Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items matching ""state of nature"" 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
12More

The Conservative War on Liberal Media Has a Long History - Nicole Hemmer - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Ailes made conservative news popular and profitable, but he was not the first to mingle partisanship with news. The twinned concepts of balance and bias were not his legacy but his inheritance. Long before Fox News, before Ailes and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, there was a conservative media complex in the United States refining a theory of liberal media bias.
  • The idea of “fair and balanced” partisan media has its roots in the 1940s and 1950s. Human Events, the right-wing newsweekly founded in 1944, was dedicated to publishing the “facts” other outlets overlooked.
  • By the early 1960s, Human Events arrived at this formulation of its mission: In reporting the news, Human Events is objective; it aims for accurate representation of the facts. But it is not impartial. It looks at events through eyes that are biased in favor of limited constitutional government, local self-government, private enterprise, and individual freedom.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • In distinguishing between objectivity and impartiality, Human Events’ editors created a space where “bias” was an appropriate journalistic value, one that could work in tandem with objectivity.
  • two events in the early 1960s convinced the right that creating conservative media wasn’t enough to achieve balance. Conservatives would also have to discredit existing media.
  • Conservative discontent with the FCC focused on the Fairness Doctrine
  • Conservatives felt the Fairness Doctrine unfairly tilted the playing field against them. Though devised to encourage controversial broadcasting, in practice the doctrine often led broadcasters to avoid controversy so they wouldn’t have to give away free airtime. To conservatives, avoiding controversy inevitably meant silencing right-wing voices.
  • the right repeatedly challenged the central assumptions the FCC—and Americans more broadly—made about journalism. For much of the 20th century, journalists cleaved to the idea of objectivity. Opinion and analysis had their place, but that place was distinct and separate from the news. Conservative broadcasts, on the other hand, were by their very nature opinion. Fairness dictated these partisan broadcasters provide airtime for a response.
  • Conservatives saw the media landscape differently. They viewed objectivity as a mask concealing entrenched liberal bias, hiding the slanted reporting that dominated American media. Because of this, the right believed fairness did not require a response to conservative broadcasts; conservative broadcasts were the response. Unable to bring the FCC around to their position, conservatives increasingly saw the commission as a powerful government agency dedicated to maintaining media’s liberal tilt.
  • In calling coverage of Goldwater “unfounded in fact,” Manion was making another argument to which conservatives anchored their charges of liberal bias: Established media did not just slant the news—they fabricated it. And if established media couldn’t be counted on for truth, the argument went, then surely they should be required to offer both sides of the argument. In the years that followed, conservatives began an active campaign against liberal bias
  • The combined forces of the administration and its conservative media-research wing had an effect. By 1971 CBS Radio had launched Spectrum, a debate show featuring conservatives like Stan Evans, James Kilpatrick, and Phyllis Schlafly. That same year 60 Minutes pitted conservative Kilpatrick against liberal Nicholas von Hoffman in a regular segment called “Point/Counterpoint.” By then, even the publisher of Human Events, in the midst of selling his paper as an alternative to liberal media, had to admit that conservatives were popping up all over established media—even the editorial pages of “that holy house organ of Liberalism—the New York Times.”
  • So balance and bias became part of the American news diet long before Ailes entered the conservative media game. Why does that matter? It makes Ailes’s successes at Fox News far more understandable—and far less Ailes-centric. By the time Ailes entered the game, the American right had spent a generation seeking out conservative alternatives to the “liberal media,” and America’s news media was already in the midst of a revolution that made Fox News possible.
20More

