facility:yale university

Des universitaires et des artistes israéliens mettent en garde contre une mise en équation de l’antisionisme et de l’antisémitisme
22 novembre | Ofer Aderet pour Haaretz |Traduction J.Ch. pour l’AURDIP
▻https://www.aurdip.org/des-universitaires-et-des-artistes.html

Une lettre ouverte de 34 éminents Israéliens, dont des chercheurs en histoire juive et des lauréats du Prix Israël, a été publiée mardi dans les média autrichiens appelant à faire une différence entre critique légitime d’Israël, « aussi dure puisse-t-elle être », et antisémitisme.

Cette lettre a été émise avant un rassemblement international à Vienne sur antisémitisme et antisionisme en Europe.

L’ événement de cette semaine, « L’Europe par delà l’antisémitisme et l’antisionisme », se tient sous les auspices du Chancelier autrichien Sebastian Kurz. Son homologue israélien, Benjamin Netanyahu, devait y prendre part, mais est resté en Israël pour s’occuper de la crise dans sa coalition gouvernementale.

« Nous adoptons et soutenons totalement le combat intransigeant [de l’Union Européenne] contre l’antisémitisme. La montée de l’antisémitisme nous inquiète. Comme nous l’a enseigné l’histoire, elle a souvent été l’annonce de désastres ultérieurs pour toute l’humanité », déclare la lettre.

« Cependant, l’UE défend les droits de l’Homme et doit les protéger avec autant de force qu’elle combat l’antisémitisme. Il ne faudrait pas instrumentaliser ce combat contre l’antisémitisme pour réprimer la critique légitime de l’occupation par Israël et ses graves violations des droits fondamentaux des Palestiniens. » (...)

#antisionisme #antisémitisme

Israeli academics and artists warn against equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism
Their open letter ahead of a conference in Vienna advises against giving Israel immunity for ‘grave and widespread violations of human rights and international law’

Ofer Aderet
Nov 20, 2018

▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-professors-warn-against-equating-anti-zionism-with-anti-se

An open letter from 35 prominent Israelis, including Jewish-history scholars and Israel Prize laureates, was published Tuesday in the Austrian media calling for a distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel, “harsh as it may be,” and anti-Semitism.
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The letter was released before an international gathering in Vienna on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Europe.
The event this week, “Europe beyond anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism: Securing Jewish life in Europe,” is being held under the auspices of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. His Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, had been due to take part but stayed in Israel to deal with the crisis in his coalition government. 
“We fully embrace and support the [European Union’s] uncompromising fight against anti-Semitism. The rise of anti-Semitism worries us. As we know from history, it has often signaled future disasters to all mankind,” the letter states. 
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“However, the EU also stands for human rights and has to protect them as forcefully as it fights anti-Semitism. This fight against anti-Semitism should not be instrumentalized to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel’s occupation and severe violations of Palestinian human rights.” 

The signatories accuse Netanyahu of suggesting an equivalence between anti-Israel criticism and anti-Semitism. The official declaration by the conference also notes that anti-Semitism is often expressed through disproportionate criticism of Israel, but the letter warns that such an approach could “afford Israel immunity against criticism for grave and widespread violations of human rights and international law.”
The signatories object to the declaration’s alleged “identifying” of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. “Zionism, like all other modern Jewish movements in the 20th century, was harshly opposed by many Jews, as well as by non-Jews who were not anti-Semitic,” they write. “Many victims of the Holocaust opposed Zionism. On the other hand, many anti-Semites supported Zionism. It is nonsensical and inappropriate to identify anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.”
Among the signatories are Moshe Zimmerman, an emeritus professor at Hebrew University and a former director of the university’s Koebner Center for German History; Zeev Sternhell, a Hebrew University emeritus professor in political science and a current Haaretz columnist; sculptor Dani Karavan; Miki Kratsman, a former chairman of the photography department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; Jose Brunner, an emeritus professor at Tel Aviv University and a former director of the Minerva Institute for German History; Alon Confino, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and graphic designer David Tartakover.

