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dicindioha

How a Nation Reconciles After Genocide Killed Nearly a Million People - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...wo-decades-after-genocide.html

shared by dicindioha on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Scenes like this one were playing out across Rwanda on this Saturday — a monthly day of service known as Umuganda.The premise is simple and extraordinary in its efficient enforcement: Every able-bodied Rwandan citizen between the ages of 18 and 65 must take part in community service for three hours once a month. The community identifies a new public works problem to tackle each month.
  • “We never had Umuganda before the genocide,”
  • Though the genocide ended a year before Mr. Kwizera was born, it is deeply ingrained in the lives of even the youngest Rwandans.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • reconciliation, development and social control
  • thousands in the country’s Hutu ethnic majority unleashed unspeakable violence on the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutu countrymen who refused to take part in the slaughter. In just 100 days, nearly one million people perished.
  • Many political analysts and human rights groups say Mr. Kagame has created a nation that is orderly but repressive. Laws banning so-called genocidal ideology that were adopted to deter a resurgence of sectarian or hate speech are also used to squelch even legitimate criticism of the government.
  • Like others in this generation, who have been taught from their earliest school days to suppress any sense of ethnic identity, he considers himself simply Rwandan.
  • That was the fault of the then government that pushed us to kill Tutsis,” he said, his eyes gazing steadily ahead as he echoed a sentiment heard throughout the community from both perpetrators and survivors. “We massacred them, killed and ate their cows. I offended them gravely.”
  • Mr. Sendegeya re-entered society through a program that allows perpetrators to be released if they seek forgiveness from their victims.
  • But the healing process has taken years.
  • She has taught them about the history of the genocide, and she said that they knew the role that Mr. Sendegeya had played in killing members of their family, but that they had never feared him.
  • dicindioha on 26 Apr 17
     
    I think it's really interesing that across the country people are required to community service, and I think that's a good way to bring people together. It shows how when a mass killing happens, that at least forces people to reflect on history and how to prevent death. This has occurred in Germany, but we talked last year about how the US hasn't really done that with slavery as a community. But we could really benefit from it. But on the flip side of this, people are still forced to reject ethnicity, so there are solutions, but solutions still have problems.
haubertbr

UN predicts 'catastrophic' nuclear war - 1 views

www.independent.co.uk/...-korea-uk-donald-a7694391.html

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    There will be "catastrophic" consequences when "luck runs out" on nuclear deterrence, the United Nations (UN) has warned in a major report which highlights the massive risk of an accidental or deliberate use of the world's most deadly weapons.
haubertbr

Slow pace of Trump nominations leaves Cabinet agencies 'stuck' in staffing limbo - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b503-9d616bd5a305_story.html

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    President Trump's Cabinet secretaries are growing exasperated at how slowly the White House is moving to fill hundreds of top-tier posts, warning that the vacancies are hobbling efforts to oversee agency operations and promote the president's agenda, according to administration officials, lawmakers and lobbyists.
haubertbr

U.S. military starts installing controversial anti-missile battery in South Korea - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-86b7-5d31b5fdc114_story.html

WorldRelations

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    The United States military started installing a controversial anti-missile defense system in South Korea overnight Tuesday, triggering protests and sparking criticism that it was rushing to get the battery in place before the likely election of a president who opposes it. The sudden and unannounced move came only six days after U.S.
haubertbr

President Trump: Seven ways the world has changed - BBC News - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...election-us-2016-37918242

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    With Donald Trump in the White House, the US's relationship with the rest of the world has changed in some important ways. Here are seven of them. A Donald Trump presidency has raised major security questions in Asia.
haubertbr

How Syria and Russia Spun a Chemical Strike - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ia-chemical-attack-russia.html

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    A New York Times investigation shows how Syria and its main partner, Russia, have distorted the facts surrounding the chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhoun.
haubertbr

Is a US-North Korea war imminent? - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...north-korea-chance-of-war

world relations

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    With all of this, it's hard to know if war is actually imminent or if these are the growing pains of US President Donald Trump's new administration figuring out how to deal with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un. Daily reports of the fragile situation fuel worries that war is imminent.
haubertbr

FDA cracks down on 'illegal' cancer treatments - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...egal-fraudulent-misleading-fda