Journalists debunk vaccine science denial - 0 views

  • extra difficulties imposed irrationally by antiscience.
  • Large outbreaks in the U.S. of the highly infectious disease have become more common in the past two years, even though measles hasn’t been indigenous since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • difficult because concerns about a possible link between vaccines and autism—now debunked by science—have expanded to more general, and equally groundless, worries about the effects of multiple shots on a child’s immune system, vaccine experts and doctors say.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • It summarized and condemned the scientific and medical fraud that the British researcher Andrew Wakefield perpetrated. Years earlier, he had falsely linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. The editorial lamented that “the damage to public health continues, fuelled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals, and the medical profession.”
  • Reporters also seek to ensure that viewers, listeners, or readers understand that measles can afflict a victim more powerfully than does a mere passing ailment.
  • Measles doesn’t spread in most U.S. communities because people are protected by “herd immunity,” meaning that 92% to 94% of the population is vaccinated or immune. That level of protection makes it hard for one case of measles to spread even from one unvaccinated person to another without direct contact.
  • a study that “found that only 51 percent of Americans were confident that vaccines are safe and effective, which is similar to the proportion who believe that houses can be haunted by ghosts.”
  • In some parts of California, resistance to vaccinations including the MMR shot is stronger than ever, despite cases of measles hitting five US states.
  • “Vaccines are a great idea, but they are poisoning us, adding things that kick in later in life so they can sell us more drugs.”
  • Health professionals say those claims are unfounded or vastly overstated.
  • “the anti-vaccination movement is fueled by an over-privileged group of rich people grouped together who swear they won’t put any chemicals in their kids (food or vaccines or whatever else), either because it’s trendy to be all-natural or they don’t understand or accept the science of vaccinations. Their science denying has been propelled further by celebrities
  • the outbreak “should worry and enrage the public.” It indicted the anti-vaxxers’ “ignorant and self-absorbed rejection of science” and declared, “Getting vaccinated is good for the health of the inoculated person and also part of one’s public responsibility to help protect the health of others.”
  • “It’s wrong,” the editors emphasized, “to allow public health to be threatened while everyone else waits for these science-denying parents to open their eyes.”
  • “It’s because these people are highly educated and they get on the Internet and read things and think they can figure things out better than their physician.”
  • linked vaccination opposition to the “political left, which has long been suspicious of the lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry and its influence on government regulators, and also the fringe political right, which has at different times seen vaccination, fluoridisation and other public-health initiatives as attempts by big government to impose tyrannical limits on personal freedom.”
  • Attempts to increase concerns about communicable diseases or correct false claims about vaccines may be especially likely to be counterproductive.
  • “attempting balance by giving vaccine skeptics and pro-vaccine advocates equal weight in news stories leads people to believe the evidence for and against vaccination is equally strong.”
  • A recent edition of the Washington Post carried a letter defending anti-vaxxers as “people who generally are pro-science and highly educated, who have high incomes and who have studied this issue carefully before coming to the conclusion that the risk to their children is greater than the slim possibility of contracting a childhood disease that [in many cases leaves] little or no residual consequences.”
  • anecdotal evidence suggests that some journalists, rather than omitting anti-vaxxers’ views, prefer to expose them and then oppose them.
  • “unwarranted fear . . . an assault on one of the greatest public-health inventions in world history.”
16More

Writing, Typing, and Economics - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The first lesson would have to do with the all-important issue of inspiration. All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand — are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced those moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion.
  • And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. Such is the horror of having to face the typewriter that you will spend all your time waiting. I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers, are about as good one day as the next (a point which Trollope made), hangovers apart. The difference is the result of euphoria, alcohol, or imagination. The meaning is that one had better go to his or her typewriter every morning and stay there regardless of the seeming result. It will be much the same.
  • Writers, in contrast, do nothing because they are waiting for inspiration.In my own case there are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. However, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed before, as I've often said, I put in that note of spontaneity which even my meanest critics concede
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • It helps greatly in the avoidance of work to be in the company of others who are also waiting for the golden moment. The best place to write is by yourself, because writing becomes an escape from the terrible boredom of your own personality. It's the reason that for years I've favored Switzerland, where I look at the telephone and yearn to hear it ring.
  • There may be inspired writers for whom the first draft is just right. But anyone who is not certifiably a Milton had better assume that the first draft is a very primitive thing. The reason is simple: Writing is difficult work. Ralph Paine, who managed Fortune in my time, used to say that anyone who said writing was easy was either a bad writer or an unregenerate liar
  • Thinking, as Voltaire avowed, is also a very tedious thing which men—or women—will do anything to avoid. So all first drafts are deeply flawed by the need to combine composition with thought. Each later draft is less demanding in this regard. Hence the writing can be better
  • There does come a time when revision is for the sake of change—when one has become so bored with the words that anything that is different looks better. But even then it may be better.
  • the lesson of Harry Luce. No one who worked for him ever again escaped the feeling that he was there looking over one's shoulder. In his hand was a pencil; down on each page one could expect, any moment, a long swishing wiggle accompanied by the comment: "This can go." Invariably it could. It was written to please the author and not the reader. Or to fill in the space. The gains from brevity are obvious; in most efforts to achieve brevity, it is the worst and dullest that goes. It is the worst and dullest that spoils the rest.
  • as he grew older, he became less and less interested in theory, more and more interested in information.
  • Reluctantly, but from a long and terrible experience, I would urge my young writers to avoid all attempts at humor
  • Only a very foolish man will use a form of language that is wholly uncertain in its effect. That is the nature of humor
  • Finally, I would come to a matter of much personal interest, intensely self-serving. It concerns the peculiar pitfalls of the writer who is dealing with presumptively difficult or technical matters
  • Economics is an example, and within the field of economics the subject of money, with the history of which I have been much concerned, is an especially good case. Any specialist who ventures to write on money with a view to making himself intelligible works under a grave moral hazard. He will be accused of oversimplification. The charge will be made by his fellow professionals, however obtuse or incompetent
  • In the case of economics there are no important propositions that cannot be stated in plain language
  • Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought
  • It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven't thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you do not understand. Clarity thus exposes flaws in the thought
14More