Ofer Aderet
Haaretz Correspondent

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Almost Everyone on Earth Lives in the Same Hemisphere - Condé Nast Traveler

▻https://www.cntraveler.com/story/almost-everyone-on-earth-lives-in-the-same-hemisphere

https://media.cntraveler.com/photos/5ade0c87e0fff73b656ee2e7/master/w_1024,c_limit/human-hemisphere.png

The human population of earth, of course, is not distributed evenly over its surface. The “Valeriepieris Circle” is perhaps the most shocking implication of this fact: more than half the people on earth live within a 2,000-mile radius of the town of Mong Khet in northeast Burma. But there’s another way to visualize the way humanity clusters, and for this one, we have to travel from Burma to Switzerland. Let’s call it the Rankin Hemisphere.
Meet a geographer who wants to halve it all.

Bill Rankin is a historian who teaches in the History of Science program at Yale University, and studies the politics of 20th-century cartography in particular. He’s also an all-purpose map lover whose blog, Radical Cartography, is full of cool maps and visualizations. In 2015, Rankin wondered how to define the hemisphere with the highest population, essentially a larger version of the Valeriepieris circle. In other words, if you were going to slice the earth in two with a giant samurai sword, where would you place the cut if you wanted to put as many people as possible in one half? And how many people would that be?

#cartographie #cartoexperiment #population #démographie

How Dangerous Is It When A Mother Sleeps With Her Baby? : Goats and Soda : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/05/21/601289695/is-sleeping-with-your-baby-as-dangerous-as-doctors-say

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/05/18/npr---bedsharing_16-91_wide-0a2b888f12ec0b76860aae87682ce70a6fc1519b.jpg?s=1400

The practice continues to be widespread around the world. Bed-sharing is a tradition in at least 40 percent of all documented cultures, Konner says, citing evidence from Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files. Some cultures even think it’s cruel to separate a mom and baby at night. In one study, Mayan moms in Guatemala responded with shock — and pity — when they heard that some American babies sleep away from their mom.

“But there’s someone else with them there, isn’t there?” one mom asked.

Balinese babies are generally held almost every moment — day and night, anthropologists have noted. And in Japan, the most common sleeping arrangement is referred to as kawa no ji or the character for river: 川. The shorter line represents the child, sleeping between the mother and father, represented by the longer lines.

Western culture, on the other hand, has a long history of separating moms and babies at night. Wealthy Roman families had rocking cradles and bassinets by the bed, historians have noted. By the 10th century, the Catholic Church began “banning” infants from the parental bed to prevent poor women from intentionally suffocating an infant whom they didn’t have resources to care for. “Any women who kept an infant less than 1 year old in her bed ... is ipso facto excommunicated,” the church declared in Milan in 1576.

Meet the Sacklers: the family feuding over blame for the #opioid crisis

▻https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/13/meet-the-sacklers-the-family-feuding-over-blame-for-the-opioid-crisis

The #Sackler family, a sprawling and now feuding transatlantic dynasty, is famous in cultural and academic circles for decades of generous philanthropy towards some of the world’s leading institutions, from Yale University to the Guggenheim Museum in the US and the Serpentine Gallery to the Royal Academy in Britain.

But what’s less well known, though increasingly being exposed, is that much of their wealth comes from one product – #OxyContin, the blockbuster prescription painkiller first launched in 1996.

‘The Position of Women in Science Has Changed for the Better’, but ‘Is Still Far From Ideal’ · Global Voices
▻https://globalvoices.org/2017/10/12/the-position-of-women-in-science-has-changed-for-the-better-but-is-sti

https://globalvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Shilpa-Iyer-800-800x450.jpg

As part of a two-pronged series of interviews with medical researchers based in Africa (read the first part here), Global Voices reached out to Dr. Shilpa Iyer, who is currently working in Zambia.

Iyer grew up in Pune, India, where she obtained her bachelor’s and masters degrees in zoology and molecular biology, respectively. She then moved to the US and obtained her PhD in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale University with a Fogarty Global health research fellowship to conduct research in Lusaka, Zambia.

