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Unmasking mask myths

July 7, 2020 1:48 pm

We are living in an era of a viral pandemic, COVID-19, in which viral particles are spread through the air from one person to another.

Numerous scientific studies show that if most people even simple cloth face masks while near each other, this dramatically reduced the viral particles in the air, and increases safety.

The effect of wearing masks is so effective that in areas where people follow social distancing & mask rules, the incidence of COVID is shrinking.

However, there has been a growing resistance to wearing a mask, fueled by conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and Russian social media troll farms deliberately spreading misinformation.

Many of us have met individuals who claimed that face masks either “block oxygen from getting in” or “make us breathe carbon monoxide.”  Both claims are literally impossible, yet widely believed.

If we have a student make such a claim, how can we turn this into a teachable moment?

Face masks

https://www.facebook.com/groups/907893332705087/permalink/1547682505392830/

Addressing the carbon monoxide claim

Claim: “Masks traps our carbon monoxide and poison us.”

How to respond:

First, revisit the equation for cellular respiration. Note that this process doesn’t produce carbon monoxide!

from the Amoeba sisters

So if someone makes this claim then ask “Where does this carbon monoxide coming from?”

If they give a vague response ask them to clarify and back up their answer with a source.

Here’s another graphic showing cellular respiration

Cellular respiration 1 Intro

 

Addressing the “air can’t get through the mask” claim

Some people try to have it both ways: They claim that virus particles are so small that they can get through the mask

yet they also claim that the oxygen is too large to pass through the mask, so we (supposedly) get low oxygen and brain damage.

The obvious problem is that the virus particle is over 250 times larger than an oxygen molecule!

The covid molecule is 0.125 microns while an O2 molecule is only 0.0005 microns.

Also, to be clear, single viral particles don’t make people sick. The disease is only spread if people inhale multiple exhalation water-virus droplets,

Each droplet is thousands of times larger than a viral particle; each droplet has thousands of viral particles. It is these larger drops that masks are good at filtering.

CoVid-19 coronavirus particle

Image created by Fusion Animation.

Addressing the low amount of oxygen claim

First off, even without a virus, your body automatically adapts to lower levels of oxygen in the air.

If that weren’t the case then anyone who visited a high altitude city like Denver, Colorado, would have died.

As we all know, up in Denver the air is thinner, so there are less O2 molecules per cubic meter of air. But we adjust, and as long as we don’t play NFL caliber football for an hour, we’re just fine.

The other claim is that these face masks “trap our breath” preventing us from getting oxygen, so that our O2 blood levels fall.

Yet see for yourself – masks don’t do that!

covid Mask blood oxygen level

Photo credit. Dr. Megan Hall

Dr. Megan Hall writes:

Below is me in 4 scenarios. I wore each mask for 5 minutes and checked my oxygen saturation (shown as the percentage below) along with my heart rate (HR, in beats per minute) using noninvasive pulse oximetry.

Keep in mind, immediately prior to this, I had been wearing the surgical mask for 5 hours.

Results:

No mask: 98%, HR 64

Surgical mask: 98%, HR 68

N95 mask: 99%, HR 69

N95 plus surgical mask (which is how most healthcare providers are wearing masks): 99%, HR 69.

Finally, if “breathing in your own breath is dangerous” then

* how come it is perfectly safe to perform CPR with mouth to mouth resuscitation?

* how come it is safe to kiss?!

The air that a person exhales has more than enough O2 to keep someone else alive.

How well do masks work?

Masks don’t need to stop all droplets. COVID is dangerous not because some particles are airborne (thats true for tons of viruses) but because

(a) it transmits more easily,

and (b) causes more damage.

When we reduce the number of droplets released, then the spread of covid significantly decreases.

Here is a video from Dr. Joe Hanson, from “It’s ok to be smart.” It is an awesome, slow-motion schlieren imaging experiment that demonstrates why masks work.

How Well Do Masks Work? (Schlieren Imaging In Slow Motion!)

References for “How Well Do Masks Work?”

.

Anatomy of Torso, Arms, and Legs

July 7, 2020 2:16 am

Intro

Torso anatomy

Torso anatomy

Arm anatomy

Arm anatomy

image by Joumana Medlej

Leg anatomy

Leg anatomy

image by Joumana Medlej

From Human Anatomy Fundamentals: Muscles and Other Body Mass

Apps

Leg muscles app – Healthline

Learning Standards

Massachusetts

6.MS-LS1-3. Construct an argument supported by evidence that the body systems interact to carry out essential functions of life.

6.MS-LS4-2. Construct an argument using anatomical structures to support evolutionary
relationships among and between fossil organisms and modern organisms.

HS-LS4-1. Communicate scientific information that common ancestry and biological evolution are supported by multiple lines of empirical evidence, including molecular,
anatomical, and developmental similarities inherited from a common ancestor
(homologies), seen through fossils and laboratory and field observations.

SAT Subject area test in Biology

Organismal biology: Structure, function, and development of organisms (with emphasis on plants and animals), animal behavior

 

Florence DiTullio Joyce first women welder in WWII shipyards

July 5, 2020 10:29 pm

Florence DiTullio Joyce WWII Quincy Shipyard welder

Women in engineering and related trades

This is Florence “Woo Woo” DiTullio Joyce. She was the first woman hired by the Fore River Shipyard in 1942. She was hired when the shipyard lost most of their male employees to enlistment during WW2.

This was before women were generally hired for defense industries. She was accepted because she had a local reputation as an excellent oxy-acetalene welder. At the time, some congressmen had sworn women would never be hired for such jobs.