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    On Tuesday, the agency responsible for policing the American food and drug market issued warning letters to 14 companies that it says are "illegally selling more than 65 products that fraudulently claim to prevent, diagnose, treat or cure cancer." "There's a couple of issues here," Jason Humbert, a regulatory operations officer in the FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs, told CNN.
haubertbr

Controversial police footage shows unarmed youths detained at gunpoint in Grand Rapids - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    Police in Grand Rapids, Michigan, are saying they followed protocol after a video was released showing officers holding a group of unarmed black teens at gunpoint on the ground. "Guys, get on the ground. Keep your hands out," a Grand Rapids police officer tells a group of youths in the video.
sissij

FaceApp apologises for 'racist' filter that lightens users' skintone | Technology | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-which-lightens-users-skintone

the guardian technology bias social media

shared by sissij on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • its “hot” filter automatically lightened people’s skin.
  • “It is an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying neural network caused by the training set bias, not intended behaviour.”
  • which he said was a side-effect of the “neural network”.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But users noticed one of the options, initially labelled as “hot” made people look whiter.
  • which usually adds filters, because it uses deep learning technology to alter the photo itself.
  • This is by no means the first time an app which changes people’s faces have been criticised for racial insensitivity.
  • sissij on 26 Apr 17
     
    This article reminds me of an article I read days ago about AI chatting program that picked up racial expression when it is learning in chatting people a lot of people. The faceApp obviously adapt a similar learning program that's similar to that of the AI robot. I think it can partly reflect what the mainstream society is thinking. It unveil this preference of whiter skin tone people have intentionally or subconsciously. This is the mainstream esthetic in the society now. --Sissi (4/26/2017)
sissij

New Research Suggests Working Out With a Friend, Even Online, Makes You Healthier | Big... - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ven-online-makes-you-healthier

research psychology social media

shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • That exercise is a social activity is not surprising. For millions of years our forebears physically worked together to provide shelter, craft rudimentary tools, hunt, and gather. If anything is strange today it’s how little we need to use our bodies to survive, which helps account for so many of our physical and emotional problems. 
  • Being socially active is the main reason I’m drawn to teaching group fitness, which has accounted for half of my career since 2004 (and complements the solitary time spent writing and editing nicely).
  • As it turns out, your friends don’t even have to live near you—social media is helping foster this trend as well.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The researchers collected over five years of data from over a million runners, who collectively clocked in nearly 225 million miles. 
  • They noticed similar training patterns even if the runners were separated.
  • Weather, it turns out, did not dissuade one friend who saw their counterpart clocking in an extra ten minutes that day.
  • Risk of lagging behind proved to be a necessary catalyst for upping the ante. 
  • Which, obviously, is in good humor. But it helps.
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    Human is essentially a social animal. People cannot live without a community. Although loneliness is a aspect of life deep in everybody's heart, nobody can refuse their nature to make friends, talk to people, and emotionally engaged with others. This follows the logic of revolution. In cross-country, our coach always tells us to run together and work together in practices and races. I think maybe he is doing that in purpose since people tends to perform better with their friends around them.
sissij

Trump Wants It Known: Grading 100 Days Is 'Ridiculous' (but His Were the Best) - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...donald-trump-100-days.html

new york times bias

shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • “As with so much else, Trump is a study in inconsistency,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “One minute he says his 100 days have been the best of any president, and the next minute he decries the idea of measuring a president by the 100 days.”
  • Mr. Trump has already told supporters not to believe contrary assessments, anticipating more critical evaluations by journalists, not to mention partisan attacks by Democrats.
  • If nothing else, Mr. Trump’s first 100 days have certainly been eventful.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Whether they have accomplished much is more a subject of debate.
  • Others were less weighty, like one officially naming a veterans’ health center in Butler County, Pa., the “Abie Abraham V.A. Clinic.”
  • To the extent that he is being held to a measurement he disdains, he has no one to blame but himself.
  • only one has even been introduced.
  • “It is hard to judge any of these other presidents after that, and I think all of them are cursing the idea that this got started,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of “No Ordinary Time,” a book about Roosevelt. “That’s the one thing they might all agree on, the post-F.D.R. presidents: ‘No way; this isn’t fair.’”
  • “I don’t think the first 100 days are by themselves that important,” he said. “The first year is critically important, and the first 100 days set the tone for the first year.”
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    I think there is a confirmation bias in Mr. Trump's argument. He was quoting the previous presidents to suggest that the first 100 days of presidency is not important. However, what the previous presidents meant by saying "100-days" is not a fair grading mark is because the time is too short to show anything. It's not that it is not important. I think Mr. Trump himself is not even convinced with that since he tried so hard to make his first hundred days look good. Quantity does not equal quality. --Sissi (4/25/2017)
sissij

