Pourquoi rejeter les #inégalités ?
▻http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Pourquoi-rejeter-les-inegalites.html
Pour Thomas Scanlon, l’égalité n’est pas une valeur politique en soi. C’est bien plutôt parce que nous souffrons des inégalités économiques que nous lui sommes attachés. Mais peut-on fonder un idéal politique uniquement sur des objections ?
Livres & études
/ inégalités, égalité , #mérite, #justification
Interview with #Tim_Scanlon
T.M. Scanlon is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity. He received his B.A. from Princeton in 1962 and his Ph.D. from Harvard. In between, he studied for a year at Oxford as a Fulbright Fellow. He taught at Princeton from 1966 before coming to Harvard in 1984. Professor Scanlon’s dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, but the bulk of his teaching and writing has been in moral and political philosophy. He has published papers on freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory. His teaching in the department has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. He was invited at EHESS on the 13th November 2017 for a one-day long discussion of his manuscript “Why does Inequality Matter?” and on the 14th November he participated in the CESPRA seminar on Normative political philosophy.
A Wild Fig Grows in Rowan Street
▻http://africasacountry.com/2018/02/a-wild-fig-grows-in-rowan-street
Professor #Sampie_Terreblanche is always swimming against the tide. “At the moment I am a very unpopular man in Stellenbosch. Around here, there’s a group of people that find me terribly annoying. There is an irrigation canal running through our neighborhood and some of the people have enclosed it, claiming it forms part of their…
“Hate Speech” Does Not Incite Hatred - Quillette
▻http://quillette.com/2018/01/18/hate-speech-not-induce-hatred
The United States Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed that “[s]peech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground” is protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, the protections of the First Amendment extend only to government efforts to punish or censor speech. Private entities remain free to take action against people who engage in speech which ostensibly demeans others, and private actors from Harvard University to Facebook and Twitter have punished or censored individuals whose speech they have found to be “hateful.”
Those who advocate the censorship of so-called “hate speech” claim that it causes various ills, but perhaps the most common claim is that “hate speech” engenders hatred towards particular groups, and thereby causes violence against members of those groups. Such claims have been particularly common in recent years, and have included allegations that “anti-police hate speech” on the part of Black Lives Matters supporters has led to violence against police officers; that Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric has led to an increase in hate crimes; and that anti-Muslim hate speech on the Internet can motivate some people to commit acts of violence against Muslims.
The claim that “hate speech” causes hatred, and thereby causes violence, is superficially appealing, but the more one thinks about it, the less sense it makes. Is it really likely that otherwise reasonable people will be driven to hate others, and to violently attack those others, simply because they were exposed to hate speech? The proponents of that view rarely, if ever, offer direct evidence for that claim. There is a simple explanation for that failure: such evidence does not exist.
At first blush, that would seem to be an outlandish claim. What about the infamous “hate radio” in Rwanda? Doesn’t everyone know that those broadcasts caused people who had peacefully coexisted with their neighbors to engage in genocide? Well, in fact, there is no evidence that that is true. This common understanding of the role of “hate radio” overlooks basic facts of Rwandan history, including the fact that the genocide took place in the midst of a Tutsi-dominated insurgency that had begun in 1990, and which had resulted in hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Rwandans as insurgent forces approached the capital in 1993, just a year before the beginning of the genocide. Thus, the myth that Rwanda was an Arcadia of ethnic harmony before the “hate radio” broadcasts began is just that: a myth.
A father in Rwanda searches for his lost child. ©ICRC/Benno Neeleman
Perhaps more importantly, the popular narrative regarding the role of “hate radio” ignores twenty years of scholarship which finds little evidence that the radio broadcasts caused people to engage in genocide. For example, a 2017 study published in Criminology found no statistically significant relationship between radio exposure and killing.1 Moreover, the anthropologist Charles Mironko interviewed one hundred convicted perpetrators and found that many either did not hear the “hate radio” broadcasts or misinterpreted them, and University of Wisconsin political scientist Scott Straus found that peer pressure and personal appeals, not hate radio, is what motivated most perpetrators.2 Similarly, political scientist Lee Ann Fujii’s book-length study of the Rwandan genocide found that those who participated in the genocide did not show unusual levels of fear or hatred of Tutsis. Instead, they participated through personal relationships with local elites, often because they feared repercussions if they did not participate. Hate had nothing to do with it.
Professor Fujii’s findings are consistent with a recent study that was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which found that villages with better radio reception had higher levels of participation in the genocide, but which credited that effect not to the creation of hatred, but rather to the fact that the broadcasts told those who were already willing to participate how to coordinate with others, and assured them that the government supported the killing and hence that they would not be punished.
At this point, an alert reader might object that several “hate radio” executives were convicted of genocide-related offenses, and might also point to the well-known claim that some of the killers “had a radio in one hand and a machete in the other[.]” That is true, but it is also true that immediately after the assassination of the Rwandan president, the “hate radio” broadcasts shifted from general propaganda to broadcasting specific advice and instructions to those already participating in the genocide regarding who to kill and where to find them.3 It was for only those post-assassination broadcasts that radio executives were convicted, rather than for the pre-genocide, more generalized “hate speech.”
Finally, these findings regarding the role of “hate radio” in the Rwandan genocide is consistent with what we know about the effects of propaganda in general. Contrary to popular belief, there is little evidence that propaganda is able to change minds; rather, it is generally effective only among those who already agree with it, and counter-productive among those who disagree.4 That was true even of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, which decreased denunciations of Jews by ordinary people in areas which had not historically been anti-Semitic.5
Therefore, the scholarly consensus is clear: “Hate speech” does not engender hatred. Rather, to the extent that is has any effect on violence at all, it makes it somewhat easier for those already inclined towards violence to act, largely by placing an imprimatur of official approval on acts of violence, and thereby making people who are already hateful and prone to violence believe that they can get away with acting violently.
This implies that censoring “hate speech” by ordinary persons is pointless – it is only “hate speech” by elites that can be dangerous (and even then not by creating hatred). There is no evidence that “hate speech” by ordinary persons has any effect on violence whatsoever. Thus, the efforts of such private actors as Facebook and Twitter to scrub the internet of what they deem to be “hate speech” by ordinary persons are, at best, misguided. But such efforts can also be dangerous because they help create excuses for governments to use allegations of “hate speech” to silence ideas that they dislike. Indeed, Freedom House has noted that that has already occurred in Russia, French courts have upheld “hate speech” convictions of advocates of the BDS movement to boycott of Israel, and in Spain, Catalan separatists who burned photographs of the Spanish monarch were fined on the grounds that they had incited violence and promoted hate speech.
Finally, efforts to censor extremists can backfire by causing them to see themselves as a persecuted minority who are justified in using violent means to be heard. Therefore, as painful as American law’s protection of “hate speech” can be, the alternative is almost certainly worse. In addition, given that even the Supreme Court recognizes that, in the contemporary world, “the most important places … for the exchange of views … is cyberspace …, and social media in particular[,]” Twitter, Facebook, and other private actors should resist calls to censor hateful speech; they might believe that doing so serves the public interest, but in fact it does quite the opposite.
Gordon Danning is History Research Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He has published a law review article on the free speech rights of high school students and conducted research on political violence.
References:
1 Hollie Nyseh Brehm. 2017. Subnational Determinants of Killing in Rwanda. Criminology, 55(1): 5-31. ▻http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.12126/full
2 Scott Straus, 2007. What is the relationship between hate radio and violence? Rethinking Rwanda’s “Radio Machete”. Politics & Society, 35(4): 609-637. ▻http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032329207308181
3 Richard Carver. 2000. Broadcasting and Political Transition: Rwanda and Beyond. African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, edited by Richard Farndon and Graham Furniss, 188-197. Oxford: James Currey 190.
4 Hugo Mercier. 2017. How Gullible Are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science. Review of General Psychology, 21(2): 103-122. ▻http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/gpr/21/2/103
5 Maja Adena, Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, Veronica Santarosa, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. 2015. Radio and the Rise of The Nazis in Prewar Germany. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(4): 1885–1939. ▻https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/4/1885/1916582?redirectedFrom=PDF
New Study Finds Sea Level Rise Has Accelerated – gCaptain
▻http://gcaptain.com/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-has-accelerated
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYnReLNLAZ0
Global sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades, rather than increasing steadily, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data.