Her moniker (“Woo-woo”) was what the shipbuilders shouted when she arrived on site the first day. She kept the nick name, and owned it, painting it across the back of her welding jacket.

Her success was part of what led to the later hiring of tens of thousands of women.

________________________________________________

From Quincy 400, City of Quincy, MA

Meet Florence DiTullio Joyce, the first woman welder to be employed by the Fore River Shipyard in 1942. A Quincy High graduate who lived with her mother and sister on Washington Street, she learned of the opportunity through her uncle, Daniel Libertini, who was working for the shipyard at that time. In a 2009 interview with the Patriot Ledger Joyce said, “I was young and I just thought it would be something fascinating, something different.”

At that point in time, the United States was embroiled in World War II, and the Fore River Shipyard was producing more vessels than any other shipyard in the nation. Many of the shipyard’s skilled laborers had been young men who had been called to serve their country, but the ever-expanding war effort required employers to seek out energetic and enterprising young women to fill these roles in their stead.

Joyce’s employment ushered in the introduction of four other women to the force, and the group gained notoriety as “the first wave of ‘Winnie the Welders’” to engage in this trade. Ultimately, around 2,000 women were employed by the shipyard during the war years.

Joyce’s workday began at 7 a.m. and concluded at 3:30 p.m., and she spent a majority of her time in the shipyard’s steel mill. She earned, on average, $40 per week, “fashioning steel girders from sheet metal.” When she was interviewed at age 22, she reported that the work was “dangerous and tough– tougher than hell. But I love it!”

When she wasn’t working, Joyce and her sister would attend events hosted by the USO, or go dancing at the American Legion. Nights out on the town at that time cost about 20 cents. Though the on-going war was an ever-present part of their lives, she later remarked that, “It was serious because it was the war, but when you were young, it was fun because there were a lot of new people and different things to do.”

References

Dave Willhoite post on Florence DiTullio

Meet Florence DiTullio Joyce, Quincy 400

Mann, Jennifer. (2009, May 6). ‘Winnie the Welder’: Former female shipbuilder recalls war days.

Florence “Woo-Woo” DiTullio: Winnie the Welder. (2018)

 

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – claims and reality

June 29, 2020 9:02 pm

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow. His first discussion of this idea was in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review. This was was developed further in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Created by FireflySixtySeven, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia

Yet contrary to popular belief, Maslow never created a pyramid to represent these needs. Nor did he conclude that in order for motivation to arise at the next stage, each stage must be satisfied. Much that teachers have heard about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs isn’t what he taught.

How his ideas were changed, incorrectly claimed as scientifically proven, and then became the basis of profitable seminars in business and education, is the subject of these papers:

Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies’ Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education, by Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard, Academy of Management Learning & EducationVol. 18, No. 1, 3/1/2019

“Who Created Maslow’s Iconic Pyramid?” by Scott Barry Kaufman Scientific American, 4/23/2019

A modern packaging of Maslow’s work is popular in management training and secondary and higher psychology and education instruction.

Saul McLeod points out that

Maslow continued to refine his theory based on the concept of a hierarchy of needs over several decades. Regarding the structure of his hierarchy, Maslow proposed that the order in the hierarchy “is not nearly as rigid” as he may have implied in his earlier description. Maslow noted that the order of needs might be flexible based on external circumstances or individual differences. For example, he notes that for some individuals, the need for self-esteem is more important than the need for love. For others, the need for creative fulfillment may supersede even the most basic needs.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, 3/20/2020, Saul McLeod, Simply Psychology

In Scientific American, Scott Barry Kaufman writes

Abraham Maslow’s iconic pyramid of needs is one of the most famous images in the history of management studies. At the base of the pyramid are physiological needs, and at the top is self-actualization, the full realization of one’s unique potential. Along the way are the needs for safety, belonging, love, and esteem.

However, many people may not realize that during the last few years of his life Maslow believed self-transcendence, not self-actualization, was the pinnacle of human needs. What’s more, it’s difficult to find any evidence that he ever actually represented his theory as a pyramid.

On the contrary, it’s clear from his writings that he did not view his hierarchy of needs like a video game– as though you reach one level and then unlock the next level, never again returning to the “lower” levels. He made it quite clear that we are always going back and forth in the hierarchy, and we can target multiple needs at the same time.

If Maslow never built his iconic pyramid, who did? In a recent paper, Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, and John Ballard trace the true origins of the pyramid in management textbooks, and lay out the implications for the amplification of Maslow’s theory, and for management studies in general. In the following Q & A, I chat with the authors of that paper about their detective work.

Question: Why did you set out to answer the question: Who built “Maslow’s Pyramid”?

My colleague Stephen Cummings and I have long been interested in how foundational ideas of our field, management studies, are represented in textbooks. Textbooks often present ideas very differently than in the original writings. We’re interested in understanding how and why this happens. We’ve taught Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for many years and were aware the pyramid did not appear in his most well-known works, so were interested in delving deeper. We contacted John Ballard, who knew Maslow’s work better than we did and who shared our concern about Maslow’s theory being misrepresented. Thankfully, he agreed to join us on the project.

Question: Do you think the popularity of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is due in part to the iconic appeal of the pyramid that became associated with it?

Yes, absolutely. Maslow wasn’t the first psychologist to develop a theory of human needs. Walter Langer presented a theory with physical, social and egoistic needs that appeared alongside Maslow’s in an early management textbook. And Maslow’s theory generally hasn’t performed well in empirical studies (although I’m aware of your recent research which challenges this).