#sciences #femmes #discriminations #inégalités

Library of Congress | The Palestine Poster Project Archives

▻http://palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/library-of-congress

Déja sur les collines... J’avais raté ce site, sur lequel il y a des pépites.

http://palestineposterproject.org/sites/default/files/3760_pppa.jpg

The Palestine Poster Project Archives
The Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestine Posters - Nominated to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program 2016-2017
About the Palestine Poster Project Archives

This website has been created to mark headway on my masters’ thesis project at Georgetown University. It is a work-in-progress.

I first began collecting Palestine posters when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in the mid-1970s. By 1980 I had acquired about 300 Palestine posters. A small grant awarded with the support of the late Dr. Edward Said allowed me to organize them into an educational slideshow to further the “third goal” of the Peace Corps: to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. Over the ensuing years, while running my design company, Liberation Graphics, the number of internationally published Palestine posters I acquired steadily grew. Today the Archives numbers some 5,000 Palestine posters from myriad sources making it what many library science specialists say is the largest such archives in the world.

The Palestine poster genre dates back to around 1900 and, incredibly, more Palestine posters are designed, printed and distributed today than ever before. Unlike most of the political art genres of the twentieth century such as those of revolutionary Cuba and the former Soviet Union, which have either died off, been abandoned, or become mere artifacts, the Palestine poster genre continues to evolve. Moreover, the emergence of the Internet has exponentially expanded the genre’s network of creative contributors and amplified the public conversation about contemporary Palestine.

My research has two major components: (1) the development of a curriculum using the Palestine poster as a key resource for teaching the formative history of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict in American high schools. This aspect of my work is viewable in my New Curriculum and; (2) the creation of a web-based archives that displays the broadest possible range of Palestine posters in a searchable format with each poster translated and interpreted.

This library and teaching resource allows educators, students, scholars, and other parties interested in using the New Curriculum to incorporate Palestine posters into classroom learning activities. Titles included are from the Liberation Graphics collection, the Library of Congress, the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Yale University, the University of Chicago and a host of other sources. To facilitate my research I have broken the genre of the Palestine poster into four sources, or wellsprings.

These wellsprings are:

1) Arab and Muslim artists and agencies

2) International artists and agencies

3) Palestinian nationalist artists and agencies

4) Zionist and Israeli artists and agencies

For the purpose of this research project, I have arbitrarily defined a “Palestine” poster as:

1) Any poster with the word “Palestine” in it, in any language, from any source or time period;

2) Any poster created or published by any artist or agency claiming Palestinian nationality or Palestinian participation;

3) Any poster published in the geographical territory of historic Palestine, at any point in history, including contemporary Israel;

4) Any poster published by any source which relates directly to the social, cultural, political, military or economic history of Palestine; and/or

5) Any poster related to Zionism or anti-Zionism in any language, from any source, published after August 31, 1897.

The majority of posters in this archives are printed on paper. However, an increasing number of new Palestine posters are “born digitally” and then printed and distributed locally, oftentimes in very small quantities. This localization represents a sea change in the way political poster art is produced and disseminated. Traditionally, political posters were printed in a single location and then distributed worldwide. The global reach of the internet combined with the rising costs of mass production is shifting production away from large centralized printing operations to a system controlled more by small end-users in myriad locations.

Electronic, digitally created images included in this archives meet these requirements: they are capable of being downloaded and printed out at a size at least as large as 18” X 24” and they deal substantially with the subject of Palestine. Computer generated images will be identified as such. I am uploading posters in what may appear to be a haphazard order; actually the order is a reflection of the way(s) in which many of the posters were originally collected, stored, and digitized on CDs over the past fifteen years.

As time and funds permit, I will be uploading the entire archives.