Opinion | The Question of Transgender Care - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria.
  • Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.
  • Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.
  • As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”
  • The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.
  • he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”
  • She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.
  • her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.
  • In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.
  • “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote
  • A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
  • Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence
  • Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.
4More

Reasons To Believe : Anthropic Principle: A Precise Plan for Humanity - 0 views

  • The anthropic principle says that the universe appears "designed" for the sake of human life
  • To state the principle more dramatically, a preponderance of physical evidence points to humanity as the central theme of the cosmos.
  • Evidence of specific preparation for human existence shows up in the characteristics of the solar system, as well
  •  
    The Anthropic Principle, arguably the most human sentient there is. This principle is the concept that due to our timeline of creation, the universe has been created specifically for us. But what about  monkeys? They are as much a result of the laws of nature as we are, perhaps the universe was created for them! This idea of human centrality appears in religion as well as early science - through a geocentric model. But as we move further into the universe, it's clear to see there lays much more than us and such sentiments ... 
11More

Canada: At "WAR" With the US? (=Water, Arctic and Refugees) - The Globalist - 0 views

  • Every Canadian government faces two existential challenges that, to make matters more complicated yet, are often intertwined.
  • The first is to keep a loose and fractious federation together. The second is to keep Canada and the United States close but separate.
  • These challenges have been made more complex with climate change and changes in U.S. politics. The regionally divisive nature of Justin Trudeau’s minority government, with no representation from Alberta and the rebirth of the “nationalist” Bloc Québécois,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • As with the Trump administration’s demand for a revised North American trading system, Canada will have to find a response to each that is positive enough to appease, but also robust enough to maintain the core of national sovereignty.
  • The first issue on the new U.S.-Canada agenda is America’s need for water.
  • New and more strident demands for U.S. access to Canada’s “surplus” of this vital resource is certain to be presented.
  • The Canadian position remains that water is not a tradable commodity. So far, the U.S. government has neither agreed nor contested that view.
  • The Arctic climate is changing faster than anywhere else. Waters previously unnavigable are now becoming sea lanes
  • U.S. policy is slated to become far more restrictive. Two shifts in particular will have dramatic implications for Canadian refugee policy.
  • In effect this means that any Central American refugee in the United States will feel entitled to claim asylum in Canada.
  • the United States simply cannot ever be expected to remain at arms’ length in our national life.
12More

Pupils at elite Welsh school to get lessons in climate change - 0 views

  • For the first time in 50 years, the directors of the IB are collaborating with schools to create an updated version of the qualification taken by 16 to 19-year-olds as an alternative to A-levels
  • A cohort of 20 pupils at UWC will drop a third of the traditional subjects usually studied within the IB. Instead they will spend 300 hours, over two years of study, on the new areas. Forms of assessment have yet to be finalised but there will be no exams on these subjects.
  • Learning will be project-based, collaborative and designed to tackle “multiple global crises” around the world. IB says it is creating the new qualification because there is a growing disconnect between the education children are receiving and the education they need.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Olli-Pekka Heinonen, director-general of the IB, told The Times that teenagers taking the new diploma would be “uniquely empowered” on leaving school.
  • Traditional assessment often led to pupils forgetting what they had learnt once exams were over, he said. “The aim of this type of assessment is to strengthen deep learning and understanding, something you learn that stays with you and is part of you. We’re experimenting with non-exam assessment and finding the best ways to evaluate.
  • “Biodiversity, food, migration and energy are meaningful and attractive to young people. They’re appealing and relevant.“We’re looking at these areas through the lens of systems leadership — ie, how it’s possible to make change happen.”
  • The school hosts pupils from 80 different countries and charges fees of £37,000 a year. It is set in St Donat’s Castle, in 122 acres and its grounds include woodland, farmland, a valley and its own seafront.
  • Naheed Bardai, principal of UWC Atlantic, said he felt dissatisfied with the state of education in the world today as pupils should be prepared to become leaders of organisations and government in the 2040s and 2050s.
  • He said the new qualification would help them understand the root causes of problems but also become compassionate world leaders that can create “transformative solutions”.
  • “Our core policies are peace, sustainability and experiential learning but there’s very little education for young people at the intersection of problems, particularly where the human meets the natural world,”
  • We need people who can take constructive action as inequality is growing at a tremendous rate.”
  • Bardai said the school had been given a free hand in curriculum writing and was looking at more radical forms of assessment. This may include interviews, peer assessment and portfolios.
7More

