Links - 24th June 2019 (1)

Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won't Tell Me How - "These friend suggestions go far beyond mundane linking of schoolmates or colleagues. Over the years, I’d been told many weird stories about them, such as when a psychiatrist told me that her patients were being recommended to one another, indirectly outing their medical issues.What makes the results so unsettling is the range of data sources—location information, activity on other apps, facial recognition on photographs—that Facebook has at its disposal to cross-check its users against one another, in the hopes of keeping them more deeply attached to the site"

Algerian martyrs bear witness to Christian-Muslim peace, Pope Francis says - "The lives of 19 religious men and women martyred during the Algerian civil war are a testament to God's plan of love and peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims, Pope Francis said."
Wut.

Intersectional Feminism Precludes Epistemic Humility - "Intersectionality presupposes, first, that all those in the Western world who are not wealthy, white, male, straight and able-bodied suffer from structural oppression. Second, it argues that the intensity of the oppression endured by an individual increases as the number of his or her intersections increase. (Thus, a black female is more oppressed than a black male, a black lesbian is more oppressed than a straight black female, and so on.) Third, intersectionality attributes all or most statistical disparities between racial/gender/ethnic groups to systemic barriers: blacks lag behind whites because of racism, women lag behind men because of sexism, etc... they have turned intersectional feminism into an ideology impervious to empirical challenge, leaving no room for competing interpretations of inequality. For intersectionality possesses only one tool to explain inequality—structural discrimination. It has a ready-made schema to explain all disparities: X group has oppressed Y group, which means that Y’s social outcomes are worse... Since discrimination is the sole analytic tool employed by intersectional theory, all competing interpretations of inequality are summarily rejected... A more epistemically humble way to study inequality would be to treat it as the supremely complex social phenomenon that it is. One might do so by examining the myriad factors that give rise to it, which is precisely what center-left, centrist and center-right theorists of inequality do. Consider the case of Thomas Sowell, a staunchly conservative and highly influential commentator on racial inequality. Sowell has never disputed the claim that structural discrimination can cause group disparities. Instead, he has argued that disparities alone do not establish the existence of discrimination. He sees discrimination as one cause of inequality among many others. The extent to which discrimination can causally explain disparities is for Sowell a matter of empirical investigation. Thus, for him, scholars who produce research showing that discrimination causally explains a specific disparity must be engaged. In marked contrast to the intersectional perspective, the Sowellian worldview necessitates epistemic humility with regard to matters of inequality."

What I Learned As A Liberal Lesbian At Fox News - "Despite what you might think, the staff at Fox News is not 100% ultraconservative. Like most media organizations headquartered in New York City, many of its employees are urban and urbane liberals–maybe slightly more conservative-leaning than at other outfits, but far from atypical among tri-state-area media professionals. See, one important thing I learned from my time there is that no place is entirely its stereotype... By working at Fox, I realized how I had stereotyped conservatives–how I assumed they were all heartless and hateful and, thus, I hated them for it. It took being the “only” one in the room to see my own biases. I had to be the weirdo to notice how normal everyone else really was... Back at Fox, I didn’t expect Sean Hannity to be nice to anyone–especially not to me–but he was, too.You can judge me for having those biased expectations about everyone at Fox, and you probably should. The whole thing was a wake-up moment for me–to such an extent I wrote a book about coming to terms with my own hate, and what we can all do about the hate in our minds and in the world around us. But that experience was only possible because I had a unique vantage point in the organization that pushed me to challenge my own ideas and assumptions... Roger Ailes ran the only program in cable news to hire and train women and people of color in the industry and, at the time, had one of the most racially diverse newsrooms I’d ever seen... The broader lesson I took away is the importance of inclusion and connection. Studies show that we are less likely to hold conscious or unconscious biases toward groups if we’ve interacted with those “others.” Which means, at the very least, we need more opportunities to live, work, and socialize together—an important goal in the face of neighborhoods and schools that remain deeply racially, economically, and politically segregated... It’s vital that we understand diversity and inclusion as not only good for the bottom line, but good for our society and democracy, helping us all connect and understand each other’s unique value."