In fact, this lack of empirical support is one of the main criticisms of the theory made by textbook authors. So why do they continue to include it? The pyramid. We know from having taught management courses for 20 years that if there’s one thing that students remember from an introductory course in management, it’s the pyramid. It’s intuitively appealing, easy to remember and looks great in PowerPoint. Students love it and because of that, so do textbooks authors, teachers, and publishers.

Question: So what’s your problem with the pyramid?

It’s described as ‘Maslow’s pyramid’ when he did not create it and it’s just not a good representation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It perpetuates unfair criticisms of the theory. For example, that people are only motivated to satisfy one need at a time, that a need must be 100% satisfied before a higher-level need kicks in, and that a satisfied need no longer affects behavior.

Another is the view that everyone has the same needs arranged and activated in the same order. In his 1943 article in Psychological Review Maslow anticipates these criticisms and says they would give a false impression of his theory. Maslow believed that people have partially satisfied needs and partially unsatisfied needs at the same time, that a lower level need may be only partially met before a higher-level need emerges, and that the order in which needs emerge is not fixed.

Question: How did this inaccurate interpretation of the hierarchy of needs become established in management textbooks?

It’s a complicated story and one we address fully in the paper. Douglas McGregor is a key figure, because he popularized Maslow within the business community. McGregor saw the potential for the hierarchy of needs to be applied by managers, but for ease of translation he deliberately ignored many of the nuances and qualifications that Maslow had articulated. To cut a long story short, McGregor’s simplified version is the theory that appears in management textbooks today, and most criticisms of Maslow’s theory are critiques of McGregor’s interpretation of Maslow.

Question: Did McGregor create the pyramid? Or if not, who did?

No pyramid appears in McGregor’s writing. Keith Davis wrote a widely-used management textbook in 1957 that illustrated the theory in the form of a series of steps in a right-angled triangle leading to a peak. The top level shows a suited executive raising a flag, reminiscent of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. But this representation of the theory did not catch on.

We traced the pyramid that we associate with the hierarchy of needs today to Charles McDermid, a consulting psychologist. It appeared in his 1960 article in Business Horizons ‘How money motivates men’ in which he argued the pyramid can be applied to generate “maximum motivation at the lowest cost”. We think McDermid’s pyramid was inspired by Davis’ representation, but it was McDermid’s image that took off. If there is an earlier pyramid, we did not find it.

Question: Is it right that you actually found no trace of Maslow framing his ideas in pyramid form? Where did you look, and how comprehensive was your search?

That’s correct. It was a comprehensive search. Maslow was a prolific writer. We examined all of his published books and articles that we could identify, as well as his personal diaries, which are published. John immersed himself in the Maslow archives at the Centre for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron in Ohio and examined many boxes of papers, letters, memos, and so forth. We found no trace of the pyramid in any of Maslow’s writings. Additionally, John went through pre1960 psychology textbooks for any discussions of Maslow. Most psych books in those times did not even mention Maslow.

Question: Why didn’t Maslow argue against the Pyramid once he saw it? He could have criticized it, right? I heard from someone who knew Maslow that he actually thought the pyramid on the back of the $1 bill was a fair representation of his theory.

Also, one of his students who took his course at Brooklyn College told me he would include a slide of the pyramid when he described his theory in class. So perhaps he was pleased with the iconic pyramid even if he didn’t invent the depiction himself?

Answer: Those are interesting questions. Maslow lived for 10 years after McDermid presented the pyramid. We found no evidence of Maslow challenging the pyramid at any time. We don’t think that’s because he regarded pyramid as an accurate representation. A more plausible explanation, which comes from our analysis of his personal diaries, is that aspects of his professional life were unravelling.

He felt underappreciated in psychology. The major research journals in psychology had been taken over by experimental studies, which depressed Maslow for their lack of creativity and insight. He also had more pragmatic concerns, suffering periods of ill health and financial difficulties. Key figures in the management community saw him as a guru and rolled out the red carpet. They gave him the recognition he felt he deserved. Furthermore, through speaking engagements and consulting, he could generate additional income. Seen in that light, it’s not surprising he went along with it.

Question: You wrote: “Inspiring the study of management and its relationship to creativity and the pursuit of the common good would be a much more empowering legacy to Maslow than a simplistic, 5-step, one-way pyramid.” I agree! It seems like Maslow’s original thinking about self-actualization is at odds with how business leaders treated the concept, right?

Definitely. Following the publication of Motivation and Personality in 1954, Maslow emerged as one of the few established psychologists to challenge the prevailing conformism of the 1950s. He spoke out on how large organizations and social conformity stifled individual self-expression. At times he was frustrated that the business community treated his theory of human nature as a means to a financial end–short-term profits–rather than the end which he saw, a more enlightened citizenry and society.

It would be great if students were encouraged to read what Maslow in the original. Students would better understand that motivating employees to be more productive at work was not the end that Maslow desired for the hierarchy of needs. He was concerned with creativity, freedom of expression, personal growth and fulfillment – issues that remain as relevant today in thinking about work, organizations, and our lives as they were in Maslow’s time.

State of the theory today

William Kremer and Claudia Hammond write

There is a further problem with Maslow’s work. Margie Lachman, a psychologist who works in the same office as Maslow at his old university, Brandeis in Massachusetts, admits that her predecessor offered no empirical evidence for his theory. “He wanted to have the grand theory, the grand ideas – and he wanted someone else to put it to the hardcore scientific test,” she says. “It never quite materialised.”