How to Be French - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • I’m pursuing French citizenship. The whole procedure can take years. Amid repeated requests for new documents, some would-be French people just give up.
  • This may be by design. “The difficulty of the ordeal seems a means of testing the authenticity of his/her commitment to the project of becoming French,” the sociologists Didier Fassin and Sarah Mazouz concluded in their 2009 paper “What Is It to Become French?” Officials can reject an applicant because he hasn’t adopted French values, or merely because his request isn’t “opportune.”
  • There’s a long tradition of Frenchification here. Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone di Buonaparte and spoke French with a thick Corsican accent. He and others spent the 19th century transforming France from a nation with a patchwork of regional languages and dialects to one where practically everyone spoke proper French.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Schools were their main instrument. French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.
  • Even the rituals of friendship are different here. The Canadian writer Jean-Benoît Nadeau, who just spent a year in Paris, says there are clues that a French person wants to befriend you: She tells you about her family; she uses self-deprecating humor; and she admits that she likes her job. There’s also the fact that she speaks to you at all. Unlike North Americans, “the French have no compunction about not talking to you.”
  • Apparently, being a Parisian woman has its own requirements. The new book “How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are” says Parisiennes are “imperfect, vague, unreliable and full of paradoxes” and have “that typically French enthusiasm for transforming life into fiction.” I need to cultivate an “air of fragility,” too.
  • Apparently nobody expects me to achieve a state of inner Frenchness. At a naturalization ceremony that the two sociologists observed, an official told new citizens that they were granted French nationality because they had assimilated “not to the point where you entirely resemble native French people, yet enough so that you feel at ease among us.”
13More

Opinion | The Ugly Secrets Behind the Costco Chicken - The New York Times - 0 views

  • we must guard our moral compasses. And some day, I think, future generations will look back at our mistreatment of livestock and poultry with pain and bafflement. They will wonder how we in the early 21st century could have been so oblivious to the cruelties that delivered $4.99 chickens to a Costco rotisserie.
  • Torture a single chicken in your backyard, and you risk arrest. Abuse tens of millions of them? Why, that’s agribusiness.
  • Those commendable savings have been achieved in part by developing chickens that effectively are bred to suffer. Scientists have created what are sometimes called “exploding chickens” that put on weight at a monstrous clip, about six times as fast as chickens in 1925. The journal Poultry Science once calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as these chickens, a 2-month-old baby would weigh 660 pounds.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • When Herbert Hoover talked about putting “a chicken in every pot,” chicken was a luxury: In 1930, whole dressed chicken retailed in the United States for $7 a pound in today’s dollars. In contrast, that Costco bird now sells for less than $2 a pound.
  • It’s not that Costco chickens suffer more than Walmart or Safeway birds. All are part of an industrial agricultural system that, at the expense of animal well-being, has become extremely efficient at producing cheap protein.
  • “They’re living on their own feces, with no fresh air and no natural light,” said Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals. “I don’t think it’s what a Costco customer expects.”
  • Garcés wants Costco to sign up for the “Better Chicken Commitment,” an industry promise to work toward slightly better standards for industrial agriculture. For example, each adult chicken would get at least one square foot of space, there would be some natural light and the company would avoid breeds that put on weight that the legs can’t support.
  • Burger King, Popeyes, Chipotle, Denny’s and some 200 other food companies have embraced the Better Chicken Commitment, but grocery chains generally have not, with the exception of Whole Foods.
  • Yet what struck me was that Costco completely accepts that animal welfare should be an important consideration. We may disagree about whether existing standards are adequate, but the march of moral progress on animal rights is unmistakable.
  • When I began writing about these issues, I never guessed that McDonald’s would commit to cage-free eggs, that California would legislate protections for mother pigs, that there would be court fights about whether an elephant has legal “personhood,” and that Pope Francis would suggest that animals go to heaven and that the Virgin Mary “grieves for the sufferings” of mistreated livestock.
  • I don’t pretend that there are neat solutions. We raised a flock of chickens on our family farm when I was a kid, and we managed to be neither efficient nor humane. Many birds died, and being eaten by a coyote wasn’t such a pleasant way to go, either. There’s no need for a misplaced nostalgia for traditional farming practices, just a pragmatic acknowledgment of animal suffering and trade-offs to reduce it.
  • We treat poultry particularly poorly because humans identify less with birds than with fellow mammals. We may empathize with a calf with big eyes, but less so with species that we dismiss as “bird brains.”
  • Still, the issue remains as the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham posed it in 1789: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
6More