This acceleration, driven mainly by increased melting in Greenland and Antarctica, has the potential to double the total sea level rise projected by 2100 when compared to projections that assume a constant rate of sea level rise, according to lead author Steve Nerem. Nerem is a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, a fellow at Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and a member of NASA’s Sea Level Change team.
If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100 — enough to cause significant problems for coastal cities, according to the new assessment by Nerem and colleagues from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; CU Boulder; the University of South Florida in Tampa; and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The team, driven to understand and better predict Earth’s response to a warming world, published their work Feb. 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This is almost certainly a conservative estimate,” Nerem said. “Our extrapolation assumes that sea level continues to change in the future as it has over the last 25 years. Given the large changes we are seeing in the ice sheets today, that’s not likely.”
#effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène
Ajouter à la troisième compilation :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/680147
Workers of Germany, Unite: The New Siren Call of the Far Right - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/world/europe/afd-unions-social-democrats.html?mabReward=ART_TS7&recid=10QNLdudNovobmvNWE
BOTTROP, Germany — Guido Reil is a coal miner, like his father and grandfather before him. He joined a trade union at 18 and the center-left Social Democratic Party at 20. Fast-talking and loud, he has been an elected union representative for over a decade.
But two years ago, after the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees in Germany, Mr. Reil switched to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. Competing in state legislative elections last May, the party won 20 percent of the vote in his home district with his name on its list — and the Social Democrats slipped 16 percentage points from a previous election.
“Those are my former comrades,” Mr. Reil said, chuckling. “They came with me.”
How is a far-right party drawing voters from labor, a traditional bastion of the left? The question is not academic, but goes directly to the heart of the emerging threat the AfD presents to Germany’s political establishment, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The AfD shocked Germany in the fall when it became the first far-right party to enter Parliament since World War II. But that breakthrough not only shattered a significant postwar taboo. It has also enormously complicated the task of forming a new governing coalition, leaving Germany and all of Europe in months of limbo.
Ms. Merkel and her conservative alliance are negotiating a coalition deal with their former governing partners, the left-leaning Social Democrats. If they do, the AfD will be Germany’s primary opposition party, leaving a wide opening for it to pick up even more traditionally left-leaning voters who fear the Social Democrats have been co-opted.
Continue reading the main story
Many fear that the AfD, as the leading voice of the opposition, would have a perfect perch to turn the protest vote it received in national elections in September — it finished third with 13 percent of the vote — into a loyal and sustained following.
“If we go back into government, the AfD will overtake us,” predicted Hilde Mattheis, a Social Democratic lawmaker from Baden-Wurttemberg, where that has already happened.
Continue reading the main story
Photo
Mr. Reil driving by the Prosper-Haniel mine in Bottrop. He has worked in six mines, five of which have closed. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
The 92 AfD lawmakers, who have been busy moving into their new parliamentary offices in central Berlin, have not been shy about using the spotlight.
One, Jürgen Pohl, recently addressed Parliament and criticized the labor market changes that former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democratic Party passed from 2003 to 2005, saying they created a host of poorly regulated, precarious jobs.
The AfD, Mr. Pohl said, “is a new people’s party that cares about the little people.”
When some center-left lawmakers guffawed, Mr. Pohl pointed at the television cameras. “Go ahead and laugh,” he said, “your voters are watching.”
Indeed, they are. The AfD has already overtaken the Social Democrats as the second-biggest party in state elections across much of what was formerly East Germany. In Bavaria, it is not far behind.
But Mr. Reil believes his party has the greatest potential in places like Bottrop, in the Ruhr area, once the industrial heartland of West Germany and long a bastion of Social Democratic and union power.
The Ruhr has produced coal since the 16th century, and it shaped modern Germany in the process. It powered the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the postwar economic miracle and even European integration: The coal and steel community was the seedling of the European Union.
But today, Bottrop and surrounding cities are in decline.
Mr. Reil has worked in six mines, five of which have closed. Along with some 2,500 others, he will take early retirement, at 48, after the last mine ceases production in December.
With the mines, most bars have closed, too, as has a whole social and cultural scene that once kept the area alive.
Continue reading the main story
Photo
Mr. Reil won 20 percent of votes in a district where the AfD had never fielded a candidate before. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
The AfD’s “pro-worker” platform (“pro-coal, pro-diesel and anti-immigration,” as Mr. Reil puts it) resonates in Bottrop as well as on the factory floors of Germany’s iconic carmakers in the former east and the wealthy south of the country.
As elections loom nationwide for worker representatives who bargain with management on behalf of their fellow employees, lists of candidates close to the AfD are circulating at several flagship companies, including Daimler and BMW. There are plans to create a new national workers’ movement, Mr. Reil said. The working name is the Alternative Union of Germany.
“The revolution,” he predicted, “will be in the car industry.”
Trade union leaders, currently on strike for higher pay and a 28-hour workweek for those wanting to care for children or elderly relatives, publicly dismiss such talk as “marginal.” But privately, some worry.
One of Mr. Reil’s allies, Oliver Hilburger, a mechanic at a Daimler plant near Stuttgart, founded an alternative union called Zentrum Automobil in 2009, four years before the AfD even existed.
Mr. Hilburger, who has been at the company for 28 years, is not a member of the AfD but he votes for it. He thinks the party and his union are a natural fit.
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When it emerged that he had once played for a band associated with neo-Nazis, the news media reported the fact widely. But that did not stop his colleagues from giving his union 10 percent of their votes and electing him as one of their representatives.
This spring, Mr. Hilburger, who calls his musical past “a sin of youth,” is fielding more than 250 candidates in at least four factories. Several of them, he said, are immigrants who have lived in Germany for years and support the AfD.
“There is a feeling among workers that the old unions collude with the bosses and the government,” Mr. Hilburger said.
Continue reading the main story
Photo
Mr. Reil with AfD supporters during an informal meeting at a bar in Essen. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
“The bosses and the media talk about skills shortages and how we need even more immigration,” he said. “We want to talk about a shortage of decent jobs for those who are already in the country. The AfD has understood that.”
The AfD is ideologically divided, with many senior members staunchly capitalist and suspicious of labor unions.
The strategic focus on the working class speaks to the challenge of turning protest voters into a loyal base, said Oskar Niedermayer, a professor of political science at the Free University in Berlin.
“Breaking into the union milieu is key to that strategy,” Mr. Niedermayer said.
He warned that the reflex to ostracize the AfD could backfire. Some unions are advising members to shun anyone in the AfD. Some soccer clubs are planning to outright bar them. And as Mr. Niedermayer pointed out, lawmakers from other parties have systematically blocked every AfD candidate for senior parliamentary posts.
“It confirms them in their role as victims of the elites,” he said. “Workers who see themselves as victims of the elites will only identify with them more.”
As the AfD appeals to Germany’s left-behinds, it is also trying to tie them to other parts of the party’s agenda, like its hard line on immigration.
For instance, the battle cry of Frank-Christian Hansel, an AfD member of Berlin’s state Parliament, is to save the German welfare state — but for Germans.
“If you want social justice, you need to manage who is coming into your country,” Mr. Hansel said. “Open borders and welfare state don’t go together.”
Continue reading the main story
Photo
An advertising board near the Prosper-Haniel mine. Mr. Reil said the AfD was “pro-coal, pro-diesel and anti-immigration.” Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
It is the kind of rhetoric that sets the AfD apart from the traditional left, even as it goes fishing for voters in Social Democratic waters.
For the AfD, it is not just those at the bottom against those at the top, Mr. Niedermayer said. It is insiders against outsiders. Social justice, yes, but only for Germans.
In Bottrop, this message plays well.
Residents complain about some refugees being prescribed “therapeutic horseback-riding” and courses in flirtation, courtesy of taxpayers, while public schools are in decline.
“They get the renovated social housing, while Germans wait for years,” said Linda Emde, the manager of one of the few remaining bars. “But when you speak up against migration, they call you a racist.”
Ms. Emde had voted for the Social Democrats all her life. But in September, she and her husband switched to the AfD.
Mr. Reil, who never managed to rise through the Social Democrats’ local party hierarchy, is now a member of the AfD’s national leadership team. At the monthly meetings, he sits at the same table as the aristocrat Beatrix von Storch and Alice Weidel, a professor.