However, after Maslow’s death in 1970, researchers did undertake a more detailed investigation, with attitude-based surveys and field studies testing out the Hierarchy of Needs.

“When you analyse them, the five needs just don’t drop out,” says Hodgkinson. “The actual structure of motivation doesn’t fit the theory. And that led to a lot of discussion and debate, and new theories evolved as a consequence.”

In 1972, Clayton Alderfer whittled Maslow’s five groups of needs down to three, labelled Existence, Relatedness and Growth. Although elements of a hierarchy remain, “ERG theory” held that human beings need to be satisfied in all three areas – if that’s not possible then their energies are redoubled in a lower category. So for example, if it is impossible to get a promotion, an employee might talk more to colleagues and get more out of the social side of work.

More sophisticated theories followed. Maslow’s triangle was chopped up, flipped on its head and pulled apart into flow diagrams. Hodgkinson says that one business textbook has just been published which doesn’t mention Maslow, and there is a campaign afoot to have him removed from the next editions of others.

The absence of solid evidence has tarnished Maslow’s status within psychology too. But as a result, Lachman says, people miss seeing that he was responsible for a major shift of focus within the discipline.

“He really was ground-breaking in his thinking,” Lachman says. “He was saying that you weren’t acting on the basis of these uncontrollable, unconscious desires. Your behaviour was not just influenced by external rewards and reinforcement, but there were these internal needs and motivations.”

Abraham Maslow and the pyramid that beguiled business, William Kremer and Claudia Hammond, BBC World Service 9/1/2013

Links

Maslow’s Hierarchy: Separating Fact From Fiction

 

Female sexual anatomy

June 24, 2020 10:52 am

It is of critical importance for high school students to graduate high school with knowledge of how their bodies work. This includes sexual anatomy. In this resource we present anatomical information on external and internal female sexual anatomy.

There is a difference in student population between college level and high school level health and science classes. As such, we have taken care to select images that are anatomically correct yet not quite overt.

The vulva – external female sexual anatomy

The vulva includes

The inner and outer lips of the labia.

The clitoris.

The opening to the vagina (although the vagina itself is technically the long muscular opening moving back from this opening, see below.)

Vaginal glands, which are between the vulva and anus (the perineum).

The urethral opening. This is the opening to the urethra (the tube that carries urine outside of the body).

Image from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Above image from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Internal female reproductive system

Vagina (birth canal) – A muscular tube leading inside a woman’s body. Where sperm enters a woman. Also is where a baby is born from.

Cervix – The muscular wall at the end of the vagina. It has a tiny hole that sperm can swim through.

Uterus (womb) -A thick muscular organ. Has two purposes

(a) Allows sperm to pass, from the vagina, up towards the fallopian tubes

(b) If a woman becomes pregnant, the fetus will attach to the wall of the uterus and grow here.

Fallopian tubes – Tubes that connect the uterus to the ovary

(a) sperm swim up into these tubes. If the woman has recently released an egg, this is where the egg and sperm meet.

Ovary – these are where a woman’s eggs are stored. After puberty, women usually mature one egg a month.

Also see Human reproductive system

Also see Female reproductive system, Teens Health

.

consciousness

June 11, 2020 4:13 pm

It is easy to ask “what is the brain, and how does it work?” A much more difficult question is “what is the mind?,” and “what is consciousness?”

Introduction

Consciousness is “awareness or sentience of internal or external existence”.

Despite centuries of analyses, definitions, and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial. It is “at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives”.

Perhaps the only widely agreed notion about the topic is the intuition that it exists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness.

Sometimes “consciousness” is synonymous with ‘the mind’, other times just an aspect of mind.

In the past it was one’s “inner life”, the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition.

Today, with modern research into the brain it often includes any kind of experience, cognition, feeling or perception.

There might be different levels or orders of consciousness, or perhaps different kinds of consciousness – or just one kind with different features.

Other questions include whether only humans are conscious or all animals or even the whole universe. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises doubts whether the right questions are being asked.

( – Wikipedia, adapted, Consciousness)

Are there levels of consciousness?

Consciousness isn’t binary (It exists, or it doesn’t exist.)

Rather, it seems to exist on a smooth continuum from not at all, all the way up to what we humans experience.

There’s no reason to assume that our awareness & consciousness is the highest level – there may be higher levels, or different kids that we can’t imagine.

Image below from A better way to test for consciousness?

levels of consciousness cognitive development

How does this relate to our bodies?  What if we look at consciousness on the level of a person, and then down to smaller biological components?

Or what if we look at this on the level of a person, and then see how this changes when we look at how many people think when they interact?

“The scale problem of consciousness: Human conscious experience does not reflect information from every scale. Only information at a certain coarse-grained scale in the neural system is reflected in consciousness.”

Image from Chang, Acer & Biehl, Martin & Yu, Yen & Kanai, Ryota. (2019)
Information Closure Theory of Consciousness.

scale problem of consciousness

The hard problem of consciousness

“The meta-problem of consciousness is (to a first approximation) the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness.”

– Chalmers on the Meta-Problem

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how atoms and molecules work together to create a living being – like us! – that actually feels and experiences the world.

How does a living person – like us! – experience awareness? How can we feel alive, experience our own thoughts – when we are built out of parts that have no awareness at all?

How the brain works is one thing – that’s the (relatively!) “easy” problem. We already have learned much about the anatomy of the brain and what kind of cells it is made of.

