Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items matching ""checks" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
katedriscoll

Why can we trust the information produced by scientific research? - The Science Behind It. - 0 views

thesciencebehindit.org/roduced-by-scientific-research

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Science relies on empirical evidence and testable explanations. By basing its conclusions on multiple lines of evidence drawn from experiments and observations, science seeks to build reliable knowledge and provide scientific explanations that people can use to better understand the world around them and inform their decision making.
  • Right. Scientific research is both an individual and a collective activity. Scientists may act on their own in gathering data and working out ideas. But they then need to convey to others their conclusions and the methods and evidence on which those conclusions are based. These observations and conclusions can be checked and extended by other scientists.
Javier E

Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in | World news | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...redicted-the-future-we-live-in

philosophy fringe acceleration psychology technology

shared by Javier E on 11 May 17 - No Cached
  • Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political.
  • accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.
  • Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled.
  • Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world
  • Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian in their introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, a sometimes baffling, sometimes exhilarating book, published in 2014, which remains the only proper guide to the movement in existence.
  • “We all live in an operating system set up by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” says Steve Goodman, a British accelerationist
  • A century ago, the writers and artists of the Italian futurist movement fell in love with the machines of the industrial era and their apparent ability to invigorate society. Many futurists followed this fascination into war-mongering and fascism.
  • One of the central figures of accelerationism is the British philosopher Nick Land, who taught at Warwick University in the 1990s
  • Land has published prolifically on the internet, not always under his own name, about the supposed obsolescence of western democracy; he has also written approvingly about “human biodiversity” and “capitalistic human sorting” – the pseudoscientific idea, currently popular on the far right, that different races “naturally” fare differently in the modern world; and about the supposedly inevitable “disintegration of the human species” when artificial intelligence improves sufficiently.
  • In our politically febrile times, the impatient, intemperate, possibly revolutionary ideas of accelerationism feel relevant, or at least intriguing, as never before. Noys says: “Accelerationists always seem to have an answer. If capitalism is going fast, they say it needs to go faster. If capitalism hits a bump in the road, and slows down” – as it has since the 2008 financial crisis – “they say it needs to be kickstarted.”
  • On alt-right blogs, Land in particular has become a name to conjure with. Commenters have excitedly noted the connections between some of his ideas and the thinking of both the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Trump’s iconoclastic strategist Steve Bannon.
  • “In Silicon Valley,” says Fred Turner, a leading historian of America’s digital industries, “accelerationism is part of a whole movement which is saying, we don’t need [conventional] politics any more, we can get rid of ‘left’ and ‘right’, if we just get technology right. Accelerationism also fits with how electronic devices are marketed – the promise that, finally, they will help us leave the material world, all the mess of the physical, far behind.”
  • In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a restless, sprawling, appealingly ambiguous book, which suggested that, rather than simply oppose capitalism, the left should acknowledge its ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen these anarchic tendencies, “to go still further … in the movement of the market … to ‘accelerate the process’”.
  • By the early 90s Land had distilled his reading, which included Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, into a set of ideas and a writing style that, to his students at least, were visionary and thrillingly dangerous. Land wrote in 1992 that capitalism had never been properly unleashed, but instead had always been held back by politics, “the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind”. He dismissed Europe as a sclerotic, increasingly marginal place, “the racial trash-can of Asia”. And he saw civilisation everywhere accelerating towards an apocalypse: “Disorder must increase... Any [human] organisation is ... a mere ... detour in the inexorable death-flow.”
  • With the internet becoming part of everyday life for the first time, and capitalism seemingly triumphant after the collapse of communism in 1989, a belief that the future would be almost entirely shaped by computers and globalisation – the accelerated “movement of the market” that Deleuze and Guattari had called for two decades earlier – spread across British and American academia and politics during the 90s. The Warwick accelerationists were in the vanguard.
