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How badly do you want something? Babies can tell | MIT News - 0 views

news.mit.edu/...abies-can-tell-value-goal-1123 babies effort psychology research
shared by knudsenlu on 02 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • Babies as young as 10 months can assess how much someone values a particular goal by observing how hard they are willing to work to achieve it, according to a new study from MIT and Harvard University.
  • This ability requires integrating information about both the costs of obtaining a goal and the benefit gained by the person seeking it, suggesting that babies acquire very early an intuition about how people make decisions.
  • “This paper is not the first to suggest that idea, but its novelty is that it shows this is true in much younger babies than anyone has seen. These are preverbal babies, who themselves are not actively doing very much, yet they appear to understand other people’s actions in this sophisticated, quantitative way,”
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  • “This study is an important step in trying to understand the roots of common-sense understanding of other people’s actions. It shows quite strikingly that in some sense, the basic math that is at the heart of how economists think about rational choice is very intuitive to babies who don’t know math, don’t speak, and can barely understand a few words
  • “Abstract, interrelated concepts like cost and value — concepts at the center both of our intuitive psychology and of utility theory in philosophy and economics — may originate in an early-emerging system by which infants understand other people's actions,” she says. 
  • In other words, they apply the well-known logic that all of us rely on when we try to assess someone’s preferences: The harder she tries to achieve something, the more valuable is the expected reward to her when she succeeds.”
  • “We have to recognize that we’re very far from building AI systems that have anything like the common sense even of a 10-month-old,” Tenenbaum says. “But if we can understand in engineering terms the intuitive theories that even these young infants seem to have, that hopefully would be the basis for building machines that have more human-like intelligence.
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'The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science,' by Armand Marie Leroi - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nce-by-armand-marie-leroi.html science modern aristotle knowledge
shared by knudsenlu on 08 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Armand Marie Leroi is a scientist, and Aristotle is his hero. This conjunction is interesting because, in the official telling of modern science’s origins, Aristotle is hardly regarded as heroic. Instead he’s portrayed as the obstacle over which the early heroes of the scientific revolution — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — had to leap in order to impose a genuinely explanatory methodology over the often deceptive input of sense perception.
  • What Aristotle had sundered, the celestial and the terrestrial, were united under one mechanics. And the rest, as they say, is history.
  • He cannot mention Plato without hissing, often characterizing him as anti-scientific or, at the very best, a poor scientist: “Plato’s science is barely distinguishable from theology.” Instead Leroi’s heart belongs to Aristotle, who not only was, like him, an enthusiastic student of biology, particularly of zoology, but who also, unlike Plato, was besotted by the world of appearances. Aristotle, as Leroi makes wonderfully clear, exemplifies one kind of scientific aptitude. He was an enthralled observer of the natural world, bedazzled by data, seeking causal explanations not in abstract numbers but in concrete details acquired through avid sense perception.
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  • Plato and Aristotle: What an accident of history that two such contrasting orientations toward the physical world, animated by two such different aesthetic sensibilities, should have been pedagogically entangled with each other.
  • To read some semblance of our science into these ancients requires charitably imaginative interpretations that clarify their obscurities with insights toward which they were themselves, perhaps, groping. Some of us are prepared to extend such interpretations toward Plato. Leroi extends them toward Aris­totle, so much so that he would vehemently reject my statement that Aristotle, like Plato, was not the finished scientific article.
  • Leroi follows closely in the footsteps of such generous elucidators. The modern understanding of genetically encoded information is applied not only to Aristotle’s formal cause, his “eidos,” and to his notion that all change is potentiality actualized, but also to his notion of the soul. “Aristotle’s belief that we should attend less to the matter than to the informational structure of living things makes him seem like a molecular geneticist avant la lettre.”
  • “I have kept Aristotle’s theos in the shadows. It may even be that I have done so deliberately; that I have been reluctant to reveal the degree to which my hero’s scientific system is riddled with religion. Yet it is.”
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Why the Coronavirus Could Threaten the U.S. Economy Even More Than China's - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-economy-us-china.html economy education science research
shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • After a string of deaths, some heart-stopping plunges in the stock market and an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve, there is reason to be concerned about the ultimate economic impact of the coronavirus in the United States.
  • Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than in China. That is because face-to-face service industries — the kind of businesses that go into a tailspin when fearful people withdraw from one another — tend to dominate economies in high-income countries more than they do in China.
  • If people stay home from school, stop traveling and don’t go to sporting events, the gym or the dentist, the economic consequence would be worse
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  • With shortages of everything from auto parts to generic medicines and production delays in things like iPhones and Diet Coke, a great deal of pain is coming from the closing of Chinese factories. That proliferating damage has central banks and financial analysts talking about a global recession in the coming months.
  • As a baseline, several factors work against the United States. China’s authoritarian government can quarantine entire cities or order people off the streets in a way that would be hard to imagine in America, presumably giving China an advantage in slowing the spread of the disease. In addition, a large share of American workers lack paid sick days and millions lack health care coverage, so people may be less likely to stay home or to get proper medical care. And 41 percent of China’s population lives outside urban areas, more than twice the share in the United States. Diseases generally spread faster in urban areas.
  • When people pull back from interacting with others because of their fear of disease, the things they stop doing will frequently affect much bigger industries in the United States.
  • People may stop attending American sporting events. There have even been calls for the N.C.A.A. to play its March Madness college basketball tournament without an audience. But sports is a huge business in the United States. People spend upward of 10 times as much on sporting events as they do in China.
  • Who wants to go to the dentist or the hospital during an outbreak if a visit isn’t necessary? Yet health spending is 17 percent of the U.S. economy — more than triple the proportion spent in China.
  • But over all, the United States is substantially more reliant on services than China is.
  • A major coronavirus epidemic in the United States might be like a big snowstorm that shuts down most economic activity and social interaction only until the snow is cleared away. But the coronavirus could be a “Snowmaggedon-style storm” that hits the whole country and lasts for months.
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In Europe, Hate Speech Laws are Often Used to Suppress and Punish Left-Wing Viewpoints - 0 views

theintercept.com/...nd-punish-left-wing-viewpoints education Knowledge social media
shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Many Americans who long for Europe’s hate speech restrictions assume that those laws are used to outlaw and punish expression of the bigoted ideas they most hate: racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny. Often, such laws are used that way. There are numerous cases in western Europe and Canada of far-right extremists being arrested, fined, or even jailed for publicly spouting that type of overt bigotry.
  • Does anyone doubt that high on the list of “hate speech” for many U.S. officials, judges, and functionaries would be groups, such as Black Lives Matter and antifa, far-left groups that fight against white supremacists?
  • In The Guardian, Richard Seymour went further and said that “Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to redefine racism as ‘anything that could conceivably offend white people.'”
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  • A leftist activist in France was convicted and fined for insulting former French President Nicolas Sarkozy by holding a sign that said “get lost, jerk”; ironically, those were the exact words Sarkozy himself uttered when a citizen refused to shake his hand at a public fair (the European Court of Human Rights ultimately overturned the Frenchman’s conviction).
  • Even if “hate speech” laws were magically applied by authorities exactly as advocates would wish — whereby only the ideas one hates would be suppressed and punished while the ideas one loves would be allowed to flourish — there would still be very good reasons to oppose such laws.
  • As Cole wrote: “When white supremacists called a rally the following week in Boston, they mustered only a handful of supporters. They were vastly outnumbered by tens of thousands of counter-protesters who peacefully marched through the streets to condemn white supremacy, racism, and hate. Boston proved yet again that the most powerful response to speech that we hate is not suppression but more speech.”
  • As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recently explained, there is a grave irony at the heart of these newfound liberal desires for “hate speech” censorship laws: The people who would implement and interpret them are those in power, people like Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, GOP governors and legislators, and their litany of right-wing judges. It takes little imagination to see how such laws would be applied, and against whom. Indeed, the U.S. history of allowing such restrictions is that they have been used against exactly the groups that censorship advocates think they are protecting.
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Musicians Using AI to Create Otherwise Impossible New Songs | Time.com - 0 views

time.com/...ai-music art artificial intelligence Technology
shared by johnsonel7 on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • n November, the musician Grimes made a bold prediction. “I feel like we’re in the end of art, human art,” she said on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. “Once there’s actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they’re gonna be so much better at making art than us.”