We’re learning how information is sent from our eyes, ears, skin, etc. to the brain. We have even begin to learn how the brain mechanically follows the laws of physics to store, recall, and process information.

But how can we humans (and presumably, animals) experience qualia – instances of subjective, conscious experience?

The philosopher David Chalmers is the first to clearly and forcefully make people aware of what an amazingly hard question is, this hard problem of consciousness.

Easy problems are (relatively) easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function.

That is, regardless of how complex  the phenomena of easy problems may be, they can eventually be understood by following science as we have always known it.

But the hard problem of consciousness will “persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained”.

Chalmers, David (1995). “Facing up to the problem of consciousness”  Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 200–219.

On the other hand, the very existence of this hard problem is controversial. It has been accepted by many philosophers of mind but its existence is disputed by others.

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David J. Chalmers

Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness, David J. Chalmers

Consciousness as a State of Matter, Max Tegmark

Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug

Qualia Formalism in the Water Supply: Reflections on The Science of Consciousness 2018

Is consciousness an illusion?

(Text tba)

Has science shown that consciousness is an illusion?

Is Consciousness Real? Scientific American

The ‘me’ illusion: How your brain conjures up your sense of self

The consciousness illusion

There’s No Such Thing as Consciousness, According to Philosopher Daniel Dennett

Physical correlates of consciousness

If consciousness if real, then presumably it correlates to something going on in our brain.

What are the physical correlates of consciousness?

The controversial correlates of consciousness, George A. Mashour, Science 04 May 2018:
Vol. 360, Issue 6388, pp. 493-494, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat5616

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6388/493/tab-figures-data

Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown Over Consciousness Ideas: To make headway on the mystery of consciousness, some researchers are trying a rigorous new way to test competing theories. Philip Ball, 3/6/2019, Quanta Magazine

Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown Over Consciousness Ideas

Visualizing how consciousness might work

Consciousness might be explained by it being an emergent phenomenon,

Analogy – we can’t predict the existence or behavior of oceans from looking at a single molecule of water.

Yet when enough liquid water molecules come together, an ocean – with all of its complex behavior – emerges.

Perhaps consciousness is similar. It might emerge from the interplay of dynamics that we already are beginning to learn about.

“Psychologist and neuroscientist Grit Hein and Ernst Fehr from the Department of Economics, University of Zurich teamed up with Yosuke Morishima, Susanne Leiberg, Sunhae Sul and found that the way relevant brain regions communicate with each other is altered depending on the motives driving a specific behavioral choice.”

Hein G, Morishima Y, Leiberg S, Sul S, & Fehr E (2016). The brain’s functional network architecture reveals human motives. Science, 351 (6277), 1074-8 PMI

gif consciousness brain firing 4

and

Elucidating the Nature of Human Consciousness Through Art: interview with Greg Dunn

gif consciousness brain firing 3

Do we really need new physics to understand consciousness?

Are the laws of physics, as we currently understand them, truly insufficient to explain what consciousness is? Many philosophers and writers make this claim. If so then we would need to postulate, look for, and prove the existence of undiscovered laws of physics.

Many claims in this area have been raised over the last two centuries. But physicist Sean Carroll warns us to be very careful if we make any such claim.

He writes – “Consciousness and the Laws of Physics” is a new paper where I review how we understand physics pretty well, and consciousness not so well, so altering physics to account for consciousness should be a last resort. And that if you try to alter the ontology of the world by adding intrinsically mental aspects to it, *without* modifying the laws of physics, you don’t really explain anything at all. The very first thing any attempt to account for consciousness should do is to be honest about whether it implies a modification of the known laws of physics. If yes, be very specific about how the equations change; if no, you’re not helping.

Philosophical zombies

In physics and philosophy, one way to learn about something is to create a gedankenexperiment (“thought experiment.”).

It may be possible to learn more about minds and consciousness by creating philosophical/biological thought experiments. The most well known one is the question of the philosophical zombie:

A philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being who is physically identical to a normal human being, but completely lacks conscious experience. – David Chalmers.

If a philosophical zombie is possible, then conscious experience is independent of physical world.

This image from Masatoshi Yoshida the-hard-problem-of-consciousness

philosophical zombie consciousness

Consciousness and the universe

“The universe is sentient. We all know that. We are the sentient bit. What could consciousness be, except the universe witnessing itself?”

– Steven Moffat

“We believe that the universe itself is conscious in a way that we can never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the universe trying to understand itself.”

– J. Michael Straczynski

Related articles

Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals

Possible minds

Consciousness creep Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it

External articles

What Is Consciousness? Scientists are beginning to unravel a mystery that has long vexed philosophers, By Christof Koch, Scientific American, June 1, 2018

New Scientist articles

What Is Consciousness?

Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy

Consciousness. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Articles on consciousness from New Scientist

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? The Guardian (article), UK

Why we need to figure out a theory of consciousness. The Conversation

Science catalog & supplier list

May 17, 2020 2:13 am

Science catalogs

American Surplus and Supplies (Sciplus)
https://www.sciplus.com/

Arbor Scientific
https://www.arborsci.com/

Carolina
https://www.carolina.com/

Daydream Education (great science posters)
https://www.daydreameducation.com/

Delta Education (K-8)
https://www.deltaeducation.com/

Edmund Optics
https://www.edmundoptics.com/

Educational Innovations (Teachersource)
https://www.teachersource.com/

Fisher Scientific
https://www.fishersci.com/

Flinn Scientific
https://www.flinnsci.com/

Frey Scientific & CPO Science
http://www.freyscientific.com/

Hand2mind (K-8)
https://www.hand2mind.com/

Lab-aids
https://store.lab-aids.com/

Kelvin Educational
http://kelvin.com/

NASCO (STEM, STEAM products)
https://www.enasco.com/c/Education-Supplies/Steam

PASCO
https://www.pasco.com/index.cfm

Pittsco
https://www.pitsco.com/

School Speciality
https://www.schoolspecialty.com/?param=ssi

STEMfinity (technology, engineering, robotics)
https://www.stemfinity.com/

ThermoFisher Scientific (Massachusetts)
https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/order.html

Trend Enterprises posters
https://www.trendenterprises.com/home.cfm

Vernier

Home Page

VWR
https://us.vwr.com/store/product?keyword=educational%20classroom%20kits

Wards’s Science / SK Science Kit & Boreal Laboratories
https://www.wardsci.com/

 

Easy labs and manipulatives

May 12, 2020 5:22 pm

Easy labs and manipulatives

DNA protein translation manipulative

Astronomy

TBA

Biology

Modeling DNA with Legos

Osmosis & Diffusion labs

Teaching protein translation

Chemistry

Precipitates: Coca Cola and milk

Teaching about the Periodic Table

Creating the periodic table

Element Data Cards Lab instructions

Element Data Cards the cards themselves

Chemistry labs

Electrochemistry: Two potato clock

Organic molecule models

TBA

Earth Science

TBA

Physics

CPO Kinematics labs

Reaction time lab

Friction lab

Gravity and tides: Why Is There a Tidal Bulge Opposite the Moon?

Inertial mass and gravitational mass lab

Magnetism labs

Magnetism: Lenz’s law demo

Measuring data with smartphone apps

Engineering/Simple machines

Catapult and Trebuchet build project

Hovercraft build project

Mousetrap racers

General science

Teaching science with augmented reality

________________

Exploratorium Science Snacks
(San Francisco, California)

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CPO Physics resources for teachers only

May 9, 2020 8:27 am

CPO Physics resources for teachers only

1

cpo-physics-skills-and-practice-worksheetsDownload

2

cpo-investigations-foundations-physical-science-ebookDownload

3

cpo-optics-labsDownload

Planet of the Humans: A critique of the documentary

May 8, 2020 3:32 pm

A critique of Planet of the Humans, a 2020 documentary film by Michael Moore which implies that renewable energy is a hoax that helps the fossil fuel industry, something which the scientific community disagrees with.

Planet of the Humans Michael Moore

‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal

By Bill McKibben

I’ll tell the story chronologically, starting a couple of weeks ago on the eve of the 50th Earth Day. I’d already recorded my part for the Earth Day Live webcast, interviewing the great indigenous activists Joye Braum and Tara Houska about their pipeline battles. And then the news arrived that Oxford University — the most prestigious educational institution on planet earth — had decided to divest from fossil fuels.

It was one of the great victories in that grinding eight-year campaign, which has become by some measures the biggest anti-corporate fight in history [but] in the next couple of hours came a very different piece of news. People started writing to tell me that the filmmaker Michael Moore had just released a movie called Planet of the Humans on YouTube. That wasn’t entirely out of the blue — I’d been hearing rumors of the film and its attacks on me since the summer before, and I’d taken them seriously.

Various colleagues and I had written to point out that they were wrong; Naomi had in fact taken Moore aside in an MSNBC greenroom and restated what she had already laid out to him in writing. But none of that had apparently worked; indeed, from what people were now writing to tell me, I was the main foil of the film. I put together a quick response, and I hoped that it would blow over.

… Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”

That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous.

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A growing number of scientists and environmentalists are calling this documentary false and misleading. This collection of responses is being curated by getenergysmartnow.

Definitely worth a read with time well spent on the follow-up This is where hard work got us (another post about the bad film).

For #EarthDay, Michael Moore (@MMFlint) releases fundamentally misleading film provides some of the initial expert Earth Day tweets making clear specific factual errors and misdirections.

Distributor pulls Michael Moore’s (@MMFlint’s) #PlanetOfTheHumans due to truthiness & errors discusses Film For Action’s ending its role in the film’s distribution with Josh Fox’s and a number of scientists’ letter to FFA that might have sparked this action. NOTE: FFA changed their minds and reposted the film.

[4/26/2020 addition]: Films For Action’s Statement on Planet of the Humans Why we took it down. Why we ultimately decided to put it back up (including this note). Plus our critiques and thoughts on the film. makes clear that FFA thought it was putting up an accurate film, was shocked to discover the extent of its inaccuracies and pulled the film, and then reinstated it due to science-misinformer pressure.

Michael Moore’s dangerous documentary by Paul Scott, an authority on EVs. He was featured in Who Killed the Electric Car? the 2006 documentary distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, and consulted for the follow up, Revenge of the Electric Car.

Michael Moore should be embarrassed. As Executive Producer on “Planet of the Humans”, an environmental hit-piece like none I’ve ever seen, he has done great disservice to the environmental movement.

Anyone interested in saving the planet who watched this poor excuse of a film, would come away thinking solar and wind energy were bad, and electric cars were horrible. I’m not kidding. They cherry pick information from 2011 on the Volt from ignorant people, and do the same for a small solar system installed a decade ago while representing this as state of the art. Huge lies were told through omission in this film!

Film Review: Forget about PLANET OF THE HUMANS by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore by Neal Livingston, documentary film maker and environmental activist.