  • In the US, confident, rainbow-coloured magazines such as Wired promoted what became known as “the Californian ideology”: the optimistic claim that human potential would be unlocked everywhere by digital technology. In Britain, this optimism influenced New Labour
  • The Warwick accelerationists saw themselves as participants, not traditional academic observers
  • The CCRU gang formed reading groups and set up conferences and journals. They squeezed into the narrow CCRU room in the philosophy department and gave each other impromptu seminars.
  • The main result of the CCRU’s frantic, promiscuous research was a conveyor belt of cryptic articles, crammed with invented terms, sometimes speculative to the point of being fiction.
  • At Warwick, however, the prophecies were darker. “One of our motives,” says Plant, “was precisely to undermine the cheery utopianism of the 90s, much of which seemed very conservative” – an old-fashioned male desire for salvation through gadgets, in her view.
  • K-punk was written by Mark Fisher, formerly of the CCRU. The blog retained some Warwick traits, such as quoting reverently from Deleuze and Guattari, but it gradually shed the CCRU’s aggressive rhetoric and pro-capitalist politics for a more forgiving, more left-leaning take on modernity. Fisher increasingly felt that capitalism was a disappointment to accelerationists, with its cautious, entrenched corporations and endless cycles of essentially the same products. But he was also impatient with the left, which he thought was ignoring new technology
  • lex Williams, co-wrote a Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics. “Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology,” they wrote. “[Our version of] accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose … repurposed towards common ends … towards an alternative modernity.”
  • What that “alternative modernity” might be was barely, but seductively, sketched out, with fleeting references to reduced working hours, to technology being used to reduce social conflict rather than exacerbate it, and to humanity moving “beyond the limitations of the earth and our own immediate bodily forms”. On politics and philosophy blogs from Britain to the US and Italy, the notion spread that Srnicek and Williams had founded a new political philosophy: “left accelerationism”.
  • Two years later, in 2015, they expanded the manifesto into a slightly more concrete book, Inventing the Future. It argued for an economy based as far as possible on automation, with the jobs, working hours and wages lost replaced by a universal basic income. The book attracted more attention than a speculative leftwing work had for years, with interest and praise from intellectually curious leftists
  • Even the thinking of the arch-accelerationist Nick Land, who is 55 now, may be slowing down. Since 2013, he has become a guru for the US-based far-right movement neoreaction, or NRx as it often calls itself. Neoreactionaries believe in the replacement of modern nation-states, democracy and government bureaucracies by authoritarian city states, which on neoreaction blogs sound as much like idealised medieval kingdoms as they do modern enclaves such as Singapore.
  • Land argues now that neoreaction, like Trump and Brexit, is something that accelerationists should support, in order to hasten the end of the status quo.
  • In 1970, the American writer Alvin Toffler, an exponent of accelerationism’s more playful intellectual cousin, futurology, published Future Shock, a book about the possibilities and dangers of new technology. Toffler predicted the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, cryonics, cloning and robots working behind airline check-in desks
  • Land left Britain. He moved to Taiwan “early in the new millennium”, he told me, then to Shanghai “a couple of years later”. He still lives there now.
  • In a 2004 article for the Shanghai Star, an English-language paper, he described the modern Chinese fusion of Marxism and capitalism as “the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known”
  • Once he lived there, Land told me, he realised that “to a massive degree” China was already an accelerationist society: fixated by the future and changing at speed. Presented with the sweeping projects of the Chinese state, his previous, libertarian contempt for the capabilities of governments fell away
  • Without a dynamic capitalism to feed off, as Deleuze and Guattari had in the early 70s, and the Warwick philosophers had in the 90s, it may be that accelerationism just races up blind alleys. In his 2014 book about the movement, Malign Velocities, Benjamin Noys accuses it of offering “false” solutions to current technological and economic dilemmas. With accelerationism, he writes, a breakthrough to a better future is “always promised and always just out of reach”.
  • “The pace of change accelerates,” concluded a documentary version of the book, with a slightly hammy voiceover by Orson Welles. “We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history – the birth of a new civilisation.”
  • Shortly afterwards, the 1973 oil crisis struck. World capitalism did not accelerate again for almost a decade. For much of the “new civilisation” Toffler promised, we are still waiting
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.
  • ...72 more annotations...
  • 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,”
lucieperloff

