’s. People in the study who slept poorly for a week also had more of a protein called tau in their spinal fluid than they did when well rested. Tau snarls itself into tangles inside brain cells of people with the disease.
blythewallick

Are We Being Framed? | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

daily.jstor.org/are-we-being-framed

language knowledge psychology

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • So the Mueller Report is finally out. President Trump has called it a “total exoneration,” but we don’t have to take his word for it. After special counsel Robert Mueller’s comprehensive, two-year investigation into serious allegations of Russian electoral interference, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, we’re free to read what the special counsel’s findings actually are, if we so choose—albeit with a number of careful redactions from William Barr that along with his four-page summary, framed public conversations about the report in important ways.
  • It can persuade us one way or another by using certain rhetorical or linguistic means. What’s more, a particular framing doesn’t just arise spontaneously to the top of the public consciousness from its own legitimate merits, because it happens to be the neutral truth. We would be naive to think so, yet many people do. When it comes to the power of states, in sociologist Christopher A. Bail’s view, it has to be knowingly crafted, with two realities. One is a front stage presentation for public consumption and the other a secret collective coordination behind the scenes. Their reality becomes your reality, one way or another.
  • To Dwight Bolinger, “literal truth—the kind one swears to tell on the witness stand—permits any amount of evasion.” He explains: “The most insidious of all concepts of truth is that of literalness. The California prune-growers tell us that prunes, pound for pound, offer several times more vitamins and minerals than fresh fruit; literally true. The oil industry advertises that no heat costs less than oil heat, which has to be true because no heat costs nothing at all.” Those savvy enough to see through it will simply eat fewer prunes and heat their homes differently to those who fall for it. But declaring that you didn’t lie but told the literal truth in this way seems a kind of hollow ethic, a careful weaselling around the words that some lawyers seem particularly adept at.
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  • So, yes, it’s perhaps literally true that no collusion was found by Mueller’s team because they weren’t actually investigating collusion, but a much harder-to-prove charge of criminal conspiracy. Collusion and conspiracy may be related, but they’re not the same. Yet in the resulting media commentary, this framing by the Trump administration was largely successful in amplifying the confused conflation of two separate concepts: One is the fact that Mueller did not ultimately find definitive proof that the Trump campaign illegally conspired with Russia; The other is the non-legal Trump talking point of “no collusion,” even though not finding something is certainly not the same as there being none (at least you would hope so, if you ever can’t find your house keys or wallet).
  • One such case is Muscarello v. United States, from 1998. The law was that anyone caught using or carrying a firearm while selling drugs (presumably on their person) would get an additional five year sentence. The defendant, Muscarello, had a firearm that he was actively not carrying because it was actually locked up in the glove compartment of his truck. Nevertheless this was redefined as “carrying” a firearm, because the judge in the case saw that one of the first definitions in a dictionary for the word happen to be in relation to “carrying” (i.e. transporting) things in vehicles.
  • These are all fairly simple and obvious features of dictionaries that are frequently overlooked in legal contexts, just when it matters most that careful and ethical consideration should go into the linguistic interpretation of the law.
  • If we don’t pay enough attention to linguistic ethics, language and the truth that it seems to tell can be subtly manipulated to misdirect us. Even the most precise legal wording of a thorough report can be misread, as long as the public is willing to allow it.
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