The two female lawmakers are perhaps best known for a recent social media rant about “barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men.” But for Mr. Reil, the point of his comment was that he had risen socially.
“What do a miner, a princess and a professor have in common?” he jokes. “They are all in the AfD.”
Follow Katrin Bennhold on Twitter: @kbennhold.
Christopher Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.
I’m a Stanford professor accused of being part of a ’terrorist group’. McCarthyism is back | David Palumbo-Liu | Opinion | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/08/stanford-professor-mccarthyism-antifa
As a scholar-activist working on issues such as sexual assault, Palestine, and anti-fascism, I am used to receiving abusive messages and being publicly maligned. Now, however, attacks on me have reached troubling new heights.
Last month, the Stanford Review, a rightwing publication co-founded by Peter Thiel and based on my university campus, wrote that I have helped set up an “organization [that is] undeniably a chapter of a terrorist group” and demanded my resignation. Their article was picked up by groups like JihadWatch, Campus Fix, Campus Reform, Fox & Friends, and other rightwing media outlets.
The organization I belong to is called the Campus Antifascist Network. We advocate for organized resistance to fascist violence on campus, and for educating our communities and others as to the nature of fascism today. We claim solidarity with a proud tradition of anti-fascism dating back to the early 20th century.
Today, we are seeing the resurgence of a wretched phenomenon we thought we had put behind us – McCarthyism, which involves “the use of tactics involving personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges”.
Professors are more than hesitant about fighting back against accusations that emanate from organizations supported by the likes of Peter Thiel or Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA.
I don’t have the resources to bring a libel suit – I cannot out-lawyer a newspaper that has an ally in its founder and major contributor to the university, Peter Thiel.
The troubling question is: who does?
Sur le pouvoir de nuisance de Thiel, je ne me rappelais plus de cette histoire aussi, il a quasi à lui tout seul fait fermer par faillite tout le groupe de presse (de ragots) Gawker :
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/big-browser/article/2016/06/01/le-milliardaire-de-la-silicon-valley-le-media-abrasif-et-les-limites-de-la-l
Professor Green films ’anti-homeless’ bench bar removal - BBC News
▻http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-42902252
Rapper Professor Green has filmed a video showing the removal of an “anti-homeless” bar fitted to a public bench.
The musician had branded the devices, in Bournemouth, an attempt to make homelessness “invisible”.
Footage posted on his Instagram account shows a man replacing one of the bars with a larger one to turn the bench into a “homeless shelter”
Dorset Police said officers were called to the town centre but “no offences were identified”.
Bournemouth council said it was disappointed Green had declined an invite to speak with officials.
#Qatar turns to #Israel to escape Saudi squeeze | The Electronic Intifada
▻https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/qatar-turns-israel-escape-saudi-squeeze
The Qatari government has been sponsoring trips for right-wing Americans and staunch supporters of Israel in an apparent bid to salvage the emirate from its regional isolation.
Earlier this month, Israel apologist Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz made a trip to Doha at the invitation of Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, who financed the trip.
Dershowitz, one of the Israel lobby’s most prominent US figures, wrote an article upon his return in which he reflected on numerous meetings with Qatari officials.
But he first professed to being surprised at learning that an Israeli tennis player was to participate in a Doha tournament and that Qatar is open to welcoming the Israeli national soccer team, should it qualify for the World Cup which Qatar will host in 2022.
He contrasted this with Saudi Arabia’s refusal to grant a visa to an Israeli chess player, concluding that “the Saudis were not necessarily the good guys in their dispute with Qatar.”
Prof. Haidar Eid: “like Hamlet in his pretended madness who claimed to be reading “words, words, words” — with the implcation that words failed to signify anything.”
“For most of my generation, mind, culture, history, tradition, and the humanities both as words and as ideas, carry an authentic ring of truth, even if for one or another reason they do not lie easily within our grasp. I have no desire to have done with them, if only because as words and ideas they still seem partially to anchor the world we inhabit, if only because they also are still objects of our regard – and also because . . . they are machines to think with.” (Beginnings, Intention and Method 1975:19) (italics in original)
(...)As Eid states in the Introduction, the reconstructed theory he envisions “ultimately aims to achieve . . . a dialectical critical theory that combines (post) modern and ‘traditional’ micro and macro analysis.” The formulation he calls for is “informed by theories of rationality, reason and knowledge without falling into essentialism and apriori epistemology.” What has happened under the influence of primarily French theorists, the system which suffered the “crisis” that Louis Menand located twenty-five years ago, was, Eid maintains, “the penetration of global capital in almost all fields of life as well as the disintegration of the liberal public sphere”.
If we need a recent example of the penetration of global capital, we have only to look at Arundhati Roy‘s The Cost of Living documenting the devastation to the environment and the displacement of millions of lower-caste Indians by the government’s pursuit of massive dam projects, the profits from which accrue to political elites and multi-national corporations. An even more contemporary example comes with the global outrage at Israeli massacres in Gaza in which UN shelters, family homes, hospitals, power-generators, mosques, ambulances, playgrounds and schools are targeted with lethal force while Israel, backed by US weapons, prestige, and money, acts with complete impunity. US power blocks any functioning of the wider “liberal public sphere” to secure justice for the indigenous Palestinians, increasingly at the mercy of a highly militarized colonial settler state armed by the global superpower. In the face of widespread moral outrage at the magnitude and sheer malice of the onslaught, representatives of the hegemonic power(s) repeat justifications amounting to the centrality to the globsl capital system of what should be a pariah state. To establish this connection between theory and social justice, Eid quotes Edward Said’s comments on the political and economic ramifications of poststructuralism:
It is significant that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical non-interference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism, or for that matter with a new cold war, increased militarism and defence spending, and a massive turn to the right on matters touching the economy, social services, and organized labor. (Said, 1983: 4).
▻http://www.palestinechronicle.com/worlding-post-modernism-interpretive-possibilities-of-critical-t
What might explain the unhappiness epidemic? (A: screens) by Jean Twenge - Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University
▻http://theconversation.com/what-might-explain-the-unhappiness-epidemic-90212
In a new analysis of 1 million U.S. teens, my co-authors and I looked at how teens were spending their free time and which activities correlated with happiness, and which didn’t.
(…) every activity that didn’t involve a screen was linked to more happiness, and every activity that involved a screen was linked to less happiness. The differences were considerable: Teens who spent more than five hours a day online were twice as likely to be unhappy as those who spent less than an hour a day.
Of course, it might be that unhappy people seek out screen activities. However, a growing number of studies show that most of the causation goes from screen use to unhappiness, not the other way around.
Why Journalists Need to Think Like Designers - Global Investigative Journalism NetworkGlobal Investigative Journalism Network
▻https://gijn.org/2018/01/24/design-thinking
On se demande.
I had a terrifying realization during the first semester of art and design school. It happened during one of the first group critiques of my work. I had made a sculpture out of found objects, to make a point about about throwaway consumer culture.
One professor said, “This might be better realized as a large, immersive installation.”
Actually,” said another professor, “I would prefer it as a design book with a series of pages with flattened objects.”
“I see it more as a performance,” said a fellow student.
At that point it dawned on me that my idea could possibly take on an infinite number of forms. It could be a sculpture, a room, a book or a performance. This was both a daunting and a dazzling moment of revelation.
LISTEN: Understanding race in education – a guide for teachers from Professor Kalwant Bhopal
Every teacher needs to take racism seriously and push for a more diverse and representative education system, says the University of Birmingham academic
▻https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/listen-understanding-race-education-a-guide-teachers-professor
#racisme #xénophobie #anti-racisme #éducation #enseignement #ressources_pédagogiques #pédagogie
Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary - Issue 56 : Perspective
▻http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary
Following Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio may be the neuroscientist whose popular books have done the most to inform readers about the biological machinery in our heads, how it generates thoughts and emotions, creates a self to cling to, and a sense of transcendence to escape by. But since he published Descartes’ Error in 1994, Damasio has been concerned that a central thesis in his books, that brains don’t define us, has been muted by research that states how much they do. To Damasio’s dismay, the view of the human brain as a computer, the command center of the body, has become lodged in popular culture. In his new book, The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, a professor of neuroscience and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, mounts (...)