Under Biden, Diplomacy Is an Attractive Career Again - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-service-state-department.html

government politics bias prejudice diversity psychology knowledge

shared by lucieperloff on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The steady erosion of traditional American diplomatic principles under the Trump administration had taken a toll, he added.
  • Their colleagues in China were mysteriously falling sick.
  • But when President Biden was elected, Mr. Luce said he was encouraged by the new president’s embrace of diplomacy, along with his nominations for senior foreign policy posts. Mr. Luce took the Foreign Service exam in February.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • And despite the rising interest, applicants have signaled the agency must tackle racism and improve diversity in the United States’ diplomatic ranks.
  • Applications to the school’s graduate programs, including its masters of science degree in foreign service, jumped 40 percent this cycle,
  • Foreign Service officers — who undergo a rigorous selection process that includes written exams, oral assessments, security checks and medical clearances — pledge to be nonpartisan as they become the machinery of foreign policymaking that political appointees rely on for expertise and continuity between administrations.
  • During Mr. Trump’s tenure, his administration installed an “America First” policy, prioritizing domestic interests over foreign policy concerns and minimizing the importance of day-to-day diplomatic work.
  • “That undercuts not only morale but also a policy process that depends on apolitical experts airing contrary views, however inconvenient they may be to the politically appointed leadership,
  • In the time between Mr. Biden’s election and his inauguration, the group grew by over 2,000 members,
  • It “has been a difficult few years,” he said. “You are the face of America, and it matters.
  • “This is a critical time in terms of America’s role in the world. We need a strong, diverse and talented pool of people from which to select our newest diplomats and aid officers.”
  • How could he promote American values abroad when they were being upended at home, he wondered.
  • “President Trump was very unusual,” Mr. Whittier said. “That’s what completely put me off of joining the Foreign Service.”
  • The Biden administration said that tackling the lack of diversity in the diplomatic corps would be a priority.
  • When she brought up issues to State Department officials, they advised her against speaking out and transferred her to Mexico City, she said.
  • she felt the “new administration brings a lot of hope to people who were marginalized in the past.”
  • “When you see more faces that look like you,” she said, “I think it definitely will bring more people to work in public service.”
cvanderloo

Why Nearly All Mass Shooters Are Men : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...arly-all-mass-shooters-are-men

guns Colorado men women shootings

shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • As with almost every mass shooter in recorded U.S. history, both of the suspects in the recent attacks are men.
  • "Men just are generally more violent," said the group's president, Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University. "There are many theories as to why that is."
  • And when women do choose violence, guns are not typically their weapon of choice.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If men vastly outnumber women as mass shooters, those perpetrators are often a model for the next male shooters who "see themselves in them," Peterson said, a phenomenon she noted is particularly true in young, white men.
  • "Many school shooters study Columbine, for example; other university shooters study the Virginia Tech shooting. And they really are kind of using those previous shootings as a blueprint for their own."
  • But at the same time, as a psychologist, I've been worried about all the risk factors that we know of for mass shootings that have been exacerbated in the pandemic. So, trauma, experiencing a mental health crisis, suicidality, time online and access to firearms have all increased.
  • . We can kind of work our way backwards and say, these are individuals who are in crisis, who have very easy access to firearms. And are there simple things we can do like universal background checks or safe storage that prevent that ease of access?
  • But we can also go further back and talk about things like, how do we make sure everybody's trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention? How do we build trauma-informed schools, and go even further back?
  • I would say, in particular, the media coverage seems to have shifted. I'm not seeing as much of the perpetrator in the news cycle. I'm not seeing the perpetrator's name and face everywhere, which we know is what contributes to the social contagion.
caelengrubb

Pandemic caused 'staggering' economic, human impact in developing counties, research says: Falling incomes, smaller meals, educational setbacks among consequences -- ScienceDaily - 1 views

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

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

Here's How Social Media Affects Your Mental Health | McLean Hospital - 0 views

www.mcleanhospital.org/...s-affecting-your-mental-health

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.
  • According to the Pew Research Center, 69% of adults and 81% of teens in the U.S. use social media.
  • To boost self-esteem and feel a sense of belonging in their social circles, people post content with the hope of receiving positive feedback. Couple that content with the structure of potential future reward, and you get a recipe for constantly checking platforms.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • FOMO—fear of missing out—also plays a role
  • A 2018 British study tied social media use to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is associated with depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance.
  • Social media use can affect users’ physical health even more directly. Researchers know the connection between the mind and the gut can turn anxiety and depression into nausea, headaches, muscle tension, and tremors.
  • The earlier teens start using social media, the greater impact the platforms have on mental health. This is especially true for females. While teen males tend to express aggression physically, females do so relationally by excluding others and sharing hurtful comments. Social media increases the opportunity for such harmful interactions.
  • In the past, teens read magazines that contained altered photos of models. Now, these images are one thumb-scroll away at any given time. Apps that provide the user with airbrushing, teeth whitening, and more filters are easy to find and easier to use. It’s not only celebrities who look perfect—it’s everyone.
  • In recent years, plastic surgeons have seen an uptick in requests from patients who want to look like their filtered Snapchat and Instagram photos.
  • A person experiences impostor syndrome when feeling chronic self-doubt and a sense of being exposed as ‘a fraud’ in terms of success and intellect. “Whether it’s another pretty vacation or someone’s bouquet of flowers, my mind went from ‘Why not me?’ to ‘I don’t deserve those things, and I don’t know why,’ and it made me feel awful.”
  • Sperling encourages people to conduct their own behavior experiments by rating their emotions on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the most intensely one could experience an emotion, before and after using social media sites at the same time each day for a week.
caelengrubb