I want to specifically thank the following people without whose assistance I would not have been able to even begin this research: Dr. Lena Jayyusi, for both her thorough critique of the New Curriculum as well as her steadfast moral support over many years; Dr. Rochelle Davis, my academic advisor at Georgetown who gave me the freedom to explore the questions of most interest to me and who encouraged me to look at the genre from visual anthropology and ethnographic perspectives; Catherine Baker, who has provided creative, editorial and moral support of incalculable value to me and to whom I am forever indebted; Dr. Eric Zakim, the director of the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park whose translations of the Hebrew text in the Zionist/Israel poster wellspring and whose breadth of knowledge of Zionist history and iconography proved indispensable; Dr. Elana Shohamy of Tel Aviv University for opening up to me the worlds of Jewish language history, Israeli language policy and perhaps most importantly, the principles of language rights, and; Richard Reinhard whose early and complete review of the New Curriculum helped keep me on schedule and in focus.

Special thanks are also due Jenna Beveridge, the Academic Program Coordinator at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, without whose guidance through the halls of academia I would have been hopelessly lost. There are, in addition, legions of people who over the years have encouraged me to persevere in this work. I will make it a point to thank them at regular intervals in the progress of this project.

Dan Walsh Silver Spring, MD April 2009

The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists | TIME
▻http://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery
▻https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/constitution.jpeg?quality=85&w=1012

The Founding Fathers had something particular in mind when they set up the U.S. presidential election system: slavery

As Americans await the quadrennial running of the presidential obstacle course now known as the Electoral College, it’s worth remembering why we have this odd political contraption in the first place. After all, state governors in all 50 states are elected by popular vote; why not do the same for the governor of all states, a.k.a. the president? The quirks of the Electoral College system were exposed this week when Donald Trump secured the presidency with an Electoral College majority, even as Hillary Clinton took a narrow lead in the popular vote.

#états-unis #trump #collège_électoral #élections #système_électoral

Would You Have Any Cosmetic Neurology Done? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/would-you-have-any-cosmetic-neurology-done

http://static.nautil.us/9611_b02d46e8a3d8d9fd6028f3f2c2495864.jpg

Like some other futurists, Ray Kurzweil thinks the best way to avoid aging is to avoid biology altogether. With a sufficient understanding of the brain, he says, we’ll be able to upload our minds to (presumably non-organic) structures and become digitally immortal. This might sound plausible enough, if a bit speculative, since the pace of technological advancement can seem surreal. Who’s going to rule out such an idea so early in the game?Susan SchneiderPhotograph by Laura Latimer Answer: Susan Schneider, philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Connecticut and member of the Technology and Ethics study group at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. “It would be silly to claim you can ‘upload’ your consciousness to a computer, the way futurists like Ray (...)

Scientists Have No Defense Against Awe - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/scientists-have-no-defense-against-awe

http://static.nautil.us/9538_9ad97add7f3d9f29cd262159d4540c96.png

 Eileen PollackIllustration by Keara McGraw Eileen Pollack, author of The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, hinted at the complexity of the relationship between science and the soul in a recent essay: “We need scientists who recognize the reality of this illusion we still call the soul and artists who know how intimately the reality of that soul will remain connected to the physical world—to science.” In many ways, her fiction follows this suggestion. It draws on her scientific background—she graduated from Yale University in 1978 with a BS in Physics—and her later pursuits in literature, philosophy, and creative writing as a graduate student. In her latest novel, A Perfect Life, for example, published last month, a woman researcher at the Massachusetts Institute (...)

There’s Plenty of Space for One Trillion More Trees - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/theres-plenty-of-space-for-one-trillion-more-trees

http://static.nautil.us/8893_17f5e6db87929fb55cebeb7fd58c1d41.jpg

Gregor Hintler had what seemed like a simple question: How many trees are there? As part of Plant for the Planet, a youth initiative that aimed to plant one billion trees in every country by 2020, he needed a way to figure out how many trees the planet could fit. But when he tried to find out, he realized nobody knew the answer. One estimate suggested 400 billion trees. “That sounds like a lot,” he recalls thinking. “Could be right.” But Hintler, who was then a graduate student in environmental management at Yale University, started looking at data from plots in Germany, Norway, and the United States, where foresters had counted the number of trees. He discovered that the old figures weren’t even close—400 billion was, in fact, far too low. Forests cover about one third of the planet’s (...)