Professor Asa Kasher, author of the IOF ethics code, supports that fact that #AhedTamimi has not been offered bail saying she is dangerous because she may slap again. ▻http://mondoweiss.net/2018/01/because-israeli-ethicist
Life Lessons From Chinese Children’s Books Differ From Those In The U.S. : Goats and Soda : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/01/06/573869099/whats-the-difference-between-children-s-books-in-china-and-the-u-s
For a taste of their findings, take a typical book in China: The Cat That Eats Letters.
Ostensibly it’s about a cat that has an appetite for sloppy letters — “written too large or too small, or if the letter is missing a stroke,” explains one of the researchers, psychologist Cecilia Cheung, a professor at University of California Riverside. “So the only way children can stop their letters from being eaten is to write really carefully and practice every day.”
But the underlying point is clear: “This is really instilling the idea of effort — that children have to learn to consistently practice in order to achieve a certain level,” says Cheung. And that idea, she says, is a core tenet of Chinese culture.
They created a list of “learning-related” values and checked to see how often the books promoted them. The values included setting a goal to achieve something difficult, putting in a lot effort to complete the task and generally viewing intelligence as a trait that can be acquired through hard work rather than a quality that you’re born with.
The results — published in the Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology: The storybooks from China stress those values about twice as frequently as the books from the U.S. and Mexico.
By contrast, Cheung says a typical book from the U.S. is one called The Jar of Happiness.
“A little girl attempts to make a potion of happiness in a jar,” explains Cheung. Only to lose the jar. She’s really upset — until all her friends come to cheer her up. “At the end of the story she comes to the realization that happiness does not actually come from a jar of potion but from having good friends.”
Cheung says this emphasis on happiness comes up a lot in the books from the U.S. In some cases it’s overt – central to the plot of the story. But often it’s more subtle.
“They’ll just have a lot of drawings of children who are playing happily in all sorts of settings — emphasizing that smiling is important, that laughing is important, that being surrounded by people who are happy is important.”
The same held true of the books from Mexico.
Can PTSD Be Good for You? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/can-ptsd-be-good-for-you
There’s no way to be sure what will traumatize someone, and not everyone exposed to “trauma” develops PTSD.WikicommonsYou might think it insensitive or even offensive to ask whether PTSD could be good for someone. Who wants a disorder, let alone one caused by “post-traumatic stress”? Yet when Nautilus posed this question to Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City—where she’s worked with war veterans, Holocaust survivors, and other trauma victims—she said, “I don’t know.”That ambivalence partly stems from the fuzzy concept of “trauma.” There’s no way to be sure what will traumatize someone, and not everyone exposed to “trauma” develops PTSD. “We’re now having a (...)
Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars | US news | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/28/adjunct-professors-homeless-sex-work-academia-poverty
Adjunct English professor Ellen James-Penney and her husband live in a car with their two dogs. They have developed a system. ‘Keep nothing on the dash, nothing on the floor – you can’t look like you’re homeless, you can’t dress like you’re homeless.’ Photograph: Talia Herman for the Guardian 
There is nothing she would rather do than teach. But after supplementing her career with tutoring and proofreading, the university lecturer decided to go to remarkable lengths to make her career financially viable.
She first opted for her side gig during a particularly rough patch, several years ago, when her course load was suddenly cut in half and her income plunged, putting her on the brink of eviction. “In my mind I was like, I’ve had one-night stands, how bad can it be?” she said. “And it wasn’t that bad.”
The wry but weary-sounding middle-aged woman, who lives in a large US city and asked to remain anonymous to protect her reputation, is an adjunct instructor, meaning she is not a full-time faculty member at any one institution and strings together a living by teaching individual courses, in her case at multiple colleges.
What Happens When We Let Tech Care For Our Aging Parents | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/digital-puppy-seniors-nursing-homes
Arlyn Anderson grasped her father’s hand and presented him with the choice. “A nursing home would be safer, Dad,” she told him, relaying the doctors’ advice. “It’s risky to live here alone—”
“No way,” Jim interjected. He frowned at his daughter, his brow furrowed under a lop of white hair. At 91, he wanted to remain in the woodsy Minnesota cottage he and his wife had built on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, where she had died in his arms just a year before. His pontoon—which he insisted he could still navigate just fine—bobbed out front.
Arlyn had moved from California back to Minnesota two decades earlier to be near her aging parents. Now, in 2013, she was fiftysomething, working as a personal coach, and finding that her father’s decline was all-consuming.
Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and general Mr. Fix-It; “a genius,” Arlyn says—started experiencing bouts of paranoia in his mid-eighties, a sign of Alzheimer’s. The disease had progressed, often causing his thoughts to vanish mid-sentence. But Jim would rather risk living alone than be cloistered in an institution, he told Arlyn and her older sister, Layney. A nursing home certainly wasn’t what Arlyn wanted for him either. But the daily churn of diapers and cleanups, the carousel of in-home aides, and the compounding financial strain (she had already taken out a reverse mortgage on Jim’s cottage to pay the caretakers) forced her to consider the possibility.
Jim, slouched in his recliner, was determined to stay at home. “No way,” he repeated to his daughter, defiant. Her eyes welled up and she hugged him. “OK, Dad.” Arlyn’s house was a 40-minute drive from the cottage, and for months she had been relying on a patchwork of technology to keep tabs on her dad. She set an open laptop on the counter so she could chat with him on Skype. She installed two cameras, one in his kitchen and another in his bedroom, so she could check whether the caregiver had arrived, or God forbid, if her dad had fallen. So when she read in the newspaper about a new digital eldercare service called CareCoach a few weeks after broaching the subject of the nursing home, it piqued her interest. For about $200 a month, a human-powered avatar would be available to watch over a homebound person 24 hours a day; Arlyn paid that same amount for just nine hours of in-home help. She signed up immediately.
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A Google Nexus tablet arrived in the mail a week later. When Arlyn plugged it in, an animated German shepherd appeared onscreen, standing at attention on a digitized lawn. The brown dog looked cutesy and cartoonish, with a bubblegum-pink tongue and round, blue eyes.
She and Layney visited their dad later that week, tablet in hand. Following the instructions, Arlyn uploaded dozens of pictures to the service’s online portal: images of family members, Jim’s boat, and some of his inventions, like a computer terminal known as the Teleray and a seismic surveillance system used to detect footsteps during the Vietnam War. The setup complete, Arlyn clutched the tablet, summoning the nerve to introduce her dad to the dog. Her initial instinct that the service could be the perfect companion for a former technologist had splintered into needling doubts. Was she tricking him? Infantilizing him?
Tired of her sister’s waffling, Layney finally snatched the tablet and presented it to their dad, who was sitting in his armchair. “Here, Dad, we got you this.” The dog blinked its saucer eyes and then, in Google’s female text-to-speech voice, started to talk. Before Alzheimer’s had taken hold, Jim would have wanted to know exactly how the service worked. But in recent months he’d come to believe that TV characters were interacting with him: A show’s villain had shot a gun at him, he said; Katie Couric was his friend. When faced with an onscreen character that actually was talking to him, Jim readily chatted back.
Jim named his dog Pony. Arlyn perched the tablet upright on a table in Jim’s living room, where he could see it from the couch or his recliner. Within a week Jim and Pony had settled into a routine, exchanging pleasantries several times a day. Every 15 minutes or so Pony would wake up and look for Jim, calling his name if he was out of view. Sometimes Jim would “pet” the sleeping dog onscreen with his finger to rustle her awake. His touch would send an instantaneous alert to the human caretaker behind the avatar, prompting the CareCoach worker to launch the tablet’s audio and video stream. “How are you, Jim?” Pony would chirp. The dog reminded him which of his daughters or in-person caretakers would be visiting that day to do the tasks that an onscreen dog couldn’t: prepare meals, change Jim’s sheets, drive him to a senior center. “We’ll wait together,” Pony would say. Often she’d read poetry aloud, discuss the news, or watch TV with him. “You look handsome, Jim!” Pony remarked after watching him shave with his electric razor. “You look pretty,” he replied. Sometimes Pony would hold up a photo of Jim’s daughters or his inventions between her paws, prompting him to talk about his past. The dog complimented Jim’s red sweater and cheered him on when he struggled to buckle his watch in the morning. He reciprocated by petting the screen with his index finger, sending hearts floating up from the dog’s head. “I love you, Jim!” Pony told him a month after they first met—something CareCoach operators often tell the people they are monitoring. Jim turned to Arlyn and gloated, “She does! She thinks I’m real good!”