Anxiety, loneliness and Fear of Missing Out: The impact of social media on young people's mental health | Centre for Mental Health - 0 views

www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/...ia-young-peoples-mental-health

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • By 2021, it is forecast that there will be around 3 billion active monthly users of social media. From the statistics alone, it’s clear that social media has become an integral (and to a large extent, unavoidable) part of our lives.
  • One implication of social media’s rapid rise, that of its relationship with young people’s mental health, has gathered a significant amount of attention in recent years.
  • So-called ‘social media addiction’ has been referred to by a wide variety of studies and experiments. It is thought that addiction to social media affects around 5% of young people, and was recently described as potentially more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The ‘urge’ to check one’s social media may be linked to both instant gratification (the need to experience fast, short term pleasure) and dopamine production (the chemical in the brain associated with reward and pleasure).
  • The popular concept of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) refers to ‘a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent’ and is ‘characterised by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing’.
  • Data from qualitative studies has shown that using social media compulsively can damage sleeping patterns, having an adverse effect on young people’s performance in school
  • The University of Glasgow found that young people found it difficult to relax following night time social media use, reducing their brain’s ability to prepare for sleep. Sleep loss works in a vicious cycle of reinforcement with mental health; that is, that loss of sleep due to night time social media use can lead to poorer mental health, and poor mental health can lead to intense night time use and sleep loss
  • What is dangerous about this compulsive use is that, if gratification is not experienced, users may internalise beliefs that this is due to being ‘unpopular’, ‘unfunny’ etc. A lack of ‘likes’ on a status update may cause negative self-reflection, prompting continual ‘refreshing’ of the page in the hope of seeing that another person has ‘enjoyed’ the post, thus helping to achieve personal validation.
  • FOMO has been linked to intensive social media use and is associated with lower mood and life satisfaction.
  • Social media has been linked to poor self-esteem and self-image through the advent of image manipulation on photo sharing platforms. In particular, the notion of the ‘idealised body image’ has arguably been detrimental to self-esteem and image, especially that of young women. The 24/7 circulation of easily viewable manipulated images promotes and entrenches unrealistic expectations of how young people should look and behave.
  • The evidence suggests that social media use is strongly associated with anxiety, loneliness and depression
caelengrubb

Why Is Memory So Good and So Bad? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...why-memory-so-good-bad

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Memories of visual images (e.g., dinner plates) are stored in what is called visual memory.
  • Our minds use visual memory to perform even the simplest of computations; from remembering the face of someone we’ve just met, to remembering what time it was last we checked. Without visual memory, we wouldn’t be able to store—and later retrieve—anything we see.
  • ust as a computer’s memory capacity constrains its abilities, visual memory capacity has been correlated with a number of higher cognitive abilities, including academic success, fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems), and general comprehension.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • For many reasons, then, it would be very useful to understand how visual memory facilitates these mental operations, as well as constrains our ability to perform them
  • Visual working memory is where visual images are temporarily stored while your mind works away at other tasks—like a whiteboard on which things are briefly written and then wiped away. We rely on visual working memory when remembering things over brief intervals, such as when copying lecture notes to a notebook.
  • UC Davis psychologists Weiwei Zhang and Steven Luck have shed some light on this problem. In their experiment, participants briefly saw three colored squares flashed on a computer screen, and were asked to remember the colors of each square. Then, after 1, 4 or 10 seconds the squares re-appeared, except this time their colors were missing, so that all that was visible were black squares outlined in white.
  • The participants had a simple task: to recall the color of one particular square, not knowing in advance which square they would be asked to recall. The psychologists assumed that measuring how visual working memory behaves over increasing demands (i.e., the increasing durations of 1,4 or 10 seconds) would reveal something about how the system works.
  • If short-term visual memories fade away—if they are gradually wiped away from the whiteboard—then after longer intervals participants’ accuracy in remembering the colors should still be high, deviating only slightly from the square’s original color. But if these memories are wiped out all at once—if the whiteboard is left untouched until, all at once, scrubbed clean—then participants should make very precise responses (corresponding to instances when the memories are still untouched) and then, after the interval grows too long, very random guesses.
  • Which is exactly what happened: Zhang & Luck found that participants were either very precise, or they completely guessed; that is, they either remembered the square’s color with great accuracy, or forgot it completely
  • But this, it turns out, is not true of all memories
  • In a recent paper, Researchers at MIT and Harvard found that, if a memory can survive long enough to make it into what is called “visual long-term memory,” then it doesn’t have to be wiped out at all.
  • Talia Konkle and colleagues showed participants a stream of three thousand images of different scenes, such as ocean waves, golf courses or amusement parks. Then, participants were shown two hundred pairs of images—an old one they had seen in the first task, and a completely new one—and asked to indicate which was the old one.
  • Participants were remarkably accurate at spotting differences between the new and old images—96 percent
  • In a recent review, researchers at Harvard and MIT argue that the critical factor is how meaningful the remembered images are—whether the content of the images you see connects to pre-existing knowledge about them
  • This prior knowledge changes how these images are processed, allowing thousands of them to be transferred from the whiteboard of short-term memory into the bank vault of long-term memory, where they are stored with remarkable detail.
  • Together, these experiments suggest why memories are not eliminated equally— indeed, some don’t seem to be eliminated at all. This might also explain why we’re so hopeless at remembering some things, and yet so awesome at remembering others.
lucieperloff