How an Argument Over Zombies Helps Explain What Makes Us Human | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...es-to-understand-consciousness

human psychology knowledge bias

shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Zombies are a big part of our pop culture. They are both a cathartic exploration of what it means to be human and a vehicle for social commentary. The word “zombie” comes from Haitian folklore and refers to a corpse animated by witchcraft.
  • The concept is kind of a mind trick. Imagine a being that looks and even talks like a human. It goes through all the normal motions of a human and yet has no consciousness. And you would have no idea that it is not like you.
  • If a p-zombie that is exactly like us, except for the sense of self and consciousness, is possible to logically conceive, then it could support dualism, an alternative view that sees the world consisting of not just the physical but also the mental.
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    What is human? In the past paradigms, we thought what separates human from all the other things is spirit. Then we thought it is reason that distinguish human from other animals. However, as we talked about in the modern paradigm, we say that there is no spirit or reason in human and all the decision we make is basically not our own. It is the result of numerous subconscious suggestions. So is there really a difference between zombie and human? I think there are people who live like a zombie and there are "zombies" that live like a human. --Sissi (4/24/2017)
sissij

What 'Snowflakes' Get Right About Free Speech - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-right-about-free-speech.html

new york times bias research psychology language

shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • “Madame, you are an experience, but not an argument.”
  • it has taken on renewed significance as the struggles on American campuses to negotiate issues of free speech have intensified — most recently in protests at Auburn University against a visit by the white nationalist Richard Spencer.
  • Lanzmann’s blunt reply favored reasoned analysis over personal memory.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Freedom of expression became a flash point in this shift.
  • Then as now, both liberals and conservatives were wary of the privileging of personal experience, with its powerful emotional impact, over reason and argument, which some fear will bring an end to civilization, or at least to freedom of speech.
  • “The Postmodern Condition” of how public discourse discards the categories of true/false and just/unjust in favor of valuing the mere fact that something is being communicated, examined the tension between experience and argument in a different way.
  • Lyotard focused on the asymmetry of different positions when personal experience is challenged by abstract arguments.
  • The rights of transgender people for legal equality and protection against discrimination are a current example in a long history of such redefinitions.
  • The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.
  • which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities — should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    This article reminds me of the topic we discussed today in TOK class. The modern paradigm doesn't provide us any positive guidance. It states that god does not exist. Since there is not limits in this paradigm, people can do whatever they want theoretically. I think this freedom of speech has the same problem. Sometimes people use the freedom of speech as their shield of saying things that hurts others' feelings. Freedom should some limits. --Sissi (4/24/2017)
sissij

There's a Major Problem with AI's Decision Making | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...black-box-ai

science research bias

shared by sissij on 24 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • For eons, God has served as a standby for “things we don’t understand.” Once an innovative researcher or tinkering alchemist figures out the science behind the miracle, humans harness the power of chemistry, biology, or computer science.
  • The process of ‘deep learning’—in which a machine extracts information, often in an unsupervised manner, to teach and transform itself—exploits a longstanding human paradox: we believe ourselves to have free will, but really we’re a habit-making and -performing animal repeatedly playing out its own patterns.
  • When we place our faith in an algorithm we don’t understand—autonomous cars, stock trades, educational policies, cancer screenings—we’re risking autonomy, as well as the higher cognitive and emotional qualities that make us human, such as compassion, empathy, and altruism.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Of course, defining terms is of primary importance, a task that has proven impossible when discussing the nuances of consciousness, which is effectively the power we’re attempting to imbue our machines with.
  • What type of machines are we creating if we only recognize a “sort of” intelligence under the hood of our robots? For over a century, dystopian novelists have envisioned an automated future in which our machines best us. This is no longer a future scenario.
  • sissij on 24 Apr 17
     