  • Artificial intelligence has already upended many blue collar jobs across various industries; the possibility that music, a deeply personal and subjective form, could also be optimized was enough to cause widespread alarm.
  • While obstacles like copyright complications and other hurdles have yet to be worked out, musicians working with AI hope that the technology will become a democratizing force and an essential part of everyday musical creation.
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  • Stavitsky realized that while people are increasingly plugging into headphones to get them through the day, “there’s no playlist or song that can adapt to the context of whatever’s happening around you," he says. His app takes several real-time factors into account — including the weather, the listener's heart rate, physical activity rate, and circadian rhythms — in generating gentle music that’s designed to help people sleep, study or relax.
  • “AI forced us to come up against patterns that have no relationship to comfort. It gave us the skills to break out of our own habits,” she says. The project resulted in the first Grammy nomination of YACHT’s two-decade career, for best immersive audio album.
  • . “There’s something freeing about not having to make every single microdecision, but rather, creating an ecosystem where things tend to happen, but never in the order you were imagining them,” she says. “It opens up a world of possibilities.” She says that she has a few new music projects coming this year using Bronze’s technology.
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The Most Egregious Straw Men of 2016 | Inverse - 0 views

www.inverse.com/...aw-men-arguments-politics-2016 straw man fallacy cognitive biases politics
shared by mmckenziejr01 on 24 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Fallacies are illicit shortcuts in reasoning, bad arguments that sound good but don’t actually make logical sense. Politicians and other public figures use them all the time ad nauseam in speeches and debates in order to better capture the hearts and minds of their audience.
  • But of all the logical fallacies out there, one stands out as being particularly powerful and popular, especially in politics: the straw man.
  • But that’s the truth, and the truth is irrelevant when it comes to fallacies. Just the fact that Clinton mentioned the term open borders, combined with her more liberal stance on immigration, was enough for Trump to say that she’s in favor of totally open borders
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  • The straw man fallacy involves the construction of a second argument that to some degree resembles, in a simplified or exaggerated way, the argument that your opponent is really making. It is much easier for you to attack that perverted point than it is to address the original point being made.
  • Clinton did not say she wanted to get rid of the Second Amendment in any sense. She had expressed support for expanding background checks and a possible assault weapons ban. Those things are reasonable (moderate, even), so it’s much simpler for Trump to ignore her argument and make one up for her
  • What are in large part reasonable measures taken to avoid unnecessary offences are recast by these Republicans to be softness or attacks on people’s freedom of speech. By connoting political correctness with these attributes, Republican politicians can ensure that their constituent remains hostile to the idea. Then, when they come across an argument in need of simplification, they can call back to that already-crafted association.
  • Sanders’s healthcare plan would have ended Medicare and the ACA as we know them, but only to replace them with a universal healthcare system. No one stood to lose their coverage, but the way Clinton was arguing, it looked like people might. By essentially leaving out half of Sanders’s argument, Clinton made a case against a fictional version of Sanders that seemed just real enough to fool the average voter.
  • Still, mostly everyone today understands that the Earth isn’t flat. They recognize that, as Scaramucci said, “science” got one wrong there. By equating these two concepts, he assumes any argument that recognizes climate change to also be one that claims the Earth is flat. For that reason, this particular brand of climate change denial wins the award for best (or maybe worst) straw man of 2016.
  • mmckenziejr01 on 24 Nov 17
     
    Here are a few examples of candidates using straw man fallacies to try to win over voters during the 2016 election. This shows just how prevalent cognitive biases are in our everyday lives without us even noticing them.
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Coronavirus Live Updates: China Is Tracking Travelers From Hubei - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-coronavirus.html
shared by tongoscar on 14 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • To combat the spread of the coronavirus, Chinese officials are using a combination of technology and policing to track movements of citizens who may have visited Hubei Province.
  • Mobile phone owners in China get their service from one of three state-run telecommunications firms, which this week introduced a feature for subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited. That has created a new way for the authorities to see where citizens have traveled.At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu on Tuesday, officials in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages and then show their location information to the authorities before being permitted to leave the station. Those who had passed through Hubei were unlikely to be allowed entry.