Mexico's President Appears To Hold Key Majority In Elections : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-key-majority-elections-morena

bias politics election coronavirus congress

shared by lucieperloff on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • but fell short of a two-thirds majority as some voters boosted the struggling opposition, according to initial election results.
  • will have to rely on votes from its allies in the Workers Party and Green Party,
  • The results give the president sufficient budgetary control to continue his train and refinery-building plans and cash handout programs,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Those would be gains for those parties, which have often appeared rudderless in the face of López Obrador's popularity.
  • López Obrador's critics had depicted the elections as a chance to stop the still-popular president from concentrating more power and weakening checks and balances.
  • Representatives of the major parties speaking at the electoral institute's general council meeting applauded the conduct of Sunday's vote amid the pandemic
  • he might try to subjugate courts and regulatory agencies created during Mexico's decades-long transition to full democracy.
  • hree dozen candidates were killed during the campaigns; almost all of the victims were running for one of the 20,000 local posts including mayors and town council up for grabs in 30 states.
  • López Obrador has raised minimum wages and strengthened government aid programs like supplementary payments to the elderly, students and training programs for youths.
  • The elections represent the first mass public events since the coronavirus pandemic hit the country over a year ago,
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | The Social Sciences' 'Physics Envy' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ial-sciences-physics-envy.html

shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.
  • Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.
  • it’s not even a good description of how the “hard” sciences work. It’s a high school textbook version of science, with everything messy and chaotic about scientific inquiry safely ignored.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • For the sake of everyone who stands to gain from a better knowledge of politics, economics and society, the social sciences need to overcome their inferiority complex, reject hypothetico-deductivism and embrace the fact that they are mature disciplines with no need to emulate other sciences.
  • Or consider the famous “impossibility theorem,” developed by the economist Kenneth Arrow, which shows that no single voting system can simultaneously satisfy several important principles of fairness. There is no need to test this model with data — in fact, there is no way to test it — and yet the result offers policy makers a powerful lesson: there are unavoidable trade-offs in the design of voting systems.
  • Unfortunately, the belief that every theory must have its empirical support (and vice versa) now constrains the kinds of social science projects that are undertaken, alters the trajectory of academic careers and drives graduate training. Rather than attempt to imitate the hard sciences, social scientists would be better off doing what they do best: thinking deeply about what prompts human beings to behave the way they do.
  • theories are like maps: the test of a map lies not in arbitrarily checking random points but in whether people find it useful to get somewhere.
  • Likewise, the analysis of empirical data can be valuable even in the absence of a grand theoretical model. Did the welfare reform championed by Bill Clinton in the 1990s reduce poverty? Are teenage employees adversely affected by increases in the minimum wage?
  • Answering such questions about the effects of public policies does not require sweeping theoretical claims, just careful attention to the data.
  • theoretical models can be of great value even if they are never supported by empirical testing. In the 1950s, for instance, the economist Anthony Downs offered an elegant explanation for why rival political parties might adopt identical platforms during an election campaign. His model relied on the same strategic logic that explains why two competing gas stations or fast-food restaurants locate across the street from each other — if you don’t move to a central location but your opponent does, your opponent will nab those voters (customers). The best move is for competitors to mimic each other. This framework has proven useful to generations of political scientists even though Mr. Downs did not empirically test it and despite the fact that its main prediction, that candidates will take identical positions in elections, is clearly false. The model offered insight into why candidates move toward the center in competitive elections
  • Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.
  • The ideal of hypothetico-deductivism is flawed for many reasons. For one thing,
caelengrubb