The C.L.R. James Internet Archive
▻https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr

https://angrysampoetry.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/clr-james.gif

“This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.”.
Revolutionary Answer, 1948

Boundless Labor : CLR James, Herman Melville, & Frank Stella
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JuKSBaNxDU

This filmed keynote speech explores the relationship between the works of C.L.R. James, Herman Melville and Frank Stella. The speaker is Wai Chee Dimock, Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. The chair is Christopher Gair, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, University of Glasgow.

en référence à ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/465444

#colonialisme

A Vaccine for Depression ? - Issue 31 : Stress
▻http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/a-vaccine-for-depression

http://static.nautil.us/7927_3dcaf04c357c577a857f3ffadc555f9b.png

One sunny day this fall, I caught a glimpse of the new psychiatry. At a mental hospital near Yale University, a depressed patient was being injected with ketamine. For 40 minutes, the drug flowed into her arm, bound for cells in her brain. If it acts as expected, ketamine will become the first drug to quickly stop suicidal drive, with the potential to save many lives. Other studies of ketamine are evaluating its effect as a vaccination against depression and post-traumatic stress. Between them, the goal is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of mental illness itself. Depression is the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting 30 percent of Americans at some point in their lives. But despite half a century of research, ubiquitous advertising, and (...)

"Experimenter": 2015 film on Stanley Milgram

This is a beautifully shot film by Michael Almereyda, featuring Peter Sarsgaard and Wynona Ryder.
“Experimenter” is based on the true story of controversial experimental social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who at Yale University in 1961-1962 conducted a series of radical behavior experiments that tested ordinary humans obedience. The film not only illustrates well the concept of the Milgram experiment, but also a few other experiments during his career.

►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1VOZhwRvWo

Milgram was interested in finding out why people’s behavior changes when they know they are not responsible for something. When they do something because “they are told to”, they seem to be able to dissociate themselves form the consequences of their actions. (or lack of thereof).

Milgram wanted to find an answer to the question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”. This happened in the same period of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, which also revolved around the concept of following orders and thereby not being able to let own personal morals take the upper hand. The danger of which was discussed by Hannah Arendt in “The Banality of Evil”. (It is also worthwhile to note that earlier this year (2015) the movie “The Eichmann Show” appeared, from director Paul Andrew Williams. It tells what happened form the point of view of the person responsible for directing the televised, live transmission of whole trial which was broadcasted to the whole world. Earlier, in 2012 the same story was told form the point of view of Hannah Arendt, in the film with the eponymous name.)

The Experiment goes as follows:
A test person (T) in one room asks questions to another “test” person (L) in another room. L is punished with an electric shock administered by T if the answer is wrong. They cannot see each other, and communication only happens form T to L via a microphone. L answers to questions by pressing a button, which blinks a light in T’s room so he can evaluate the answer. If the answer is wrong, T is instructed to flip a switch that delivers an electric shock to L. There is a whole row of switches, each one with a higher voltage. T is instructed that after every wrong answer he must use the next switch, thus delivering a higher shock to L. The switches ranged from 15 to 450 volts.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/Milgram_experiment_v2.svg/500px-Milgram_experiment_v2.svg.png

When T refuses to administer a shock then the examiner E gives him a series of orders/statements to ensure that he continues. There were 4 statements and if one was not obeyed then T receives the next statement:

Statement 1: please continue.
Statement 2: the experiment requires you to continue.
Statement 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Statement 4: you have no other choice but to continue.

Aim of the experiment
See how far T is willing to go (up to the last switch), following the instructions/orders.
See if and from what point T will decide to abandon the experiment for refusing to cause more pain to L.

Outcome
It was expected that many would stop when hearing L is in pain, but it turned out that most subjects T carried on when instructed to do so, even if they were manifestly displeased/uncomfortable and would have preferred to stop. At some point most did want to stop but they were just instructed they just had to carry on and follow the instructions of the experiment, that this is all part of the experiment.
65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e. T) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.

Conclusion
People are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of hurting an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in most of us from the way we are brought up.
People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognise their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school and workplace.