About 1,500 miles south of Lake Minnetonka, in Monterrey, Mexico, Rodrigo Rochin opens his laptop in his home office and logs in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He talks baseball with a New Jersey man watching the Yankees; chats with a woman in South Carolina who calls him Peanut (she places a cookie in front of her tablet for him to “eat”); and greets Jim, one of his regulars, who sips coffee while looking out over a lake.
Rodrigo is 35 years old, the son of a surgeon. He’s a fan of the Spurs and the Cowboys, a former international business student, and a bit of an introvert, happy to retreat into his sparsely decorated home office each morning. He grew up crossing the border to attend school in McAllen, Texas, honing the English that he now uses to chat with elderly people in the United States. Rodrigo found CareCoach on an online freelancing platform and was hired in December 2012 as one of the company’s earliest contractors, role-playing 36 hours a week as one of the service’s avatars.
After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished.
In person, Rodrigo is soft-spoken, with wire spectacles and a beard. He lives with his wife and two basset hounds, Bob and Cleo, in Nuevo León’s capital city. But the people on the other side of the screen don’t know that. They don’t know his name—or, in the case of those like Jim who have dementia, that he even exists. It’s his job to be invisible. If Rodrigo’s clients ask where he’s from, he might say MIT (the CareCoach software was created by two graduates of the school), but if anyone asks where their pet actually is, he replies in character: “Here with you.”
Rodrigo is one of a dozen CareCoach employees in Latin America and the Philippines. The contractors check on the service’s seniors through the tablet’s camera a few times an hour. (When they do, the dog or cat avatar they embody appears to wake up.) To talk, they type into the dashboard and their words are voiced robotically through the tablet, designed to give their charges the impression that they’re chatting with a friendly pet. Like all the CareCoach workers, Rodrigo keeps meticulous notes on the people he watches over so he can coordinate their care with other workers and deepen his relationship with them over time—this person likes to listen to Adele, this one prefers Elvis, this woman likes to hear Bible verses while she cooks. In one client’s file, he wrote a note explaining that the correct response to “See you later, alligator” is “After a while, crocodile.” These logs are all available to the customer’s social workers or adult children, wherever they may live. Arlyn started checking Pony’s log between visits with her dad several times a week. “Jim says I’m a really nice person,” reads one early entry made during the Minnesota winter. “I told Jim that he was my best friend. I am so happy.”
After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished. Having Pony there eased her anxiety about leaving Jim alone, and the virtual dog’s small talk lightened the mood.
Pony was not only assisting Jim’s human caretakers but also inadvertently keeping an eye on them. Months before, in broken sentences, Jim had complained to Arlyn that his in-home aide had called him a bastard. Arlyn, desperate for help and unsure of her father’s recollection, gave her a second chance. Three weeks after arriving in the house, Pony woke up to see the same caretaker, impatient. “Come on, Jim!” the aide yelled. “Hurry up!” Alarmed, Pony asked why she was screaming and checked to see if Jim was OK. The pet—actually, Rodrigo—later reported the aide’s behavior to CareCoach’s CEO, Victor Wang, who emailed Arlyn about the incident. (The caretaker knew there was a human watching her through the tablet, Arlyn says, but may not have known the extent of the person’s contact with Jim’s family behind the scenes.) Arlyn fired the short-tempered aide and started searching for a replacement. Pony watched as she and Jim conducted the interviews and approved of the person Arlyn hired. “I got to meet her,” the pet wrote. “She seems really nice.”
Pony—friend and guard dog—would stay.
Grant Cornett
Victor Wang grew up feeding his Tamagotchis and coding choose-your-own-adventure games in QBasic on the family PC. His parents moved from Taiwan to suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, when Wang was a year old, and his grandmother, whom he called Lao Lao in Mandarin, would frequently call from Taiwan. After her husband died, Lao Lao would often tell Wang’s mom that she was lonely, pleading with her daughter to come to Taiwan to live with her. As she grew older, she threatened suicide. When Wang was 11, his mother moved back home for two years to care for her. He thinks of that time as the honey-sandwich years, the food his overwhelmed father packed him each day for lunch. Wang missed his mother, he says, but adds, “I was never raised to be particularly expressive of my emotions.”
At 17, Wang left home to study mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia. He joined the Canadian Army Reserve, serving as an engineer on a maintenance platoon while working on his undergraduate degree. But he scrapped his military future when, at 22, he was admitted to MIT’s master’s program in mechanical engineering. Wang wrote his dissertation on human-machine interaction, studying a robotic arm maneuvered by astronauts on the International Space Station. He was particularly intrigued by the prospect of harnessing tech to perform tasks from a distance: At an MIT entrepreneurship competition, he pitched the idea of training workers in India to remotely operate the buffers that sweep US factory floors.
In 2011, when he was 24, his grandmother was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a disease that affects the areas of the brain associated with memory and movement. On Skype calls from his MIT apartment, Wang watched as his grandmother grew increasingly debilitated. After one call, a thought struck him: If he could tap remote labor to sweep far-off floors, why not use it to comfort Lao Lao and others like her?
Wang started researching the looming caretaker shortage in the US—between 2010 and 2030, the population of those older than 80 is projected to rise 79 percent, but the number of family caregivers available is expected to increase just 1 percent.
In 2012 Wang recruited his cofounder, a fellow MIT student working on her computer science doctorate named Shuo Deng, to build CareCoach’s technology. They agreed that AI speech technology was too rudimentary for an avatar capable of spontaneous conversation tailored to subtle mood and behavioral cues. For that, they would need humans.
Older people like Jim often don’t speak clearly or linearly, and those with dementia can’t be expected to troubleshoot a machine that misunderstands. “When you match someone not fully coherent with a device that’s not fully coherent, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Wang says. Pony, on the other hand, was an expert at deciphering Jim’s needs. Once, Pony noticed that Jim was holding onto furniture for support, as if he were dizzy. The pet persuaded him to sit down, then called Arlyn. Deng figures it’ll take about 20 years for AI to be able to master that kind of personal interaction and recognition. That said, the CareCoach system is already deploying some automated abilities. Five years ago, when Jim was introduced to Pony, the offshore workers behind the camera had to type every response; today CareCoach’s software creates roughly one out of every five sentences the pet speaks. Wang aims to standardize care by having the software manage more of the patients’ regular reminders—prodding them to take their medicine, urging them to eat well and stay hydrated. CareCoach workers are part freewheeling raconteurs, part human natural-language processors, listening to and deciphering their charges’ speech patterns or nudging the person back on track if they veer off topic. The company recently began recording conversations to better train its software in senior speech recognition.
CareCoach found its first customer in December 2012, and in 2014 Wang moved from Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, renting a tiny office space on a lusterless stretch of Millbrae near the San Francisco airport. Four employees congregate in one room with a view of the parking lot, while Wang and his wife, Brittany, a program manager he met at a gerontology conference, work in the foyer. Eight tablets with sleeping pets onscreen are lined up for testing before being shipped to their respective seniors. The avatars inhale and exhale, lending an eerie sense of life to their digital kennel.
CareCoach conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app.
Wang spends much of his time on the road, touting his product’s health benefits at medical conferences and in hospital executive suites. Onstage at a gerontology summit in San Francisco last summer, he deftly impersonated the strained, raspy voice of an elderly man talking to a CareCoach pet while Brittany stealthily cued the replies from her laptop in the audience. The company’s tablets are used by hospitals and health plans across Massachusetts, California, New York, South Carolina, Florida, and Washington state. Between corporate and individual customers, CareCoach’s avatars have interacted with hundreds of users in the US. “The goal,” Wang says, “is not to have a little family business that just breaks even.”