    In the fiction books, we can always see a scene that the AI robots start to take over the world. We humans are always afraid of AI robots having emotions. As we discussed in TOK, there is a phenomenon that the more robots are like human, the more people despise of them. I think that's because if robots start to have emotions, then they would be easily out of our control. We still see AI robots as lifeless gears and machines, what if they are more than that? --Sissi (4/23/2017)
sissij

Bearing Witness to Executions: Last Breaths and Lasting Impressions - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-and-lasting-impressions.html

new york times bias research psychology

shared by sissij on 23 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • The death penalty holds a crucial, conflicted place in a nation deeply divided over crime and punishment, and whether the state should ever take a life. But for such a long, very public legal process, only a small number of people see what unfolds inside the country’s death houses.
  • There is no uniformity when they look back on the emotions that surround the minutes when they watched someone die.
  • You’re watching through glass, and then the process starts.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • They had a chance to offer last statements, and I was disgusted because they were so self-serving, narcissistic statements for these people who had caused so much pain and suffering.
  • A prosecutor has to have no doubt: not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but no doubt that a person committed those crimes. As long as you have no doubt, I don’t think there’s any valid argument against the death penalty.
  • They caught him right there where he shot my son. I just don’t understand: 20 years before they killed him.
  • I cannot even tell you how unbelievable it was to see people deliberately get ready to kill your client.
  • When they pronounced him dead, I think I felt happy that he was no longer being hurt as part of the process.
  • It is probably the shortest yet longest 11 minutes of my life. No matter what anyone says, there’s really nothing to prepare you for what you are about to see.
  • The victim’s family is hurt, and the family of the individual. You’re not just killing a person. You’re killing his whole family. There’s a lot of people involved in this, not just the poor kid lying on a gurney.
  • People don’t realize that you never get over it, unless you’re just cold and calculated. I’ll never forget it. Not a day goes by. Not a day goes by. And I don’t expect it to. If it does, then I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, as a Christian and as a chaplain and as a human being.
  • sissij on 23 Apr 17
     
    Death penalty has long been a very controversial topic. Do people have the right to take away another person's life as the punishment of their wrong-doing? Those five witnesses offer their own opinion and feelings towards death penalty. Some of them think it is deserving because their wrong-doing caused too much damage to others. Some think it is painful because as a person is killed, their families and relatives are also "killed" in a way. Life is not a calculation. One life never equals to another life. --Sissi (4/23/2017)
Javier E

A scholar asks, 'Can democracy survive the Internet?' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b503-9d616bd5a305_story.html

democracy psychology social media internet

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University
  • has written about this in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Democracy in an article with a title that sums up his concerns: “Can Democracy Survive the Internet?”
  • Persily argues that the 2016 campaign broke down previously established rules and distinctions “between insiders and outsiders, earned media and advertising, media and non-media, legacy media and new media, news and entertainment and even foreign and domestic sources of campaign communication.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Clinton played by old rules; Trump did not. He recognized the potential rewards of exploiting what the Internet offered, and he conducted his campaign through unconventional means.
  • “That’s what Donald Trump realized that a lot of us didn’t,” Persily said. “That it was more important to swamp the communication environment than it was to advocate for a particular belief or fight for the truth of a particular story,”
  • Persily notes that the Internet reacted to the Trump campaign “like an ecosystem welcoming a new and foreign species. His candidacy triggered new strategies and promoted established Internet forces. Some of these (such as the ‘alt-right’) were moved by ideological affinity, while others sought to profit financially or to further a geopolitical agenda.
  • The rise and power of the Internet has accelerated the decline of institutions that once provided a mediating force in campaigns. Neither the legacy media nor the established political parties exercise the power they once had as referees, particularly in helping to sort out the integrity of information.
  • legacy media that once helped set the agenda for political conversation now often take their cues from new media.
  • The Internet, however, involves characteristics that heighten the disruptive and damaging influences on political campaigns. One, Persily said, is the velocity of information, the speed with which news, including fake news, moves and expands and is absorbed. Viral communication can create dysfunction in campaigns and within democracies.
  • Another factor is the pervasiveness of anonymous communication, clearly greater and more odious today. Anonymity facilitates a coarsening of speech on the Internet. It has become more and more difficult to determine the sources of such information, including whether these communications are produced by real people or by automated programs known as “bots.”
  • “the prevalence of bots in spreading propaganda and fake news appears to have reached new heights. One study found that between 16 September and 21 October 2016, bots produced about a fifth of all tweets related to the upcoming election. Across all three presidential debates, pro-Trump twitter bots generated about four times as many tweets as pro-Clinton bots. During the final debate in particular, that figure rose to seven times as many.”
  • the fear of dark money and “shady outsiders” running television commercials “seems quaint when compared to networks of thousands of bots of uncertain geographic origin creating automated messages designed to malign candidates and misinform voters.”
  • When asked how worrisome all this is, Persily said, “I’m extremely concerned.” He was quick to say he did not believe government should or even could regulate this new environment. But, he said, “We need to come to grips with how the new communication environment affects people’s political beliefs, the information they receive and then the choices that they make.”
sissij