Remarks
(0) A newspaper ad asked for volunteers to participate in a scientific research experiment aimed at improving memory. It is form the responses that candidates were selected to be T. Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area.
(1) It is presented to T as if both T and L are randomly selected and participating in the experiment. In reality L is an accomplice/confederate. There are two roles to be taken: the Teacher and the Learner. When T can chose a hand to determine who will be the Teacher and who will be the Learner, it is predetermined that T will have “Teacher” written on the little paper that is in the hand he selects.
(2) The experiment does not revolve around two but three entities: the Teacher person (T) whose obedience is going to be tested, the other, fake participant Learner (L) who is an accomplice, and thirdly the conductor/leader/Examiner (E) of the experiment who sits in the same room as T and pretends to observe and take notes. He wears a lab coat so as to simulate the authority of an uniform. The role of E is crucial, as it fulfills the role of “commanding authority” to which T “must” obey. During the experiment some T asked who was going to take responsibility if something happened to L, and then they seemed to accept carrying on when the answer given by E was “I am taking responsibility”.
(3) Even though L cannot talk directly to T, T does hear the noise L is making, through the wall. As a consequence, T will actually hear L screaming form pain and after a while begging to stop.
(4) L does not really get electrical shocks, and the reactions/comments made by L with the intention to be heard through the wall by T, are actually prerecorded messages on tape.
(5) In order to give T an idea of what these shocks feel like, before the experiment starts, T is administered a small shock of 45 volts. When asked to guess how much they had received, most of them thought it was more (eg. 75).
(6) When both T and L visit the room where L will reside, L cares to mention he has a heart condition. This is done so as to add extra psychological weight on T’s conscience.

A short presentation of the experiment:
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr5cjyokVUs

A 1962 documentary on the experiment:
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXn2SZfwuSc

More on the Milgram and other related experiments:
▻http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

The Agentic State
Milgram defined this state as the one an individual is in when he yields to authority, and in doing so becomes alienated form his own actions. Typical statements we hear from individuals in agentic state are:
– I’m just doing my job / It’s not my job
– I don’t make the rules
– I just follow orders
– This is our store / company policy

Other experiments shown in the film
Milgram received quite some criticism about his experiment, mainly about it being unethical and forcing people to inflict pain and possibly causing psychological damage. In a later debriefing session whose purpose was to refute these claims, it was shown that
– 84% of the subjects were glad to have been in the experiment
– 15% had neutral feelings
– 1.3% said they experienced negative feelings.
74% said they had learned something important about themselves and about the conditions that shape human action.
The debriefing meetings allowed to conclude that no one showed signs of harm or had been traumatised.

The impact of all this was that Milgram had a hard time finishing the book that was supposed to document his experiment. He did finish it, and the book appeared in 1974: “Obedience to authority: an experimental view”. [1]
During that pause between the experiment and the publication of his book he carried out or focused on some other experiments. The film also documents these. Some of them are:

Experiment 1: Solomon Asch’s experiment of the effect of group pressure on conformity
Solomon wanted to analyse the effect of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgments.
There is one test person (T) and 5 fake participants. A question is asked to all, and they give an answer.
The goal is to observe the behaviour/response of T when after a while the other 5 participants start to give wrong answer on purpose. The initial experiment was visual: "which line on the right is of the same length as the line on the left.

http://www.edrants.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/solomonoasch.gif

Initially the fake participants give the right anwer, which is in accordance with what T thinks. But after a while they all give the same wrong answer, and T starts doubting, but it happened more than expected that T chose to give the same wrong answer a well in order to “conform”.

Experiment 2: Another of Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments was conducted as part of a 1962 Elevator Candid Camera TV show.
Normally people who enter an elevator turn around to face the door. Here the test subject enters an elevator, and he notices everyone already in the elevator is facing the back wall. After a while, the test subject starts to face the same direction in order to feel more “conform”.
▻http://vk.com/video_ext.php?oid=91077908&id=169731762&hash=04a77d473c63fa2e&hd=3

Experiment 3: Lost Letter technique
This is another experiment that is documented in the film. It consists of writing hundreds of letters, putting them in stamped envelopes addressed to the same address (part of the experiment), but distributed over 4 different “addressees”. Then the envelopes would be spread throughout the city, and the experiment was to see how many of them would arrive. The contents of the letters was a simple message from Max to Walter, proposing an upcoming meeting. The results for the 4 addressees were:
– “Communist Party” : 25% got delivered
– “Nazi Party” : 25% got delivered
– “Medical research Associates” : 72% got delivered
– “Mr. Walter Carnap” : 71% got delivered.