Opinion | There Is No Scientific Method - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-is-no-scientific-method.html

shared by caelengrubb on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Maybe the method on which science relies exists wherever we find systematic investigation. In saying there is no scientific method, what I mean, more precisely, is that there is no distinctly scientific method.
  • Our knowledge separates into layers: Experience provides a base for a higher layer of more conceptual understanding. This is as true for poetry as for science.
  • Suppose you and I try to define courage. We would begin with the meaning that is familiar to both of us. This shared meaning will be used to check proposed definitions and provide typical examples of it. Commonly, we may not be able to explain what something is, but we know it when we see it
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Yet we wouldn’t accept such a definition even if it itemized every possible exception. Why? Because, from a different point of view, this definition is inadequate: not because it fails to bring the meaning of the definition closer to the actual meaning of courage, but because all it does is try to save the original definition by tacking on ad hoc exceptions.
  • When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data.
  • One can resort to curve-fitting, in which a hypothesis is patched together from different independent pieces, each piece more or less fitting a different part of the data
  • The lesson is that it is not just the observed facts that drive a scientist’s theorizing
  • Science education, however, has persistently relied more on empirical fit as its trump card, perhaps partly to separate science from those dangerous seat-of-the-pants theorizings (including philosophy) that pretend to find their way apart from such evidence.
  • Yet in science, just as in defining a concept like courage, ad hoc exceptions are sometimes exactly what are needed
jmfinizio

NRA files for bankruptcy - CNN - 0 views

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

NRA files bankruptcy

shared by jmfinizio on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The National Rifle Association of America, the nation's foremost gun lobby, has filed for bankruptcy
  • The group said it plans to leave New York State, where it was founded in 1871, and reincorporate as a Texas nonprofit in a move it is calling "Project Freedom,"
  • New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit in August accusing the NRA's senior leadership of violating laws governing nonprofit groups and using millions of dollars from the organization's reserves for personal use and tax fraud.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In response, the NRA filed a countersuit alleging the attorney general was hampering the group's First Amendment rights.
  • "while we review this filing, we will not allow the NRA to use this or any other tactic to evade accountability and my office's oversight."
  • The NRA said Friday it is in its "strongest financial condition in years," but the restructuring will help to "streamline costs and expenses."
  • The largest creditor listed on the NRA's bankruptcy filing is its former advertising firm, Ackerman McQueen, with which the NRA has been in a contentious legal battle after nearly 30 years in business together.
  • "The NRA, a get rich quick scheme for its executives that pushed positions wildly out of step with gun owners, is collapsing, just as Congress readies to vote on a comprehensive background checks proposal with 90% public support,"
colemorris

Supermodel Halima Aden: 'Why I quit' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...stories-55653029

world discrimination industry

shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • the first hijab-wearing supermodel, quit the fashion industry in November saying it was incompatible with her Muslim religion.
  • "I'm Halima from Kakuma," she says, referring to the refugee camp in Kenya,
  • However she was dressed, keeping her hijab on for every shoot was non-negotiable
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      good for her for standing up for herself in an industry that is so manipulative
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • "There are girls who wanted to die for a modelling contract," she says, "but I was ready to walk away if it wasn't accepted."
  • But as time went on she had less control over the clothes she wore, and agreed to head coverings she would have ruled out at the start.
  • In the last year of her career her hijab got smaller and smaller, sometimes accentuating her neck and chest.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      edge of being true to herself and being manipulated by the industry
  • "I eventually drifted away and got into the confusing grey area of letting the team on-set style my hijab."
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      grey area TOK lesson
  • IMG supported her in this and in 2018 Halima became a Unicef ambassador. As she had spent her childhood in a refugee camp, her work focused on children's rights.
  • "I could spell 'Unicef' when I couldn't spell my own name. I was marking X,"
  • "The style and makeup were horrendous. I looked like a white man's fetishised version of me," she says.
  • "Why would the magazine think it was acceptable to have a hijab-wearing Muslim woman when a naked man is on the next page?" she asks. It went against everything she believed in.
  • I'm putting my mental health and my family at the top. I'm thriving, not just surviving. I'm getting my mental health checked, I'm getting therapy time."
aprossi