The fastest growth would come through hospital units and health plans specializing in high-need and elderly patients, and he makes the argument that his avatars cut health care costs. (A private room in a nursing home can run more than $7,500 a month.) Preliminary research has been promising, though limited. In a study conducted by Pace University at a Manhattan housing project and a Queens hospital, CareCoach’s avatars were found to reduce subjects’ loneliness, delirium, and falls. A health provider in Massachusetts was able to replace a man’s 11 weekly in-home nurse visits with a CareCoach tablet, which diligently reminded him to take his medications. (The man told nurses that the pet’s nagging reminded him of having his wife back in the house. “It’s kind of like a complaint, but he loves it at the same time,” the project’s lead says.) Still, the feelings aren’t always so cordial: In the Pace University study, some aggravated seniors with dementia lashed out and hit the tablet. In response, the onscreen pet sheds tears and tries to calm the person.
More troubling, perhaps, were the people who grew too fiercely attached to their digital pets. At the conclusion of a University of Washington CareCoach pilot study, one woman became so distraught at the thought of parting with her avatar that she signed up for the service, paying the fee herself. (The company gave her a reduced rate.) A user in Massachusetts told her caretakers she’d cancel an upcoming vacation to Maine unless her digital cat could come along.
We’re still in the infancy of understanding the complexities of aging humans’ relationship with technology. Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies, science, and technology at MIT and a frequent critic of tech that replaces human communication, described interactions between elderly people and robotic babies, dogs, and seals in her 2011 book, Alone Together. She came to view roboticized eldercare as a cop-out, one that would ultimately degrade human connection. “This kind of app—in all of its slickness and all its ‘what could possibly be wrong with it?’ mentality—is making us forget what we really know about what makes older people feel sustained,” she says: caring, interpersonal relationships. The question is whether an attentive avatar makes a comparable substitute. Turkle sees it as a last resort. “The assumption is that it’s always cheaper and easier to build an app than to have a conversation,” she says. “We allow technologists to propose the unthinkable and convince us the unthinkable is actually the inevitable.”
But for many families, providing long-term in-person care is simply unsustainable. The average family caregiver has a job outside the home and spends about 20 hours a week caring for a parent, according to AARP. Nearly two-thirds of such caregivers are women. Among eldercare experts, there’s a resignation that the demographics of an aging America will make technological solutions unavoidable. The number of those older than 65 with a disability is projected to rise from 11 million to 18 million from 2010 to 2030. Given the option, having a digital companion may be preferable to being alone. Early research shows that lonely and vulnerable elders like Jim seem content to communicate with robots. Joseph Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, is pragmatic. “I would always prefer the human touch over a robot,” he says. “But if there’s no human available, I would take high tech in lieu of high touch.”
CareCoach is a disorienting amalgam of both. The service conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app. If a person is incapable of consenting to CareCoach’s monitoring, then someone must do so on their behalf. But the more disconcerting issue is how cognizant these seniors are of being watched over by strangers. Wang considers his product “a trade-off between utility and privacy.” His workers are trained to duck out during baths and clothing changes.
Some CareCoach users insist on greater control. A woman in Washington state, for example, put a piece of tape over her CareCoach tablet’s camera to dictate when she could be viewed. Other customers like Jim, who are suffering from Alzheimer’s or other diseases, might not realize they are being watched. Once, when he was temporarily placed in a rehabilitation clinic after a fall, a nurse tending to him asked Arlyn what made the avatar work. “You mean there’s someone overseas looking at us?” she yelped, within earshot of Jim. (Arlyn isn’t sure whether her dad remembered the incident later.) By default, the app explains to patients that someone is surveilling them when it’s first introduced. But the family members of personal users, like Arlyn, can make their own call.
Arlyn quickly stopped worrying about whether she was deceiving her dad. Telling Jim about the human on the other side of the screen “would have blown the whole charm of it,” she says. Her mother had Alzheimer’s as well, and Arlyn had learned how to navigate the disease: Make her mom feel safe; don’t confuse her with details she’d have trouble understanding. The same went for her dad. “Once they stop asking,” Arlyn says, “I don’t think they need to know anymore.” At the time, Youa Vang, one of Jim’s regular in-person caretakers, didn’t comprehend the truth about Pony either. “I thought it was like Siri,” she said when told later that it was a human in Mexico who had watched Jim and typed in the words Pony spoke. She chuckled. “If I knew someone was there, I may have been a little more creeped out.”
Even CareCoach users like Arlyn who are completely aware of the person on the other end of the dashboard tend to experience the avatar as something between human, pet, and machine—what some roboticists call a third ontological category. The caretakers seem to blur that line too: One day Pony told Jim that she dreamed she could turn into a real health aide, almost like Pinocchio wishing to be a real boy.
Most of CareCoach’s 12 contractors reside in the Philippines, Venezuela, or Mexico. To undercut the cost of in-person help, Wang posts English-language ads on freelancing job sites where foreign workers advertise rates as low as $2 an hour. Though he won’t disclose his workers’ hourly wages, Wang claims the company bases its salaries on factors such as what a registered nurse would make in the CareCoach employee’s home country, their language proficiencies, and the cost of their internet connection.
The growing network includes people like Jill Paragas, a CareCoach worker who lives in a subdivision on Luzon island in the Philippines. Paragas is 35 years old and a college graduate. She earns about the same being an avatar as she did in her former call center job, where she consoled Americans irate about credit card charges. (“They wanted to, like, burn the company down or kill me,” she says with a mirthful laugh.) She works nights to coincide with the US daytime, typing messages to seniors while her 6-year-old son sleeps nearby.
Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend.
Before hiring her, Wang interviewed Paragas via video, then vetted her with an international criminal background check. He gives all applicants a personality test for certain traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. As part of the CareCoach training program, Paragas earned certifications in delirium and dementia care from the Alzheimer’s Association, trained in US health care ethics and privacy, and learned strategies for counseling those with addictions. All this, Wang says, “so we don’t get anyone who’s, like, crazy.” CareCoach hires only about 1 percent of its applicants.
Paragas understands that this is a complicated business. She’s befuddled by the absence of family members around her aging clients. “In my culture, we really love to take care of our parents,” she says. “That’s why I’m like, ‘She is already old, why is she alone?’ ” Paragas has no doubt that, for some people, she’s their most significant daily relationship. Some of her charges tell her that they couldn’t live without her. Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend. Arlyn quickly realized that she had gained a valuable ally.
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1/7Jim Anderson and his wife, Dorothy, in the living room of their home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the ’70s. Their house was modeled after an early American Pennsylvania farmhouse.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
2/7Jim became a private pilot after returning home from World War II.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
6/7A tennis match between Jim and his middle daughter, Layney, on his 80th birthday. (The score was tied at 6-6, she recalls; her dad won the tiebreaker.)Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
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1/7Jim Anderson and his wife, Dorothy, in the living room of their home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the ’70s. Their house was modeled after an early American Pennsylvania farmhouse.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
As time went on, the father, daughter, and family pet grew closer. When the snow finally melted, Arlyn carried the tablet to the picnic table on the patio so they could eat lunch overlooking the lake. Even as Jim’s speech became increasingly stunted, Pony could coax him to talk about his past, recounting fishing trips or how he built the house to face the sun so it would be warmer in winter. When Arlyn took her dad around the lake in her sailboat, Jim brought Pony along. (“I saw mostly sky,” Rodrigo recalls.)
One day, while Jim and Arlyn were sitting on the cottage’s paisley couch, Pony held up a photograph of Jim’s wife, Dorothy, between her paws. It had been more than a year since his wife’s death, and Jim hardly mentioned her anymore; he struggled to form coherent sentences. That day, though, he gazed at the photo fondly. “I still love her,” he declared. Arlyn rubbed his shoulder, clasping her hand over her mouth to stifle tears. “I am getting emotional too,” Pony said. Then Jim leaned toward the picture of his deceased wife and petted her face with his finger, the same way he would to awaken a sleeping Pony.
When Arlyn first signed up for the service, she hadn’t anticipated that she would end up loving—yes, loving, she says, in the sincerest sense of the word—the avatar as well. She taught Pony to say “Yeah, sure, you betcha” and “don’t-cha know” like a Minnesotan, which made her laugh even more than her dad. When Arlyn collapsed onto the couch after a long day of caretaking, Pony piped up from her perch on the table:
“Arnie, how are you?”
Alone, Arlyn petted the screen—the way Pony nuzzled her finger was weirdly therapeutic—and told the pet how hard it was to watch her dad lose his identity.
“I’m here for you,” Pony said. “I love you, Arnie.”