Supreme Court Takes Up Question of Gene Research - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would decide whether human genes may be patented.
  • The patents were challenged by scientists and doctors who said that their research and ability to help patients had been frustrated.
  • ained the right to exclude the rest of the scientific community from examining the naturally occurring genes of every person in the United States,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • prevent patients from examining their own genetic information” and “made it impossible to obtain second opinions.”
  • he legal question for the justices is whether isolated genes are “products of nature” that may not be patented or “human-made inventions” eligible for patent protection.
  • “The isolated DNA molecules before us are not found in nature,” wrote Judge Alan D. Lourie, who was in the majority. “They are obtained in the laboratory and are man-made, the product of human ingenuity.”
7More

Sleeping Wipes Out Certain Memories - And That's a Good Thing, Reveal Studies | Big Think - 0 views

  • But what is its evolutionary purpose – what kind of changes do our brains undergo when we sleep?
  • suggest our brains undergo a pruning cycle while we rest.
  • Its important to note these studies are still in their early stages. The tests were done on mice.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • letting us forget the less relevant information while strengthening memories that may be important.
  • However, modern humans don't abide by a natural sleep cycle anymore – we look at our phones before bed and expose ourselves to things that cause our brains to think sleep is not on the menu.
  • they might not require a chemical crutch to get some rest.
  •  
    This article shows that how unreliable our memory is. Every night when we go to sleep, our memory is edited and our brain would delete some irrelevant things. So our memory is not a primary source and I think the words of witnesses on the court can only be a reference, not a direct evidence. Also, in this article, the author states the uncertainties and limits of the experiment, showing that the result of the experiment in this stage can only serves as a suggestion, not a direct evidence. --Sissi (2/7/2017)
12More

Nine Ways Falling In Love Makes Us Do Strange Things | HuffPost - 0 views

  • people who are passionately in love are less able to focus and to perform tasks that require attention.
  • because you spend a large part of your cognitive resources on thinking of your beloved,
  • When you fall in love, the same neural system in your brain linked to cocaine addiction becomes active, giving you that feeling of euphoria.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Love can make you less vulnerable to pain.
  • your heart beats as fast as your partner’s so they’re at the same rate. How romantic.
  • holding hands with the person you love may alleviate pain.
  • brain activated by feelings of intense love are the same areas that drugs use to reduce pain,”
  • men adjust their walking speed to match their romantic partner’s pace
  • people in a committed relationship who have been actively thinking about their partner actually avert their eyes from attractive members of the opposite sex unknowingly
  • men are more willing to take unnecessary risks for a romantic partner.
  • It makes your pupils grow.
  • pupil dilation correlates with intense emotional states
8More

Pesticides Linked to Honeybee Deaths Pose More Risks, European Group Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • An influential European scientific body said on Wednesday that a group of pesticides believed to contribute to mass deaths of honeybees is probably more damaging to ecosystems than previously thought and questioned whether the substances had a place in sustainable agriculture.
  • A growing body of evidence shows that the widespread use of the pesticides “has severe effects on a range of organisms that provide ecosystem services like pollination and natural pest control, as well as on biodiversity,” the report’s authors said.
  • Predatory insects like parasitic wasps and ladybugs provide billions of dollars’ worth of insect control, they noted, and organisms like earthworms contribute billions more through improved soil productivity. All are harmed by the pesticides.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The authors were critical of studies of neonicotinoids on bee health that tested the insects’ ability to survive a single exposure to a given quantity of pesticide dust; they noted that the effect of the chemicals is cumulative and irreversible, meaning that repeated sublethal doses will eventually be deadly if a certain threshold is passed.
  • The restrictive approach used by European regulators contrasts with the more lenient stance of United States regulators. In March, American opponents of neonicotinoid use delivered more than four million signatures to the White House calling for stronger action to protect pollinators.
  • critics say the E.P.A.’s interim policy is rife with loopholes, allowing continued use of existing products for approved applications, for example. They also criticized the agency for not halting the approval of some products that are chemically quite similar to neonicotinoids but classified differently for regulatory purposes.
  • Pollination — the transfer of pollen from one flower to another, typically by wind, bug or bird — is essential to the global food supply. An estimated 75 percent of all traded crops, including apples, soybeans and corn, depend on pollination.
  • Neonicotinoids are absorbed by a plant so that the neurotoxic poison spreads throughout its tissues, including the sap, nectar and pollen. Far more deadly to insects than to mammals, they do not discriminate between harmful pests and beneficial pollinators.
9More