Fauci says he worried Trump's disinfectant comment would make people 'start doing dangerous and foolish things' - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump Fauci Covid-19 research knowledge education

shared by aprossi on 26 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Fauci says he worried Trump's disinfectant comment would make people 'start doing dangerous and foolish things'
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, said Monday evening he was extremely worried by former President Donald Trump's dangerous April suggestion that ingesting disinfectant could possibly be used to treat Covid-19.
  • He later falsely claimed he was being sarcastic and that he was prompting officials to look into the effect of disinfectant on hands -- not through ingestion or injection. But the comments prompted cleaning product companies and state health officials to issue warnings about the dangers of their ingestion.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • You're going to have people who hear that from the President and they're going to start doing dangerous and foolish thing
  • Fauci recalled Monday evening that Trump had been getting a mix of "good information and bad information" on the pandemic.
  • As a result of his willingness to openly refute Trump, Fauci has faced numerous threats to his personal safety -- something he says has given him a look at "the depth of the divisiveness" in the US.
  • This includes "somebody sending me an envelope with powder that explodes in my face to scare me and my family," Fauci said Monday. And while the substance turned out to be a harmless powder, Fauci explained, "My children were very, very distraught by that."
  • The US Capitol insurrection earlier this month, Fauci assessed, was that same divisiveness "in its ultimate."
Javier E

Mutated virus may reinfect people already stricken once with covid-19, sparking debate and concerns - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...riant-reinfection-south-africa

virus Covid-19 research immunity mutation

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • it appears a vaccine is better than natural infection in protecting people, calling it “a big, strong plug to get vaccinated” and a reality check for people who may have assumed that because they have already been infected, they are immune.
  • In the placebo group of the trial for Novavax’s vaccine, people with prior coronavirus infections appeared just as likely to get sick as people without them, meaning they weren’t fully protected against the B.1.351 variant that has swiftly become dominant in South Africa.
  • “The data really are quite suggestive: The level of immunity that you get from natural infection — either the degree of immunity, the intensity of the immunity or the breadth of immunity — is obviously not enough to protect against infection with the mutant,” Fauci said.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • She and others emphasized the apparent lack of severe health repercussions from reinfection — and the lack of evidence that reinfection is common.
  • Nearly 4 percent of people who had a previous infection were reinfected, an almost identical rate to those with no history of infection.
  • “Basically, it’s saying vaccination actually needs to be better than natural immunity. But vaccination is better than natural immunity.”
  • The study backs up recent laboratory data from South African researchers analyzing blood plasma from recovered patients. Nearly half of the plasma samples had no detectable ability to block the variant from infecting cells in a laboratory dish
  • The good news is that vaccine trials from Johnson & Johnson and Novavax show that vaccines can work — even against the B.1.351 variant, and particularly in preventing severe illness.
  • Novavax did not provide a breakdown of mild, moderate and severe cases, but severe cases of covid-19 were rare in the trial, suggesting that reinfection is unlikely to send people to the hospital.
  • “It is not surprising to see reinfection in individuals who are convalescent. And it would not be surprising to see infection in people who are vaccinated, especially a few months out from vaccine,”
  • “The key is not whether people get reinfected, it’s whether they get sick enough to be hospitalized.
  • “If the data holds true, it means we will need to walk the public back on the idea of how close we are to the finish line for ending this pandemic.”
  • Projections created by data scientist Youyang Gu — whose pandemic models have been cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — suggest that about 65 percent of America’s population will reach immunity by June 1. But built into that 65 percent is roughly 20 percent having immunity from past infections only.
  • In a separate study, scientists at Rockefeller University in New York took blood plasma from people who had been vaccinated and found that vaccine-generated antibodies were largely able to block mutations found on the B.1.351 variant.
  • I think the fact that we … now have data from two vaccines indicating that we can prevent serious disease, even against the new variant, is hopeful,”
  • A future concern needing close monitoring is whether the reformulation of vaccines to keep up with the evolving virus could drive the virus to continue evolving.
  • There is also a concern that subpar immunity could allow new resistant variants to emerge. That possibility, Nussenzweig said, is one reason that people should get both doses of a vaccine, on time.
Javier E