When she recalls her own attachment to the dog, Arlyn insists her connection wouldn’t have developed if Pony was simply high-functioning AI. “You could feel Pony’s heart,” she says. But she preferred to think of Pony as her father did—a friendly pet—rather than a person on the other end of a webcam. “Even though that person probably had a relationship to me,” she says, “I had a relationship with the avatar.”
Still, she sometimes wonders about the person on the other side of the screen. She sits up straight and rests her hand over her heart. “This is completely vulnerable, but my thought is: Did Pony really care about me and my dad?” She tears up, then laughs ruefully at herself, knowing how weird it all sounds. “Did this really happen? Was it really a relationship, or were they just playing solitaire and typing cute things?” She sighs. “But it seemed like they cared.”
When Jim turned 92 that August, as friends belted out “Happy Birthday” around the dinner table, Pony spoke the lyrics along with them. Jim blew out the single candle on his cake. “I wish you good health, Jim,” Pony said, “and many more birthdays to come.”
In Monterrey, Mexico, when Rodrigo talks about his unusual job, his friends ask if he’s ever lost a client. His reply: Yes.
In early March 2014, Jim fell and hit his head on his way to the bathroom. A caretaker sleeping over that night found him and called an ambulance, and Pony woke up when the paramedics arrived. The dog told them Jim’s date of birth and offered to call his daughters as they carried him out on a stretcher.
Jim was checked into a hospital, then into the nursing home he’d so wanted to avoid. The Wi-Fi there was spotty, which made it difficult for Jim and Pony to connect. Nurses would often turn Jim’s tablet to face the wall. The CareCoach logs from those months chronicle a series of communication misfires. “I miss Jim a lot,” Pony wrote. “I hope he is doing good all the time.” One day, in a rare moment of connectivity, Pony suggested he and Jim go sailing that summer, just like the good old days. “That sounds good,” Jim said.
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That July, in an email from Wang, Rodrigo learned that Jim had died in his sleep. Sitting before his laptop, Rodrigo bowed his head and recited a silent Lord’s Prayer for Jim, in Spanish. He prayed that his friend would be accepted into heaven. “I know it’s going to sound weird, but I had a certain friendship with him,” he says. “I felt like I actually met him. I feel like I’ve met them.” In the year and a half that he had known them, Arlyn and Jim talked to him regularly. Jim had taken Rodrigo on a sailboat ride. Rodrigo had read him poetry and learned about his rich past. They had celebrated birthdays and holidays together as family. As Pony, Rodrigo had said “Yeah, sure, you betcha” countless times.
That day, for weeks afterward, and even now when a senior will do something that reminds him of Jim, Rodrigo says he feels a pang. “I still care about them,” he says. After her dad’s death, Arlyn emailed Victor Wang to say she wanted to honor the workers for their care. Wang forwarded her email to Rodrigo and the rest of Pony’s team. On July 29, 2014, Arlyn carried Pony to Jim’s funeral, placing the tablet facing forward on the pew beside her. She invited any workers behind Pony who wanted to attend to log in.
A year later, Arlyn finally deleted the CareCoach service from the tablet—it felt like a kind of second burial. She still sighs, “Pony!” when the voice of her old friend gives her directions as she drives around Minneapolis, reincarnated in Google Maps.
After saying his prayer for Jim, Rodrigo heaved a sigh and logged in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He ducked into living rooms, kitchens, and hospital rooms around the United States—seeing if all was well, seeing if anybody needed to talk.
Shhhh. The “Gene Silenced” Apple Is Coming. – Mother Jones
▻http://www.motherjones.com/food/2018/01/shhhh-the-gene-silenced-apple-is-coming/#
Why go through all this trouble to change the color of the fruit? The Arctic’s non-browning properties mean it can be sold pre-sliced, which the company says makes it more appealing as a snack food for kids. And unlike other prepackaged apple slices, “our non-browning sliced apples are preservative free, avoiding negative flavor and aroma impacts of anti-browning treatments,” Okanagan President Neal Carter told me.
Et l’argument écologiste en prime
And if the apples stay white, we’re less likely to toss them out, according to the Breakthrough Institute, which is helping promote the fruit: “By eliminating superficial bruising and browning, the Arctic Apple holds the potential to dramatically reduce consumer food waste once it enters the market.” Food makes up the largest share of waste at municipal landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Around the world, almost half of all fruits and vegetables are wasted every year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, and that includes a startling 3.7 trillion apples.
Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc.
But if the point of the apple is to help reduce food waste, why market it in a way that requires so much packaging? I asked the company, and it responded that the plastic bags are recyclable, as are the shipping cartons and trays. Still, it’s hard to see how whole apples would require as much plastic, recyclable or not.
Et la mention OGM n’est pas sur l’emballage
ut the Arctic apples are one of the first genetically modified foods created to please consumers, rather than farmers. “It’s good for people to bite into one of these apples and see in their own hand how simple it is,” says Professor Pam Ronald, a plant pathologist and geneticist at the University of California-Davis. “It tastes the same.”
If you come across a packet of Arctic apple slices in stores, it won’t say “GM” on the label.
That’s only if they know what they’re eating. A law signed in 2016 by President Barack Obama requires companies to reveal whether a product is genetically modified, but it does not force them to print that information on its packaging. If you come across a packet of Arctic apple slices in stores, it won’t say “GM” on the label. Instead, there will be a QR code on the back that you can scan with a smartphone to learn more about Okanagan and the biotechnology at work.
Korean War, a ‘Forgotten’ Conflict That Shaped the Modern World - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/world/asia/korean-war-history.html
The war devastated Korea. Historians said that between three million and four million people were killed, although firm figures have never been produced, particularly by the North Korean government. As many as 70 percent of the dead may have been civilians.
Destruction was particularly acute in the North, which was subjected to years of American bombing, including with napalm. Roughly 25 percent of its prewar population was killed, Professor Cumings said, and many of the survivors lived underground by the war’s end.
“North Korea was flattened,” he said. “The North Koreans see the American bombing as a Holocaust, and every child is taught about it.”
Scientists predict ’mini ice age’ could hit UK by 2030
▻https://news.sky.com/story/scientists-predict-mini-ice-age-could-hit-uk-by-2030-11186098
https://e3.365dm.com/17/12/1600x900/skynews-museum-of-london-river-thames_4192664.jpg?20171227015004 A mini ice age that would freeze major rivers could hit Britain in less than two decades, according to research from universities in the UK and Russia.
[...]
Professor Zharkova claims 97% accuracy for the model which dovetails with previous mini ice ages, including the Maunder Minimum period from 1645 to 1715 when frost fairs were held on the frozen Thames.
But she cautions that her mathematical research cannot be used as proof that there will be a mini ice age this time around, not least because of global warming.
"I hope global warning will be overridden by this effect, giving humankind and the Earth 30 years to sort out our pollution," she said.
The ’imminent mini ice age’ myth is back, and it’s still wrong
▻https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/09/the-imminent-mini-ice-age-myth-is-back-and-its-still-wrong
The most important takeaway point is that the scientific research is clear – were one to occur, a grand solar minimum would temporarily reduce global temperatures by less than 0.3°C, while humans are already causing 0.2°C warming per decade.
Est-ce que c’est à mettre en perspective avec ça ?
The History Of The Modern “Climate Change” Scam
Tony Heller, The Deplorable Climate Science Blog, le 1er novembre 2017
►https://seenthis.net/messages/657195
Oui ça doit pouvoir être vu comme une dernière manifestation de ce « mythe » du refroidissement bien alimenté par ce blog.
Sur les prévisions de refroidissement faites dans les années 1970, on peut lire :
What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s ?
▻https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm
Women were the key to spreading culture around Europe | Daily Mail Online (septembre 2017)
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4850532/Women-key-spreading-culture-Europe.html
Women spread culture and knowledge around Europe 4,000 years ago while men stayed at home, according to ancient bone records
• Families were formed in a surprising manner in the Lechtal area, now in Germany
• Study found women travelled far and wide from home villages to start families
• They brought with them new cultural ideas, while men tended to stay near home
• The so-called ’patrilocal’ pattern combined with individual female mobility was not a temporary phenomenon, but persisted over a period of 800 years
Women were the ‘driving force’ spreading new ideas and technologies across Britain and Europe during the Stone Age – while their menfolk stayed home, a surprising new study has found.
Previous ideas of how our primitive ancestors travelled have been shaken by analysis of bones and teeth from ancient peoples.