Experiment 4: The Small World problem
This is the experiment which illustrates that there are less than 6 degrees of separation between you and several million strangers whom you may or may not encounter in your lifetime.

Notes regarding the movie:
Note 1: the film quotes from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographical work “Speak, Memory”:
“The cradle rocks above an abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Note 2: The same theme of “subjects obeying an authority” also is used in Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. There are several films about this:
• 2001 : Das Experiment, by Oliver Hirschbiegel
• 2010 : The Experiment, by Paul Scheuring
• 2015 : The Stanford Prison Experiment, by Kyle Patrick Alvarez.

_
[1] Text version of the book: ▻http://www.shimer.edu/live/files/338-obediencemilgrampdf

#Philip_Zimbardo
#Solomon_Asch
#obedience #authority

Registered clinical trials make positive findings vanish
▻http://www.nature.com/news/registered-clinical-trials-make-positive-findings-vanish-1.18181

A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000. Study author Veronica Irvin, a health scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says this suggests that registering clinical studies is leading to more rigorous research. Writing on his NeuroLogica Blog, neurologist Steven Novella of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, called the study “encouraging” but also “a bit frightening” because it casts doubt on previous positive results.

#fraude #santé #médecine #big_pharma

On the Map by Simon Garfield – review | Books | The Guardian

▻http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/19/on-the-map-simon-garfield-review

Signalé il y a quelques mois déjà par Thomas Deltombe qui a toujours bon goût

On the Map by Simon Garfield – review

Rachel Hewitt on a rollicking journey through the history of cartography

The Guardian, Friday 19 October 2012 22.55 BST

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MvoPH5ooL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_SX385_SY500_CR,0,0,385,500_SH20_OU02_.jpg

On 9 October 1965, Yale University released to public view a map that caused a media frenzy “akin to the detonation of a small bomb”. The so-called Vinland map was a crude creation on vellum, 27.8cm high by 41cm wide, with a vertical fold through the middle, a few worm holes, and purporting to date from the mid-15th century. What was so devastating about the map? It showed a “startlingly accurate” representation of “Vinland” (Wineland) – the name given by the Vikings to North America – including part of Newfoundland or Labrador: “almost certainly the result of original exploration”.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Admin/BkFill/Default_image_group/2012/10/17/1350484955157/Vinland-map-008.jpg

#cartographie #visualisation #représentation #Imaginaire

Neuroscience, Special Forces and Yale
▻http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/06/neuroscience-special-forces-and-yale

Last month, a proposal to establish a U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) Center for Excellence in Operational Neuroscience at Yale University died a not-so-quiet death. The broad goal of “operational neuroscience” is to use research on the human brain and nervous system to protect and give tactical advantage to U.S. warfighters in the field. Crucial questions remain unanswered about the proposed center’s mission and the unusual circumstances surrounding its demise. But just as importantly, this episode brings much needed attention to the morally fraught and murky terrain where partnerships between university researchers and national security agencies lie.

#neuroscience #recherche #armée

Infants prefer an nasty moose if it punishes an unhelpful elephant | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine
►http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/28/infants-prefer-an-nasty-moose-if-it-punishes-an-unhelpful-el

Kiley Hamlin from the University of British Columbia has shown that this capacity for finer social appraisals dates back to infancy – we develop it somewhere between our fifth and eighth months of life.
Hamlin, formerly at Yale University, has a long pedigree in this line of research. Together with Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom, she showed that infants prefer a person who helps others over someone who hinders, even from the tender age of three months. These experiments also showed that infants expect others to behave in the same way – approaching those who help them and avoiding those who harm them. Now, Hamlin has shown that our infant brains can cope with much more nuance than that.