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267255

rational choice rationality psychology consumer economics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 15 - No Cached
  • Atlantic.displayRandomElement('#header li.business .sponsored-dropdown-item'); Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website. More Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. All Posts RSS feed Share Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on twitter « Previous Thompson Email Print Close function plusOneCallback () { $(document).trigger('share'); } $(document).ready(function() { var iframeUrl = "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"; var toolsClicked = false; $('#toolsTop').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'top'; }); $('#toolsBottom').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'bottom'; }); $('#thanksForSharing a.hide').click(function() { $('#thanksForSharing').hide(); }); var onShareClickHandler = function() { var top = parseInt($(this).css('top').replace(/px/, ''), 10); toolsClicked = (top > 600) ? 'bottom' : 'top'; }; var onIframeReady = function(iframe) { var win = iframe.contentWindow; // Don't show the box if there's no ad in it if (win.$('.ad').children().length == 1) { return; } var visibleAds = win.$('.ad').filter(function() { return !($(this).css('display') == 'none'); }); if (visibleAds.length == 0) { // Ad is hidden, so don't show return; } if (win.$('.ad').hasClass('adNotLoaded')) { // Ad failed to load so don't show return; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('display', 'block'); var top; if(toolsClicked == 'bottom' && $('#toolsBottom').length) { top = $('#toolsBottom')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsBottom').height() - 310; } else { top = $('#toolsTop')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsTop').height() + 10; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('left', (-$('#toolsTop').offset().left + 60) + 'px'); $('#thanksForSharing').css('top', top + 'px'); }; var onShare = function() { // Close "Share successful!" AddThis plugin popup if (window._atw && window._atw.clb && $('#at15s:visible').length) { _atw.clb(); } if (iframeUrl == null) { return; } $('#thanksForSharingIframe').attr('src', "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"); $('#thanksForSharingIframe').load(function() { var iframe = this; var win = iframe.contentWindow; if (win.loaded) { onIframeReady(iframe); } else { win.$(iframe.contentDocument).ready(function() { onIframeReady(iframe); }) } }); }; if (window.addthis) { addthis.addEventListener('addthis.ready', function() { $('.articleTools .share').mouseover(function() { $('#at15s').unbind('click', onShareClickHandler); $('#at15s').bind('click', onShareClickHandler); }); }); addthis.addEventListener('addthis.menu.share', function(evt) { onShare(); }); } // This 'share' event is used for testing, so one can call // $(document).trigger('share') to get the thank you for // sharing box to appear. $(document).bind('share', function(event) { onShare(); }); if (!window.FB || (window.FB && !window.FB._apiKey)) { // Hook into the fbAsyncInit function and register our listener there var oldFbAsyncInit = (window.fbAsyncInit) ? window.fbAsyncInit : (function() { }); window.fbAsyncInit = function() { oldFbAsyncInit(); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); }; } else if (window.FB) { FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); } }); The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices By Derek Thompson he
  • First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb.
  • Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences.
  • The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us
  • neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.
  • The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.
  • the final message is that neither the physiology of pleasure nor the methods we use to make choices are as simple or as single-minded as the classical economists thought. A lot of behavior is consistent with pursuit of self-interest, but in novel or ambiguous decision-making environments there is a good chance that our habits will fail us and inconsistencies in the way we process information will undo us.
  • Our brains seem to operate like committees, assigning some tasks to the limbic system, others to the frontal system. The "switchboard" does not seem to achieve complete, consistent communication between different parts of the brain. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the limbic system, but not on one fixed "utility" or "self-interest" scale. Pleasure and pain have distinct neural pathways, and these pathways adapt quickly to homeostasis, with sensation coming from changes rather than levels
  • Social networks are sources of information, on what products are available, what their features are, and how your friends like them. If the information is accurate, this should help you make better choices. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for you to follow the crowd rather than engaging in the due diligence of collecting and evaluating your own information and playing it against your own preferences
ilanaprincilus06

Why the modern world is bad for your brain | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ized-mind-information-overload

smartphone social media multitasking communication

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.
  • Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.
  • But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.”
  • Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
  • Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.
  • The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted.
  • Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
  • His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.
  • Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.
  • If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.
  • All this activity gives us a sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.
  • This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t answer right now?
  • A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar;
  • But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
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.'
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

SCIENCE WATCH; Clouded Perceptions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...watch-clouded-perceptions.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • experiments showed that fog could make a driver think he had dropped to a safe speed when he was actually hurtling along at, say, 70 miles per hour, thinking he was doing 50.
  • Evidence suggests that when people look at a pattern like moving stripes, they think that the stripes move more slowly when it becomes hard to see where one stops and another begins.
  • To find out if a similar distortion affects drivers in fog, the Cardiff researchers studied nine people who had been taught to drive in a computer-controlled simulated environment.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • with feedback,'' Dr. Snowden said, ''we could teach them to be accurate and drive at a consistent speed.''
  • drivers were often reluctant to drag their eyes from a foggy road and tended to judge their speed by feel.
  • ''We can't change our visual systems,'' Dr. Snowden said, ''so even when visibility is poor, it's worth having a look down to check your speed.'
« First ‹ Previous 141 - 160 of 224 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page