Random thoughts - "Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.
Some people seem to think that we live in more "liberated" times, when all that has happened is that one set of taboos has been replaced by another and more intolerantly enforced set of taboos...
It is hard to think of any word that has confused more issues than the word "rights." Nowadays, almost anything that anybody wants is called a "right" -- a magic word that does away with the need for evidence, logic or even common sense.
Many of the same people who are urging us to get out of Iraq are also urging us to go into Darfur. They say we should "do something" about the murderous horrors in Darfur. But you cannot simply "do something." You have to do something specific. Those who are urging intervention won't take the responsibility for specifying what we are to do -- and at what cost in American lives...
We can only hope that the rumor that Israel is going to take out Iran's nuclear weapons facilities is true. If they do, Israel will be widely condemned by governments that are breathing a sigh of relief that they did."
From 2007, Thomas Sowell

Isang Yun - Wikipedia - "Isang Yun, also spelled Yun I-sang (17 September 1917 – 3 November 1995), was a Korean-born composer who made his later career in West Germany... From October 1959, Yun had been living in Krefeld, Freiburg im Breisgau and Köln (Cologne). With a grant from the Ford Foundation, he and his family settled in West Berlin in 1964. However, due to acts of espionage, he was kidnapped by the South Korean secret service from West Berlin on 17 June 1967. Via Bonn he was taken to Seoul. In prison he was tortured, attempted suicide, forced to confess to espionage, threatened with the death sentence - and in the first instance sentenced to life imprisonment"
When South Korea was like the North

Why do Indians generally not eat pork? - Quora - "In Hinduism, domestic pork meat is forbidden as it is mostly fed on wastage & filth, but the wild boar is not prohibited in the Hindu culture as per the texts"

Nick Cannon Posts Old Homophobic Tweets from Female Comedians - "Cannon has resurfaced old tweets from Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman & Chelsea Handler that used homophobic language following the backlash against Hart... Hart did eventually go on to apologize.“I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscar’s""

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Netanyahu's Likely Victory - "[On India] We follow an education system that was set up by the British when they ruled this country. They don't follow it anymore. So why do ?... Last year, a survey by a leading recruitment firm found that 94% of Indian engineering graduates were unemployable"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Sudanese street protests - "Calcutta is India's most colonial of cities. Its most famous building is the Victoria Memorial. It has streets with names like Shakespeare Sarani. Clubs where you still need to wear a jacket and tie for dinner. And restaurants where eager customers queue up for a prawn cocktail. It was once the first capital of the British Raj. So it's no surprise that people here are following Brexit with close attention... There are constant posts on Indian social media about Brexit... His wife added, we've stopped watching soap operas. Instead, we just watched the latest from the British Parliament. We thought our politicians were bad but yours are even worse"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, The beginning of a new era in Japan - "It's now a uniform on both American coasts. In the east vests pace up and down Wall Street. And in the West, it usually means hello, I'm a man in tech. I put its success here down to its flexibility. For the techie proud to tell his colleagues about his 4am daily gym session, the vest keeps them warm but doesn't hide the arms they've been working so hard on. For the larger man in tech, the vest does a very good job of comfortably hiding any strange shirt butts. The vest is such a status symbol here that when you arrive at San Francisco Airport, you can buy one for $50 from a vending machine in arrivals. The airport says the machine makes around $10,000 every month"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Gut feelings - "The idea of a link between our brain and our gut isn't new. Far from it. A handful of doctors at the turn of the 20th century found that their patients melancholia improved when they added fermented milk drinks to their diets. But it was 100 years before the notion of a gut-brain axis took root in the scientific mainstream. In 2004, researchers at Kyushu University in Japan showed that germ free mice, mice that had been engineered and raised in a completely sterile environment, released twice the amount of stress hormone when distressed, than otherwise identical, normal mice...
You go to a health food store. And the reality is, they are the modern day snake oil merchants, many of them, I mean, 90% of the products in health food stores have no proven therapeutic benefit. Most of these have never been tested at all in relation to mood. In fact, some of them haven't been tested in relation to anything. Not only have they not been tested, but it's not even certain that many of them survived storage on the shelf, that they're even alive when one ingests them. And clearly our stomachs are full of acid. And the question is, do these bacteria always get through the acid in the stomach? And of course, the reality is, many of them do not. So there are a lot of spurious claims."