Planet of the Humans uses the most worn out editing techniques to emotionally manipulate the viewer. We see windmills from the early 1970’s, the early days of wind power, which are long gone.  We see on the street facile interviews, with film editing techniques to make environmental leaders look dumb. We see dying orangutans as the film ends to make you cry. But nowhere does the film show us how to get off fossil fuels, by showing us where renewables are working. Nor does the film help us to stop forest destruction, by showing us places that have taken steps to protect nature, and there are many places that have done so.

Environmentalists demand that Michael Moore’s anti-EV film be retracted by Bradley Berman, Eletrek

Michael Moore’s environment film a slap in the face on Earth Day (on Medium), Cathy Cowan Becker, provides a substantive, documented, thoughtful review

instead of attacking fossil-fuel based system we live in and the politicians who are fiddling while Earth burns, what does Michael Moore go after? Environmentalists and renewable energy. It not only makes no sense, but it’s toxic to the environmental movement. It feels like a slap in the face from a one-time friend to have this released on Earth Day. ….  spends most of its time attacking the major solution to lowering carbon emissions — renewables — and the environmentalists and environmental groups that spend their time trying to get our government to move toward clean energy. In doing so, the film repeats some of the ugliest climate denial tropes and provides fodder to the worst climate denial groups in the country. … When the “global warming is a hoax” crowd is touting your film, it’s time to examine yourself.

Planet of the Humans – A Critique, Julián Eduardo González Martínez,

I had the opportunity to watch “Planet of the Humans”, a new documentary directed by Jeff Gibbs, and sponsored by Michael Moore (it is free to watch on YouTube at the time of writing). As an engineer working on the field of sustainable energy, I reckoned it might be worth a watch, and ended up sorely disappointed with the result … In the end, “Planet of the Humans” leaves the casual viewer scrambling for answers, wondering if we have been sold a solution on an idea that in no way will help humanity move towards a post-oil society. However, poorly researched points, a messy and sprawiling plotline that intertwines technical truths with “alternative facts”, half-baked arguments, and a dose of cheap “eco-pity” footage, leaves this documentary on shaky grounds at best.

10 Reasons « Planet of the Humans » Gets Everything Wrong on Climate Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs’ new climate movie is a disgrace for both science and filmmaking, Benjamin Tincq,

« Planet of the Humans » achieves the exceptional feat of starting from a such great premise, only to deliver an absurd, scientifically illiterate conspiracy theory. In a nutshell, Gibbs’ conclusion is that clean energy is even worse than fossil fuels, that humanity is doomed, and that severe population control (voluntary or not) is the only option we have left to prevent the extinction of our entire species.

27 Apr 2020

6 Reasons Why “Planet of the Humans” is a Disaster of Misinformation, Ben Wehrman, is a well-organized and devastating laydown of POTH making clear how it exemplifies a FUD disinformation approach. Wehrman cogently discusses these six problem areas:

  1. Misrepresenting: “The first major problem with Planet of the Humans is its misrepresentation of the clean energy movement. In short, the producers lump ALL non-fossil fuel energy sources as “renewables,” when in truth this is simply not the case.”
  2. Short-sighted: “POTH focuses on a mix of “fake” renewables that have long been dismissed by the scientific community, and misrepresentative examples from the true solutions like wind, solar, and EVs.In doing this, POTH also avoids all consideration of the future”
  3. Horrible interview sourcing: “misrepresentation and short-sightedness of the clean energy movement can be quickly traced to the fact that the filmmakers don’t interview anyone who is even remotely qualified to speak on the matter.” Wehrman documents lots of festival organizers and attendees but no scientists, engineers, nor ….
  4. Miscellaneous skepticism, lies, and other BS: Green reached into “the hat of stone-aged FUD arguments, and ask[ed] them to college students & street hippies until [he had] enough “GOTCHA” moments to make a movie.” Outdated and deceptive commentary re solar, wind, batteries, EVs, ….
  5. It’s aimless: All that FUD to result at identifying and discussing (other than a Malthusian path of population reduction) any actual (set of) solutions and paths forward.
  6. Follow-up fail: After release, Moore made clear that the film had been (in essence) done for years but he was unable to secure a major distributor.

After this substantive takedown, Wehrman is reasonable enough to spend time to discuss many things POTH got right. But, on reflection, that a discussion requires 1,000s of words laying down failures before legitimately being able to discuss positives speaks exactly to the introduction to this annotated bibliography of review posts.

The wheel of first-time climate dudes (Or, alternatively: Why I don’t want to review Michael Moore’s climate change documentary) from Emily Atkin (Heated) isn’t a review but highlights how this fits within a long record of poorly informed (white male) people getting traffic for mediocre (often wrong) climate-related work while expert/experienced women/POC are left on the sidelines without the same mass media attention.

Really, the reason I don’t want to review this movie is because I’m tired of having to spend hours consuming and debunking messy-yet-blockbuster climate reporting from dudes who seemingly woke up a few mornings beforehand and decided they were climate journalists.

I feel like a hamster on a wheel: The Wheel of First Time Climate Dudes.

[Note: This is a Jeff Gibbs’ film and he didn’t wake up just a few mornings ago. Actually, a key part of the film’s problems is the accumulated nature of arguments and data seemingly from his thinking over a decade ago that wasn’t updated for today’s changed realities. See Ketan Joshi’s excellent discussion of this linked above.]