They show that many females found buried in ancient burial grounds made long journeys to distant villages far from the homesteads where they were born and grew up.
Female exogamy and gene pool diversification at the transition from the Final Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in central Europe
▻http://www.pnas.org/content/114/38/10083.abstract
Significance
Paleogenetic and isotope data from human remains shed new light on residential rules revealing patrilocality and high female mobility in European prehistory. We show the crucial role of this institution and its impact on the transformation of population compositions over several hundred years.
Evidence for an epoch-transgressing maternal relationship between two individuals demonstrates long-debated population continuity from the central European Neolithic to the Bronze Age. We demonstrate that a simple notion of “migration” cannot explain the complex human mobility of third millennium BCE societies in Eurasia. On the contrary, it appears that part of what archaeologists understand as migration is the result of large-scale institutionalized and possibly sex- and age-related individual mobility.
Abstract
Human mobility has been vigorously debated as a key factor for the spread of bronze technology and profound changes in burial practices as well as material culture in central Europe at the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. However, the relevance of individual residential changes and their importance among specific age and sex groups are still poorly understood. Here, we present ancient DNA analysis, stable isotope data of oxygen, and radiogenic isotope ratios of strontium for 84 radiocarbon-dated skeletons from seven archaeological sites of the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker Complex and the Early Bronze Age from the Lech River valley in southern Bavaria, Germany. Complete mitochondrial genomes documented a diversification of maternal lineages over time. The isotope ratios disclosed the majority of the females to be nonlocal, while this is the case for only a few males and subadults. Most nonlocal females arrived in the study area as adults, but we do not detect their offspring among the sampled individuals.
The striking patterns of patrilocality and female exogamy prevailed over at least 800 y between about 2500 and 1700 BC. The persisting residential rules and even a direct kinship relation across the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age add to the archaeological evidence of continuing traditions from the Bell Beaker Complex to the Early Bronze Age. The results also attest to female mobility as a driving force for regional and supraregional communication and exchange at the dawn of the European metal ages.
Version plus musclée du Telegraph
Forget the wandering warrior: Bronze Age women travelled the world while men stayed at home
▻http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/04/forget-wandering-warrior-bronze-age-women-travelled-world-men
The concept that men stay at home while independent women venture out into the world is considered a rather modern phenomenon.
But a study suggests that in fact, the practice was rooted in ancient times, when Bronze Age men stayed at home while adventurous women were the key to spreading culture and ideas.
The research reveals that over a period of some 800 years, European women travelled between 300km and 500km from their home villages to start families, while men tended to stay near where they were born.
Et un point de vue absolument inverse (article de mars 2017), qui reprend l’hypothèse de migrations
• mixtes, lors de la transition néolithique (7500 ans AA (avant aujourd’hui)
• essentiellement masculines, pour le passage à l’âge du bronze (5000 ans AA)
Genetic data show mainly men migrated to Europe from the Pontic steppe 5,000 years ago - Vetenskapsområdet för teknik och naturvetenskap - Uppsala universitet
▻http://www.teknat.uu.se/nyheter/nyhetsdetaljsida/?id=8264&typ=artikel
Researchers from Uppsala and Stanford University investigated the genetic ancestry on the sex-specifically inherited X chromosome and the autosomes in 20 early Neolithic and 16 Late Neolithic/Bronze Age human remains. Contrary to previous hypotheses suggesting patrilocality (social system in which a family resides near the man’s parents) of many agricultural populations, they found no evidence of sex-biased admixture during the migration that spread farming across Europe during the early Neolithic.
– For later migrations from the Pontic steppe during the early Bronze Age, however, we find a dramatic male bias. There are simply too few X-chromosomes from the migrants, which points to around ten migrating males for every migrating female, says Mattias Jakobsson, professor of Genetics at the Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University.
Ancient X chromosomes reveal contrasting sex bias in Neolithic and Bronze Age Eurasian migrations
▻http://www.pnas.org/content/114/10/2657.full
Significance
Studies of differing female and male demographic histories on the basis of ancient genomes can provide insight into the social structures and cultural interactions during major events in human prehistory. We consider the sex-specific demography of two of the largest migrations in recent European prehistory. Using genome-wide ancient genetic data from multiple Eurasian populations spanning the last 10,000 years, we find no evidence of sex-biased migrations from Anatolia, despite the shift to patrilocality associated with the spread of farming. In contrast, we infer a massive male-biased migration from the steppe during the late Neolithic and Bronze Age. The contrasting patterns of sex-specific migration during these two migrations suggest that different sociocultural processes drove the two events.
Abstract
Dramatic events in human prehistory, such as the spread of agriculture to Europe from Anatolia and the late Neolithic/Bronze Age migration from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, can be investigated using patterns of genetic variation among the people who lived in those times. In particular, studies of differing female and male demographic histories on the basis of ancient genomes can provide information about complexities of social structures and cultural interactions in prehistoric populations. We use a mechanistic admixture model to compare the sex-specifically–inherited X chromosome with the autosomes in 20 early Neolithic and 16 late Neolithic/Bronze Age human remains. Contrary to previous hypotheses suggested by the patrilocality of many agricultural populations, we find no evidence of sex-biased admixture during the migration that spread farming across Europe during the early Neolithic. For later migrations from the Pontic Steppe during the late Neolithic/Bronze Age, however, we estimate a dramatic male bias, with approximately five to 14 migrating males for every migrating female. We find evidence of ongoing, primarily male, migration from the steppe to central Europe over a period of multiple generations, with a level of sex bias that excludes a pulse migration during a single generation. The contrasting patterns of sex-specific migration during these two migrations suggest a view of differing cultural histories in which the Neolithic transition was driven by mass migration of both males and females in roughly equal numbers, perhaps whole families, whereas the later Bronze Age migration and cultural shift were instead driven by male migration, potentially connected to new technology and conquest.
Ajouter à la compilation #archéologie et #sexisme :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/633249
As Google AI researcher accused of harassment, female data scientists speak of ’broken system’
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/22/google-ai-researcher-sexual-harassment-female-data-scientists
Sexual harassment and groping allegations against a suspended researcher are part of an industry culture that condones sexist behavior, women say Katherine Heller felt helpless. The Duke University professor was at a statistics conference last year when, she said, she witnessed Steven Scott, a senior artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at Google, make sexual advances on one of her female students. According to Heller, when she spoke to Scott later at an event dinner, he was defensive (...)
Neve Gordon · The ‘New Anti-Semitism’ · LRB 4 January 2018
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/neve-gordon/the-new-anti-semitism
Le « nouvel antisémitisme » c’est l’opposition à la #colonisation de la #Palestine.
One idiosyncratic but telling instance of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ took place in 2005 during Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. When soldiers came to evacuate the eight thousand Jewish settlers who lived in the region, some of the settlers protested by wearing yellow stars and insisting they would not ‘go like sheep to the slaughter’. Shaul Magid, the chair of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, points out that by doing so, the settlers cast the Israeli government and the Israeli military as anti-Semitic. In their eyes, the government and soldiers deserved to be called anti-Semites not because they hate Jews, but because they were implementing an anti-Zionist policy, undermining the project of settling the so-called greater Israel. This representation of decolonialisation as anti-Semitic is the key to a proper understanding of what is at stake when people are accused of the ‘new anti-Semitism’. When the professor from Haifa University branded me an anti-Semite, I wasn’t his real target. People like me are attacked on a regular basis, but we are considered human shields by the ‘new anti-Semitism’ machine. Its real target is the Palestinians.
[...]
In this way, Judith Butler has observed, ‘a passion for #justice’ is ‘renamed as anti-Semitism’.
UN rapporteur “shocked” by deep poverty in US - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/18/pove-d18.html
UN rapporteur “shocked” by deep poverty in US
By Eric London
18 December 2017
On Friday, United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston published a report on poverty and democratic rights in the United States titled “Statement on Visit to the USA.”
In 1831, the French intellectual and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States and compiled notes on what he saw, publishing an optimistic report titled Democracy in America. One hundred and eighty six years later, Alston, an Australian academic and New York University professor, traveled through a country in the throes of a social catastrophe. His report might well be titled Destitution in America .
#nations_unies #états_unis #âuvreté #pauvreté_extrême #inégalités