LINKS - April 27th, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Under Musk, Twitter-Neuralink Is a Natural Pairing
By Oliver Renick, TD Ameritrade Network
“Twitter is an extraordinarily powerful website because it is a running electronic diary for anyone who chooses to use it. There are different kinds of users, but as of last quarter about 200 million people used it every day. It is as close to humanity's stream of consciousness there is. It makes complete sense that the man behind Neuralink, Musk's company exploring brain-machine interfaces, would want unfiltered access to this digital consciousness.”
The Confounding Politics of Camping in America
By Dan Piepenbring, The New Yorker
“In “Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement” (Oxford University Press), the historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.”
Darwin Was Wrong: Your Facial Expressions Do Not Reveal Your Emotions
By Lisa Feldman Barrett, Scientific American
“This debate is not just academic; the outcome has serious consequences. Today you can be turned down for a job because a so-called emotion-reading system watching you on camera applied artificial intelligence to evaluate your facial movements unfavorably during an interview. In a U.S. court of law, a judge or jury may sometimes hand down a harsher sentence, even death, if they think a defendant’s face showed a lack of remorse. Children in preschools across the country are taught to recognize smiles as happiness, scowls as anger and other expressive stereotypes from books, games and posters of disembodied faces. And for children on the autism spectrum, some of whom have difficulty perceiving emotion in others, these teachings do not translate to better communication.”
Employers can make remote working a success by listening to research
By Unsigned Editorial, Nature
“Clearly, hybrid working is here to stay, in part because of the benefits in terms of broader access to work, convenience and reduced commuting times and travel costs. Now is the time to build on what has been learnt, to make hybrid and remote working successful in their own right — and to ensure that they are not just a poor replacement for fully in-person interactions.”
An elderly man dedicates himself to saving lives at Japan’s ‘suicide cliffs’
Director: Yung Chang, Producers: Eriko Miyagawa & Bob Moore; EyeSteelFilm, Field of Vision
“With about 70 suicides per day in 2015, Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world. At Tojinbo in Fukui Prefecture – notorious for its ‘suicide cliffs’, where numerous people have ended their lives – the retired policeman Yukio Shige has taken a hands-on approach to addressing the social issue. Alongside volunteers at his Tojinbo Nonprofit Organisation Support Center, Shige patrols the cliffs for anyone who looks distraught, and invites them to his nearby café, where he offers food, an opportunity to talk over their problems and longer-term support if necessary. Over the past 12 years, Shige’s organisation has been credited with saving some 550 lives, even as more and more people have flocked to the cliffs, which have become something of a morbid tourist attraction.”