  • Top officials in Beijing on Thursday expanded their mass roundup of sick or possibly infected people beyond Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, to include other cities in Hubei Province that have been hit hard by the crisis, according to the state-run CCTV broadcaster.
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  • Chinese officials reported Friday that a surge in new infections was continuing, though not as markedly as the day before, when the number of people confirmed to have the virus in Hubei Province skyrocketed by 14,840 cases.
  • Japan has confirmed its first death from the virus.
  • For a moment on Thursday, it seemed as if there might be some good news from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship being held in the port of Yokohama in Japan, when the authorities said they would release some passengers to shore to finish their quarantine.Instead, Japanese health officials announced the first death from the virus in the country, of a woman in her 80s. It was third death from the virus outside mainland China. The woman had no record of travel there.
  • The Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that a person under quarantine at a military base in San Antonio had tested positive for the virus, bringing the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States to 15.
  • For the first time in a decade, global oil demand is expected to fall.
  • The arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.Image
  • Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off. And spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them.
  • The U.S. reported its 15th case after a person under quarantine tested positive.
  • The travel industry in Asia has been upended.Image
  • China ousted a provincial leader at the center of the outbreak.
  • China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday summarily fired two top Communist Party officials from Hubei Province, exacting political punishment for the regional government’s handling of the crisis.
  • A second citizen-journalist in Wuhan has disappeared.
  • A video blogger in the city of Wuhan who had been documenting conditions at overcrowded hospitals at the heart of the outbreak has disappeared, raising concerns among his supporters that he may have been detained by the authorities.The blogger, Fang Bin, is the second citizen journalist in the city to have gone missing in a week after criticizing the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic.Mr. Fang began posting videos from hospitals in Wuhan on YouTube last month, including one that showed a pile of body bags in a minibus. In early February, Mr. Fang said he had been briefly detained and questioned. A few days later, he filmed an exchange he had with strangers who showed up at his apartment claiming to bring him food.Mr. Fang’s last video, posted on Sunday, was a message written on a piece of paper: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”Last week, Chen Qiushi, a citizen-journalist and lawyer in Wuhan who recorded the plight of patients and the shortage of hospital supplies, vanished, according to his friends.
  • South Korea quarantined hundreds of soldiers who visited China.
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Why Do Emotions Influence Us More Than Reason? - Exploring your mind - 0 views

exploringyourmind.com/emotions-influence-us-reason
shared by tongoscar on 03 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Our mind is extremely powerful and skillful in directing our behavior, both for good and for evil.
  • We have the choice to follow our “heart” or to listen to the list of pros and cons.
  • Most of the studies that have analyzed this process of decision-making affirm that, usually, emotions win.
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  • Emotions: as ethereal as air and as dangerous as sulfur 
  • Emotions are subjective experiences that induce you to act. They emerge basically from our perceptions of the world, instead of from an actual reasoning.
  • Many human behaviors depend on emotions. Emotions have a great effect on the decisions we make. In fact, usually, they are crucial.
  • In theory, emotions are not decisive, but in reality they can be very decisive. They are intrinsic to human beings and seep into all our judgments and deliberations in life. It is not about denying them, but rather about identifying them and learning to channel them for our own good.
  • Emotions usually obey unknown causes.
  • Emotions give way to certain thoughts, and thoughts, in turn, give birth to emotions.
  • Emotions that have barely been thought out lead to a distorted perception of reality.
  • In the same way, imagining purely emotional actions, without even a pinch of reason, is more or less absurd.
  • Emotions are not prancing and runaway horses that we should “take the reins of.” They make us who we are as human beings. They help give meaning to our world. They do not have to be “eradicated,” nor denied or undervalued. Quite the contrary: being able to feel means being able to be human. Only on the basis of emotions can love, sacrifice, big dreams and great deeds be built.
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Trump warns Iran's supreme leader to be 'very careful' with his words - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...4505266002
shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Trump tweeted hours after Khamenei called him a "clown" who will "push a poisonous dagger" into Iran's back.