Really, Michael Moore? I watched your climate movie, and I have some questions. Emily Atkin, Heated. After having (see above) written a perspective before seeing the film, Atkin’s caved in and watched it due to the buzz and hearing of its impacts (such as people leaving 350.org due to its disinformation) … and found POTH to be even worse than feared.

Planet of the Humans reminded me of an argumentative essay from a lazy college freshman—as if, after a few hours of studying, he realized there wasn’t enough evidence to support the argument he chose for the assignment. But he was so wedded to the original idea, and didn’t want to waste the hours of work he did, so he overcompensated by being an overly aggressive narrator instead of starting over with a new argument.

Planet of the Humans: a film review Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore somehow make a climate change film without involving climate scientists, Solar Nerd, starts with “what the film gets right” and then turns to blowing apart Gibbs’/POTH‘s “strawman argument” “that that renewable energy not only isn’t better than fossil fuels, but is harmful because it’s the result of some kind of grand conspiracy between financial interests and big environmental groups to distract us from the real solution” of population control.

It’s a strawman argument. Climate researchers and the enviromental groups he trashes aren’t saying that green energy is the only thing we need to do. It’s widely acknowledged that the climate solution will need to be an all-of-the-above approach. Yes, that includes technical solutions like green energy and possibly even carbon sequestration, but also big changes to how live.

The post then uses substantive material to “pick apart some [of POTH’s] bad arguments and logical fallacies” but concludes with a frustration that all too many others share:

I realized that the thing I hate the most about it isn’t that it gets the science wrong, egregious as that is.

No, the worst part of this movie is that Gibbs thinks he’s made some kind of big revelation – that he’s asking Big Questions nobody has asked before.

So many have been asking and struggling with how to answer the “Big Questions” of POTH and, unlike Gibbs and Moore, have evolved with interactions and learning from that dialectic. Too bad Gibbs seemed to have disdain from learning from, documenting, and giving credit to a few decades of that process.

Planet of the Humans, a weak documentary on sustainable energy, Thijs Ten Brinck, Wattisduurzaam (original in Dutch), faces the pain that so many actually informed and expert people face

I don’t recommend watching the movie.

I would prefer to ignore this film. Unfortunately, experience with shock docs on energy is that climate skeptics and other contrarians spread bullshit like viruses. This increases the chance that people with a more pleasant attitude to life and society will also be exposed to the fallacies in the film.

Thus, a question: Is it best to ignore or better to identify failures/faults seeking to inoculate some portion of society to this deceit and equip people to deal with those duped by Gibbs and Moore? Brinck joined the crowd (as per above) seeking to foster herd immunity to POTH’s FUD disinformation. Brinck provides a concise and clearly structured highlighting of issues with the concluding section entitled “Lots of hand waving. No substance.”

No, Michael Moore did not make a documentary called “Planet of the Humans” by Greg Laden makes clear that I — like so many others — got something fundamentally wrong. POTH is not a Moore Film — it was written and directed by Jeff Gibbs and Moore doesn’t even appear in it.

Many people love and respect Michael Moore and his work, and a large number of individuals have, in my experience, decided that since this is a Michael Moore joint, it must be fabulous, and it must be true.

So, I say this to you, Michael Moore fan: This documentary sucks, but it is OK that it sucks. This is a documentary by Jeff Gibbs, not by Michael Moore. So, it is OK to pay attention to the many voices of critique.

28 April 2020

Michael Moore produced a film about climate change that’s a gift to Big Oil: Planet of the Humans deceives viewers about clean energy and climate activists, Leah Stokes, Vox, lays out why this film should have been “left on the cutting room floor”.

the film, directed by Jeff Gibbs, a long-time Moore collaborator, is not the climate message we’ve all been waiting for — it’s a nihilistic take, riddled with errors about clean energy and climate activism. With very little evidence, it claims that renewables are disastrous and that environmental groups are corrupt.

What’s more, it has nothing to say about fossil fuel corporations, who have pushed climate denial and blocked progress on climate policy for decades. Given the film’s loose relationship to facts, I’m not even sure it should be classified as a documentary.

Babies, Bathwater, and Planet Human, Rabett’s Run, tips the hat to other reviews and highlights three points: POTH put ideology before facts; biomass isn’t always horrific even if/as much of it is; and, that there is a “need [for] an “antiracists for population control” movement.”

Review: Planet of the Humans, Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute, is the most favorable of the posts included here (yet) with a recommendation (that I disagree with) to see the film even while discussing its problems.

The film is low on nuance, but our global climate and energy dilemma is all shades of gray. Gibbs seems to say that renewables are a complete waste of time. I would say, they are best seen as a marginal transitional strategy for industrial societies. Given climate change and the fact that fossil fuels are depleting, finite resources, it appears that if we want to maintain any sort of electrical energy infrastructure in the future, it will have to be powered by renewables—hydro, wind, or solar. … The future will be renewable; there simply isn’t any other option. What is very much in question, however, is the kind of society renewable energy can support.

Planet of the Humans Comes This Close to Actually Getting the Real Problem, Then Goes Full Ecofascism, Brian Kahn, Gizmondo, opens generously but then Kahn actually watched the film …

Michael Moore is a dude known for provocation. Every documentary he drops is designed to paint a world of sharp contrasts with clear bad guys. They’re designed to get a reaction and get people talking, so in some ways, him dropping a documentary he executive produced trashing renewable energy on Earth Day makes total sense.

I’ll leave the film criticism to those wiser than me … but I will say this: The movie is deeply flawed in both its premise, proposed solutions, and who gets to voice them.

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