How Isaac Newton Changed the World | Live Science - 0 views

  • To the probable dismay of some befuddled calculus and physics students the world over, Isaac Newton didn't just live, he grew up and lived long enough to become the single-most influential scientist of the 17th-century.
  • Newton's wide range of discoveries, from his theories of optics to his groundbreaking work on the laws of motion and gravity, formed the basis for modern physics.
  • The true genius of his work, experts think, is how he ultimately took those theories and applied them to the universe at large, explaining the motions of the Sun and planets in a way that had never been done before.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Upon getting bumped on the head by a falling apple, Newton airily dreams up the laws of gravity and the rest, as they say, is history
  • When the black plague closed Cambridge University, where he was a student, for two years starting in 1665, he spent the long months locked up at home studying complex mathematics, physics and optics.
  • It was during this fruitful time that Newton, with the help of a crystal prism, became the first to discover that white light is made up a spectrum of colors
  • He also developed the concept of infinite-series calculus, the kind of scary math studied today by engineering and statistics scholars.
  • By 1666, Newton had even laid the blueprints for his three laws of motion, still recited by physics students everywhere:An object will remain in a state of inertia unless acted upon by force.The relationship between acceleration and applied force is F=ma.For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
  • Across the pages of the Principia, Newton breaks down the workings of the solar system into "'simple"' equations, explaining away the nature of planetary orbits and the pull between heavenly bodies.
7More

Coronavirus: The psychology of panic buying - BBC Worklife - 0 views

  • LLast Saturday afternoon, Kristina Moy decided to swing by her local supermarket in the US city of Seattle to pick up some weekly groceries and supplies for her son’s upcoming baseball tournament. What started as a quick errand turned into a three-hour ordeal, navigating checkout lanes packed with hundreds of shoppers stocking up amid the outbreak of coronavirus.
  • Moy isn’t the only one to experience long queues and empty shelves. Mass demand for rice and instant noodles in Singapore prompted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to assure the public there was enough to go around. In Auckland, New Zealand, supermarket spending shot up 40% last Saturday compared to the same day a year ago. And shoppers in Malaysia wanting to pad “pandemic pantries” – grocery hoards to fill people’s kitchens until the crisis dies down – have driven an 800% increase in weekly hand sanitiser sales. (All of those places have confirmed cases of Covid-19.)
  • With events like looming natural disasters, such as a hurricane or flood, people frequently stock up with emergency supplies. “It is rational to prepare for something bad that looks like it is likely to occur,” says David Savage, associate professor of behavioural and microeconomics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who’s written about the rationality behind stocking up in a crisis. However: “It is not rational to buy 500 cans of baked beans for what would likely be a two-week isolation period.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Irrational stockpiling can also lead to price gouging, says Steven Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics. “If the price of a roll of toilet paper is tripled, that’s seen as a scarcer commodity to acquire, which can lead to anxiety,” he says.
  • Panic buying, Taylor says, is fuelled by anxiety, and a willingness to go to lengths to quell those fears: like queueing for hours or buying way more than you need. We’ve seen this before throughout history. Back in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed imminent, American families filled their basements with enough canned goods and bottled water to survive an atomic blast.
  • “But for many people, hand-washing seems to be too ordinary. This is a dramatic event, therefore a dramatic response is required, so that leads to people throwing money at things in hopes of protecting themselves.”
  • “Panic is a subjective, emotional state, and mostly what we can observe is the behaviour,” says Oppenheim. “Maybe someone reads articles or a couple of tweets about supply chain disruptions in China and mask shortages in Hong Kong, and then makes a very reasoned decision to stock up on masks just in case. All we can infer from the purchasing is the timing, so it could look panicky even if it's well thought through.”
13More