  • “The villainous U.S. government repeatedly says that they are standing by the Iranian people. They lie,” Khamenei said. “If you are standing with the Iranian people, it is only to stab them in the heart with their venomous daggers.”
  • “The noble people of Iran—who love America—deserve a government that's more interested in helping them achieve their dreams than killing them for demanding respect,”
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The Trailblazing 18th-Century Woman of Letters Germaine de Staël on Ambition ... - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...germaine-de-stael-ambition Human Nature
shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Of all the passions of which the human heart is susceptible, there is none which possesses so striking a character as the Love of Glory. The traces of its operations may be discovered in the primitive nature of man, but it is only in the midst of society that this sentiment acquires its true force.
  • According to that sublimity of virtue which seeks in our own conscience for the motive and the end of conduct, the love of glory is the most exalted principle which can actuate the soul.
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Singularity: Poet Marie Howe's Beautiful Tribute to Stephen Hawking and Our Belonging t... - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...ity-marie-howe-stephen-hawking Singularity Physics Universe Shape Understanding
shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?
  • what happens to a dying star as it collapses to form a singularity — that tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of a black hole.
  • shaped the course of modern physics and changed our common understanding of why everything that is is
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How to Befriend the Universe: Philosopher and Comedian Emily Levine on the Art of Meeti... - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...emily-levine-ted-reality Meeting Reality
shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • From Newton to quantum physics to Hannah Arendt, a mind-bending, heart-opening invitation to welcome nature exactly as it is and ourselves exactly as we are.
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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.
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Consumer Updates > Coping With Memory Loss - 0 views

www.fda.gov/...ucm107783.htm memory brain science science psychology memory lost
shared by krystalxu on 03 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Frequent memory lapses are likely to be noticeable because they tend to interfere with daily living.
  • What’s being forgotten?
  • may cause individuals to get lost in a familiar place or put something in an inappropriate place because they can’t remember where it goes (think car keys in the refrigerator).
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  • —the process of thinking, learning, and remembering—can affect memory.
  • Anything that affects cognition
  • Depression, which is common with aging, causes a lack of attention and focus that can affect memory.
  • Brain imaging – either using computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) – can help to identify strokes and tumors, which can sometimes cause memory loss.
  • Heavy alcohol use can cause deficiencies in vitamin B1 (
  • Stress, particularly because of emotional trauma, can cause memory loss. I
  • Doctors evaluate memory loss by taking a medical history, asking questions to test mental ability
  • repeated head trauma, as in boxers and footballers can result in progressive loss of memory and other effects.
  • Research has shown that the combination of shifting estrogen and progestin levels increased the risk of dementia in women older than 65. There is no evidence that the herb ginkgo biloba prevents memory loss.
  • vascular diseases (heart disease and stroke) that result from elevated cholesterol and blood pressure may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease,
  • Don’t smoke or abuse alcohol.
  • Get regular exercise.
  • Maintain healthy eating habits.
  • Maintain social interactions,
  • Keep your brain active
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NIMH » Depression Basics - 0 views

www.nimh.nih.gov/...index.shtml psychology brain science depression
shared by krystalxu on 03 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Depression—also called “clinical depression” or a “depressive disorder”—is a mood disorder that causes distressing symptoms that affect how you feel, think, and handle daily activities, such as sleeping, eating, or working.
  • Two of the most common forms of depression
  • Major depression
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  • Perinatal Depression
  • Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD):
  • Psychotic Depression:
  • Scientists at NIMH and across the country are studying the causes of depression. Research suggests that a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors play a role in depression.
  • Depression can occur along with other serious illnesses, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Depression can make these conditions worse and vice versa.
  • Depression affects different people in different ways.
  • The first step in getting the right treatment is to visit a health care provider or mental health professional, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist
  • Medications called antidepressants can work well to treat depression.
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George Floyd's heartbreaking cry for 'Mama' hits home (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • His final minutes in the custody of the police were captured in a devastating video, as he screamed "Mama." Floyd was pleading with the officers -- one of whom held a knee to his neck -- that he couldn't breathe, to the growing alarm of bystanders, one of whom recorded the scene. Floyd's mother is deceased. But in his cry -- "Mama!" -- I heard a twisted combination of hope and horror. Hope because in that moment he hoped the person who gave him life could save his life even in death. She'd undoubtedly done it before when she was alive. And horror because that's never how a black mama wants to hear her sacred title.