Is the March for Science Going to Change Any Minds? | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ence-going-to-change-any-minds

science research bias

shared by sissij on 22 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • "Make contact with that part of America that doesn’t know any scientists. Put a face on the debate. Help them understand what we do, and how we do it. Give them your email, or better yet, your phone number...  The solution here is not mass spectacle, but an increased effort to communicate directly with those who do not understand the degree to which the changing climate is already affecting their lives. We need storytellers, not marchers."
  • sissij on 22 Apr 17
     
    Although the society now is closely intertwined with science, real and up-to-date science is still very far away from the general population. As we discussed in TOK when we talked about science, the science that the general population talk about and quote from is mostly not real or scientific science. They don't really care the scientific methods and all those theories behind those conclusions. They just use those "science facts" to satisfy their confirmation bias and support their argument. From this research, we can just see how the general population don't really care about real science. Science is becoming more like a special thing that is only in the hands of the minority elites. Although they say that general population is not important for science, I think it is really important that the science that the general population perceive is real science. --Sissi (4/21/2017)
oliviaodon

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Science Deniers In Power Are A Profound Threat To Democracy | The ... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...rs_us_58f99e89e4b06b9cb91572a1

science

shared by oliviaodon on 21 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • The U.S. grew from a “backwoods country” to one of “greatest nations the world has ever known” thanks to science — but that pillar of America is eroding, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson warns.
  • Science deniers “rising to power” now create a “recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy,”
  • “People have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable,” he says in the above video, which he posted to Facebook Wednesday. “That’s not the country I remember growing up in. I don’t remember any other time where people were standing in denial of what science was.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Tyson praises science as an “exercise in finding what is true” that’s based on peer-reviewed experimentation backed by other experiments and counter-experiments that gives birth to an “emergent truth.” He points out that science is “not something to toy with.” “You can’t say, ‘I chose not to believe in E=mc2,’” he says, referring to physicist Albert Einstein’s corroborated theory of special relativity. “You don’t have that option. It is true, whether or not you believe in it.”
  • Tyson warns that every minute someone is in denial of a scientific truth delays the “political solution that should have been established years ago.”  “Recognize what science is, and allow to be what it can and should be: In the service of civilization,” he says. “It’s in our hands.”
sissij

What does an LSD-style drug-induced 'higher state of consciousness' feel like? | Scienc... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ate-of-consciousness-feel-like

the guardian psychology research science

shared by sissij on 21 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • A study published this week that looked at brain scans of people on psychedelics suggested that one effect is “a mixing of the senses” – an accurate description.
  • “fountains of colour”
  • Can I see the colours begin to glow brighter, or are they humming loudly into new levels of vividness?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • synaesthesia
  • But tripping isn’t just about the drugs. As the shaman Julian Vayne explains in his manual for getting the best out of psychedelics, Getting Higher, all highs are products of their context.
  • sissij on 21 Apr 17
     
    I found it very interesting that LSD light patterns can actually be a kind of drug. Drugs are not limited to the ones we eat. It includes the ones that we feel. As we know, there are all kinds of addictions. Some people are addicted to certain object or certain pattern. There are even music drugs. -- Sissi (4/21/2017)
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