The Primate Brain Likes to Win, But Can't Always Have It | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Winning stimulates dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. Just watching competition stimulates these happy chemicals through our mirror neurons.
  • Happy chemicals are stimulated by behaviors that promote survival in the state of nature.
  •  Dopamine is the good feeling of getting a reward the meets your needs.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Once he gets the fruit, his dopamine stops. The good feeling will be gone as soon as it's metabolized. To get more, he will have to do more.  Natural selection produced a brain that feels good when it works toward a goal.
  • The monkey's brain weighs the evidence based on past experience. The fruit he scored in the past triggered dopamine that paved neural pathways and trigger his dopamine today. But the pain of past setbacks built cortisol pathways that alert him to the risk of setbacks today.
  • Your brain evolved to stimulate them by takig action to meet your needs. Just taking steps toward skill building gets your happy chemicals flowing once you've built the circuits that kick-start the process.
  • different kind of motivation comes from serotonin. Let's say our monkey's fruit is snatched by a bigger, stronger monkey when he finally gets to the top of the tree. Experience has taught him that bigger monkeys cause pain, and falling from a tree causes pain.
  • A surge of serotonin causes this feeling. Experience teaches a monkey to determine when he is in the superior position and when he is in the inferior position.
  • These words horrify us in today's culture, but a monkey would starve to death if it always saw itself as inferior. It has to feel confident to go for it some of the time. Serotonin creates that confidence.
  • You may say that monkeys should cooperate, share the bananas, or leave the bananas for the needy. By saying these things, you mark yourself as a superior person in today's society. You are just seeking serotonin in the modern way. You stimulate oxytocin when your self-restraint helps you belong
  •  Oxytocin causes the good feeling of social solidarity, and low oxytocin warns your inner mammal that you're in immediate danger. Our brains are constantly aware of potential threats to our social bonds. Competition can threaten your bonds, but it can also strengthen them. Superior skills can bring recognition that reassures you of social acceptance and belonging. Secure social bonds feel good because they stimulate oxytocin.
  • Your inner mammal is always looking for ways to stimulate your dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.
  • Your mirror neurons stimulate dopamine when you see other people get rewards
5More

An Old Ally Sends Droves of Students to U.S. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Though Britain sent more than 9,000 students to the United States last year — more than ever before — and Germany sent about 9,300, both lagged behind Turkey, which has been sending more than 10,000 students a year to the United States since 2000.
  • demographics had much to do with the number of Turkish students on U.S. campuses. “There was a baby boom here from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, which is still just reaching the age to go to college,” he said. “Turkey expanded its own educational capacity a lot in the past 20 years. From a few dozen universities, the current figure is 164, and that number keeps growing. But it hasn’t grown fast enough to keep up with the demographic bulge.”
  • The highly competitive nature of admissions poses a problem for Turkish families, which traditionally place a strong emphasis on education.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Irsadi Aksun, a professor of electrical engineering at Koc, said, “There are two different groups of Turkish students who go abroad.” The first, he said, is “very competitive — some have taken Advanced Placement courses in high school. Some have followed the International Baccalaureate.” “This group is quite small,” he went on, adding that most came from a handful of Turkish private schools that offer English instruction in many subjects. Such schools are increasingly popular among wealthy families in Istanbul and Ankara.
  • But we’d like to get more American students to come here.” In the 2010-11 academic year, the most recent year for which Open Door statistics are available, the United States sent slightly more than 2,000 students to Turkey — a jump of 34 percent from the previous year, and more than double the 2006-7 number. “I can definitely see Turkey as the next frontier in studying abroad,” Mr. Pierce said.
5More

Two New Studies Explore the Neuroscience of Negative Emotions | Mental Floss - 0 views

  • We've all had experiences we'd prefer not to remember. That's especially true for people who have gone through a traumatic event such as childhood abuse, combat-related PTSD, or a bad accident. But there may be positive health applications for identifying, predicting, and retrieving negative emotions in the brain, according to two new studies. 
  • Researchers identified the different networks in the brain that all work together during a participant’s negative emotional experience, which they call a “brain signature.” Then, they used machine-learning algorithms to find global patterns of brain activity that best predicted the participants’ responses. “What we’re calling a 'brain signature' is basically a configuration—a brain pattern that is predictive of a state,” Chang tells mental_floss. He compares the process to the way that Netflix predicts who is watching a certain type of show based on the watcher’s choices in programming.
  • MEMORIES CAUSED—AND LOST—BY TRAUMA
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Many psychologists believe that in order for patients to recover from trauma, they often need to be able to recall what happened to them. The second study, published in Nature Neuroscience, investigated how the brain stores negative memories, known as “state-dependent learning.” The study, conducted in mice at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, suggests that negative memories caused—and then “lost”—by traumatic experiences may be retrieved by re-creating the state of the brain in which the memory first occurred.
  • The study suggests that in response to trauma, the brain activates this extra-synaptic GABA system, which appears to encode memories of fear-inducing events and hide them away from consciousness, rather than the glutamate system, which helps to store all memories, positive and negative. This research may provide a window into how to access these traumatic memories when needed for therapeutic reasons.
11More