  • It's an unwavering declaration of faith. Whether they are three, 12, 20 or 46, like Floyd, children yell it when they're excited, proud, threatened or in pain.
  • I've heard that sound of panicked hope and belief that I could, and would, solve all problems and heal all wounds.
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  • I heard Floyd scream "Mama," and through my tears, even though I knew the events in the video had already unfolded to a tragic conclusion, I was still ready to fight. He wasn't my baby, but he was someone's child. And he needed someone with a mother's love to help him
  • I'm tired of being scared for him. I'm tired of reading about Ahmaud, Travis, George and so many others. The list never stops. I need the white mamas to share this burden. I need my white friends to love me and mine enough to come running, too.
  • While I'm waiting for white mothers to come running, to let me rest for just a moment while they carry the baton for a bit, I have a special thank you for my friend Stacie. I'm blessed with a multi-cultural array of friends. Stacie personifies compassion, sensitivity, godliness and intellect. She knows the world sees and treats her differently because she's white, financially comfortable and socially connected. In her heart, she's just a mama like me.
  • My baby calls me every time he's caught being black -- the security officer trailing him in the Harvard museum while he waited for his friend's commencement to start last May.
  • And the white woman who scurried away from the ladies' room on his college campus, presumably because he was walking toward her? Wasn't he just going in the same direction to use the adjacent men's room?
  • I need them to hear that cry and to tell their sons and daughters that my child is a human. I need them to declare and believe that he's in danger, that I can't protect him by myself and that his life matters to me and to them. I need them to tell their white friends' children, too. My child's life is sacred. My child is not dangerous.
  • She sees my blackness and the pain it brings. She'd never declare, as too many do, that she "doesn't see color." She sees it because she truly sees me. She knows it shapes how I see the world and how the world sees me. She knows my son, and she authentically cares about him. She knows I'm hurting without my having to tell her. And one mama to another, she cared.
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Why Do We Fear Fear? | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-do-we-fearfear_b_5780576.html fear brain science knowledge science
shared by krystalxu on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • fear being great or even maybe just fear living life to the fullest.
  • I feel like fear also comes from not living in the moment, but from living in the past and/or the future.
  • Fear is one of the hardest and most painful emotions to overcome.
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  • It contains a heart with smiles and laughter.
  • let it be your friend and just become one with it,
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Police accountability and immunity could get a closer look by the Supreme Court - CNNPo... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Law enforcement accountability is missing in the justice system.
  • The Supreme Court could decide soon whether it will take a closer look at a legal doctrine it created nearly 40 years ago that critics say is shielding law enforcement and government officials from accountability. Defenders argue that it protects an officer's ability to make a snap decision during potentially dangerous situations.
  • "When the Supreme Court grants qualified immunity ... it sends a message to law enforcement that there are not consequences for violating the law and it sends the message to the people that their rights don't matter,"
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  • That requires a high bar and makes it difficult to win unless the situation is similar to a prior case with nearly identical facts. In some cases with unique fact patterns, of which there are many, officers have been granted immunity even if they have been found to have acted in violation of the Constitution.
  • "Everyone has the potential for adverse encounters with state actors, whether it's members of law enforcement, public school officials, city council members, or other municipal employees," said Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. "So long as the Supreme Court continues to permit this unlawful shield for government agents, no citizen will have any assurance that their rights will be respected."
  • "Until we shift the focus of our inquiry to whether immunity existed at common law, we will continue to substitute our own policy preferences for the mandates of Congress," the conservative Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion. "In an appropriate case, we should reconsider our qualified immunity jurisprudence."
  • In its 1982 decision, the court found that the aides were entitled to qualified immunity. "Government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known," the court ruled.
  • "The principle that government officials should be accountable for their violations of the Constitution is not a partisan issue. It's an American one," Boston University law professor Jack Beermann said in an interview with CNN. "Conservatives are just as concerned with abuse of government power as liberals are. And you combine that with what seems to be a rash of police misconduct in recent years and you can get a pretty strong coalition."