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, How to feed the Falklands - "I was talking to a farmer the other day... We'd love to keep more chickens but actually it's more expensive to import chicken food from the UK than it is to import chicken from Chile"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Great Irish Famine - "Most people died of diseases rather than different of starvation. Some of those diseases were, of course, closely linked to malnutrition, such as dysentery, and scurvy, and edema and marasmus since on those, those were all related to the lack of food. But then a lot of people died of typhus, what was known at the time as fever, and you didn't have to be hungry to die of typhus. Typhus was caused by lice, and by dirt. And the reason people died of that is that once the famine struck, once hunger became a problem, people start to move around, you get people migrating, people wash less, people change their clothes less...
When the potato did not fail, the potato was good food. And the Irish were relatively healthy. And by the standards of the time, even though they were very poor, they seem to have lived relatively long lives, compared to say, people in France or Italy or in other parts of Europe, so the potato was a kind of health food. The trouble is that, as you mentioned, also, about a third of the population consumed virtually nothing else. And when the potato failed, there was no food then you could trade down to, like, you know, other cases where there were famines, people might be depending on say wheat, and they could trade down to rye. But that was not a possibility in Ireland in 1845, 1846, 1847."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Evolution of Teeth - "[On sharks] Not only do they have teeth in their mouth, they also have teeth in their skin... the teeth in the mouth of sharks and an all fishes actually are almost identical, I mean, almost identical to the teeth that we have. And the genes that make those teeth are almost equivalent across the board. So we're looking at a unit tooth within a shark that's incredibly conserved in the way it's made, which is great news for us, because that means we can learn a lot about sharks and how they make their teeth. And at some point, that information will be useful for humans and human health...
In mammals, it seems that we have reduced the number of teeth that we make, because we're more sort of focused, I think, on forming teeth in a specific shape for a specific function. So mammals have a relatively specialized diet for the most part, and their teeth are made for function, right? So they're made for a specific diet. If you think about cows that chew a card, and they sort of like to chew and grind grass down, they really need their molars to work together. This is called occlusion. The fact that molars are shaped perfectly to align with each other means that they can actually process that grass down to a cud and actually get all the nutrients out of it. If they didn't have those teeth aligning, then they wouldn't be able to generate the nutrients from the grass... We have incisors, we have canines, we have pre molars and molars. They're all very different shapes, because they will do slightly different things, if you think about our incisors, incisors are really there to sort of grasp the prey. So to take whatever it is we're eating, and pass it through to the back of our mouth, where it can then be processed by our molars, right? So we're omnivorous. So our molars are really good at chewing plant matter and also chewing meat. But there are some vertebrates, for example, cats that have molars that aren't like ours, that aren’t like cows, they're more blade like and they're there to shear and to slice through meat, and muscle. So, so we have a huge, I think mammals are incredible that they have a huge diversity of of dental form... mammals specifically have have targeted occlusion as a really sort of important sort of mechanism. So if we did replace our teeth multiple times, the chances of our molars misaligning is quite high. And so some vertebrates wouldn't survive. Because if their molars don't align, then they can't generate the nutrients from their food...
Taste buds definitely evolved before teeth did… this link between taste buds in the jaw and how teeth may have taken over that space. And what's intriguing about taste buds is that they're incredibly regenerative... in mammals, I think maybe 10% of the cells in a tastebud in mammals is replaced every day. And so they're incredibly regenerative. The same genes that are involved in the development of taste buds, that they are in teeth. So we're actually starting to think about taste buds as sort of almost like a forerunner for teeth"