True Blue Stands Out in an Earthy Crowd - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.”
  • Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency.
  • Still other researchers are tracing the history of blue pigments in human culture, and the role those pigments have played in shaping our notions of virtue, authority, divinity and social class. “Blue pigments played an outstanding role in human development,” said Heinz Berke, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Zurich. For some cultures, he said, they were as valuable as gold.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • people their favorite color, and in most parts of the world roughly half will say blue, a figure three to four times the support accorded common second-place finishers like purple or green
  • t young patients preferred nurses wearing blue uniforms to those in white or yellow.
  • blue’s basic emotional valence is calmness and open-endedness, in contrast to the aggressive specificity associated with red. Blue is sea and sky, a pocket-size vacation.
  • computer screen color affected participants’ ability to solve either creative problems —
  • blue can also imply coldness, sorrow and death. On learning of a good friend’s suicide in 1901, Pablo Picasso fell into a severe depression, and he began painting images of beggars, drunks, the poor and the halt, all famously rendered in a palette of blue.
  • association arose from the look of the body when it’s in a low energy, low oxygen state. “The lips turn blue, there’s a blue pallor to the complexion,” she said. “It’s the opposite of the warm flushing of the skin that we associate with love, kindness and affection.”
  • A blue glow makes food look very unappetizing.”
  • That blue can connote coolness and tranquillity is one of nature’s little inside jokes. Blue light is on the high-energy end of the visible spectrum, and the comparative shortness of its wavelengths explains why the blue portion of the white light from the sun is easily scattered by the nitrogen and oxygen molecules in our atmosphere, and thus why the sky looks blue.
11More

Computers Jump to the Head of the Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Tokyo University, known as Todai, is Japan’s best. Its exacting entry test requires years of cramming to pass and can defeat even the most erudite. Most current computers, trained in data crunching, fail to understand its natural language tasks altogether. Ms. Arai has set researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, where she works, the task of developing a machine that can jump the lofty Todai bar by 2021. If they succeed, she said, such a machine should be capable, with appropriate programming, of doing many — perhaps most — jobs now done by university graduates.
  • There is a significant danger, Ms. Arai says, that the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, if not well managed, could lead to a radical restructuring of economic activity and the job market, outpacing the ability of social and education systems to adjust.
  • Intelligent machines could be used to replace expensive human resources, potentially undermining the economic value of much vocational education, Ms. Arai said.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “Educational investment will not be attractive to those without unique skills,” she said. Graduates, she noted, need to earn a return on their investment in training: “But instead they will lose jobs, replaced by information simulation. They will stay uneducated.” In such a scenario, high-salary jobs would remain for those equipped with problem-solving skills, she predicted. But many common tasks now done by college graduates might vanish.
  • Over the next 10 to 20 years, “10 percent to 20 percent pushed out of work by A.I. will be a catastrophe,” she says. “I can’t begin to think what 50 percent would mean — way beyond a catastrophe and such numbers can’t be ruled out if A.I. performs well in the future.”
  • A recent study published by the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology, at Oxford University’s Oxford Martin School, predicted that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be replaced by computers over the next two decades.
  • Smart machines will give companies “the opportunity to automate many tasks, redesign jobs, and do things never before possible even with the best human work forces,” according to a report this year by the business consulting firm McKinsey.
  • Advances in speech recognition, translation and pattern recognition threaten employment in the service sectors — call centers, marketing and sales — precisely the sectors that provide most jobs in developed economies.
  • Gartner’s 2013 chief executive survey, published in April, found that 60 percent of executives surveyed dismissed as “‘futurist fantasy” the possibility that smart machines could displace many white-collar employees within 15 years.
  • Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner, told a conference in October: “Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”
  • Optimists say this could lead to the ultimate elimination of work — an “Athens without the slaves” — and a possible boom for less vocational-style education. Mr. Brant’s hope is that such disruption might lead to a system where individuals are paid a citizen stipend and be free for education and self-realization. “This optimistic scenario I call Homo Ludens, or ‘Man, the Player,’ because maybe we will not be the smartest thing on the planet after all,” he said. “Maybe our destiny is to create the smartest thing on the planet and use it to follow a course of self-actualization.”
« First ‹ Previous 121 - 140 of 196 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page