  • "There's an incredible urgency as communities across the country seek accountability for police violence against individuals of color in particularly, to open up the courts, claim a constitutional violation and make sure officers aren't provided a get-out-of-court-free card when they violate people's rights,"
  • "We are in the midst of a crisis of accountability in law enforcement,
  • As George Floyd's death tragically illustrates, for many people in this country, our culture of near-zero accountability for law enforcement is not an abstract public-policy concern, but a matter of life and death.
  • "At its heart, qualified immunity protects police officers' split second decisions ... courts must afford them a measure of deference in their on-the-scene assessments about the application of force to subdue a fleeing or resisting suspect,"
  • "Abandoning qualified immunity ... would leave hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers exposed to potential liability, likely second guessing themselves in situations where a hesitation to act could mean the difference between life and death," the lawyers said in court papers.
  • Our case presents some of the problems with qualified immunity very starkly," said Michelman, lead counsel representing Baxter in the case. "Everyone should know, and everyone does know, that putting your hands up is a universal symbol of surrender and it is completely out of bounds to attack somebody who has surrendered."
  • "These cases very frequently arrive from police use of force in particular circumstances," Hughes said. "When an individual or his or her estate alleges that a police officer used excessive force the officer will invariably raise a qualified immunity defense."
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People with at least two Northern Isles grandparents needed for genetics study - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-east-orkney-shetland-51135287 science research
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  • People with at least two grandparents who were born in Orkney or Shetland are being sought for a genetics study aimed at improving health.The research aims to better understand the causes of conditions such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancer, and in turn find treatments.Those taking part in the University of Edinburgh study-led Viking II project will complete an online questionnaire about their health and lifestyle.
  • The team believes the "unique genetic identity" of those with Northern Isles ancestry offers a "rare opportunity" to give a detailed picture on how genes are implicated in health
  • It is believed this information could be useful in terms of their future healthcare, including taking preventive actions to reduce the impact of health conditions.The study is being backed by the Medical Research Council.
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Mindfulness: How it could help you be happier, healthier and more successful - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
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  • "Change in humanity must start from individuals," the Dalai Lama told the mayors. "We created this violence, so we can reduce this violence."
  • Paying attention to the matters at hand may sound simple, but most Americans aren't doing it, studies show. Though the experts say there's a lot more research to be done, the number of scientific studies has grown exponentially over the past decade. They show that mindfulness is more than a passing fad; there's early evidence it can help your health.
  • n their 2010 study, they created a computer program that sent questions at random moments to people by iPhone. The program asked, "How are you feeling right now?" "What are you doing right now?" and "Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?"
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  • Of the 2,250 adults who answered the pings, 46.9% were not thinking about the task they were doing at the moment. This was the case for 30% of their activities, with one exception: during sex. That, apparently, had
  • their full attention.
  • To remain mindful, the Dalai Lama said, he sleeps a lot: about nine hours a night. He also gets up at 3 a.m. to meditate. He has another session in the afternoon and one more right before bed.
  • Scientists had Buddhist monks meditate while being scanned by an MRI machine. While strapped to a board and put in the huge, noisy machine, the monks calmed their minds, reduced distractions and paid attention to life moment-by-moment.
  • The participants were then subjected to a stressful day-long training exercise. Both groups had similar spikes in blood pressure and breathing rates during the test, but when it was over, the mindfully trained Marines' heart rate and breathing recovered much faster, as did their nervous systems.
  • The data on stress reduction is pretty good," said Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published hundreds of scientific papers about the impact of emotion on the brain and did some of the first MRIs of meditating Buddhist monks.
  • Several workplace studies found that employees who get mindfulness training become more productive and stable. They demonstrate more self-control and efficiency. Employees with mindfulness training also seem to pick up on things faster and can read group dynamics better.
  • Davidson suggests that the data are "much weaker and less convincing" as mindfulness relates to curing a specific disease.It can't cure cancer or chronic pain, but the practice can help manage some of the symptoms. For instance, if you have chronic lower back pain, mindfulness may be as helpful as medication at easing that pain.
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