Links - 4th July 2020 (2)

The National Museum's Police Bicentennial Exhibition Is A Crime Against History - "Long story short: Singapore was very unsafe then, but very safe now. Along the way, we got radios, Gurkhas, FBI-style shooting and Crimewatch.This would be okay if I was attending a Singapore Police Force Career Fair, but I feel that a bicentennial history exhibition hosted by the National Museum should be held to a higher standard.Ultimately, my disappointment boils down to this: SPF200 does a disservice to Singapore’s history, by painting everything in shades of black and white, order and chaos, violence and safety—by reducing the fairly complicated issue of law and order into the usual story of upward progress. Even its title ‘Frontier Town To Safest City’ recalls the ‘Fishing Village To Thriving Metropolis’ cliche... I get it. It’s the SPF’s exhibit. It’s their birthday. There is limited space and budget. However, birthdays are not just celebratory occasions, but also a time to take stock and reflect, no? As it stands, the show is an exercise in strategic amnesia."

What to expect from the 2020s: the world’s big thinkers make their predictions | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Sunday Times - "The big mistake is to think that the future will simply be an extension of the present. As the author of The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, points out with his idea of “negative forecasting”, it is almost certain that the most recent developments are the most likely to fail. They have not been tested by time. The iPhone in your pocket still seems like modern magic, but so did the lowly iPod not that long ago...
Everyone wonders why year after year nothing changes for minorities, but that is why. We are posturing ourselves as progressive while ignoring the real issues. I think that once the mechanics of Brexit are out of the way, there will be a dialling down of hostile identity arguments and a return to a traditional British muddling along. I’m not particularly optimistic about the US when it comes to racial integration, because I don’t think it cares much itself. It’s a country founded on a frontier myth. My expectations of Britain, however, are high. This is the only country in the world where a sizeable mixed-race population has come about as a consequence of love rather than coercion and slavery...
You want to write a book that survives at least two or three decades? The instinct is to write something that is geared to the future. No. Make sure the contents are relevant both today and at some well-defined point in the past — say 30 years ago. The book is thus likely to be relevant in 30 years. Conversely, if you want the book to die, make sure it would have been of no interest to someone in the past...
The hiatus in manned spaceflight exemplifies that when there’s no economic or political demand, there’s a big lag between what is actually done and what could be achieved... Later this century, thrill-seekers may establish “bases” independent from the Earth. But don’t ever expect mass emigration. It’s a dangerous delusion to think space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We have to solve these here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared with terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment as clement as even the Antarctic or the top of Everest. There’s no “Planet B” for ordinary risk-averse people."

Professor’s online students prefer when he teaches classes as anime girl - "In a bid to get students to pay attention in online classes, a college professor in Shanghai has been transforming himself into different digital avatars for live-streamed and recorded lessons"

Gabriele Galimberti photographs children with their toys in his book Toy Stories: Photos of Children From Around the World and Their Favorite Things (PHOTOS).

Grandmothers Posing with their Signature Dish - "Regina Lifumbo, 53 years old – Mchinji, Malawi
Finkubala (Caterpillar in tomato sauce)"

Satoshi Uematsu: Japanese man who killed 19 at disabled facility sentenced to death - ""I am aware that this is an outrageous thing to say," he wrote, adding that he dreamed "of a world where disabled people with severe difficulties socializing as well as severe difficulties at home are allowed to be peacefully euthanized.""

Japanese man who killed 19 at centre for disabled sentenced to death - "Police said Uematsu, described by neighbours as polite and helpful, was motivated by a deep-seated hatred of people with disabilities. He told police after his arrest that society would be better off if disabled people “disappeared”.... After his arrest, Uematsu expressed no remorse, telling the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper that people with mental disabilities “have no heart”, and “there’s no point in living” for them. “I had to do it for the sake of society,” he said of the attack."

‘Don’t call back those numbers’: Toronto woman warns others of call-back phone scam - "Since mid-December, Sharon Leamy has received as many as 15 calls a day from international phone numbers, all part of a call-back scam commonly known as Wangiri fraud.“It started December 16 — I started getting calls from strange numbers that I didn’t identify and they were just constant,” she said.“I would block them and as soon as I blocked them, I would get a new call from a different country.”Leamy said the calls became so frequent, she thought the only way to stop them was to call back and have them remove her number... “There was a woman speaking very softly – almost in an apologetic tone and in a foreign language – she kept talking and talking and talking. I realized at that point that this was a scam.” Leamy called her phone company and they informed her that she had been charged $10 for a 10-second phone call.“There doesn’t seem to be any boundaries. They call and wake me up in the morning and I have had to learn to turn my phone off at night”"

Are Women of Color Above Reproach? - "In the wake of President Trump’s controversial tweets about congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayana Pressley, most of the criticism has been that Trump’s comments were racist, sexist, etc., etc. Because it's far easier to launch canned accusations than to address the substance of what he said... Are we really supposed to accept the notion that AOC, Tlaib, Omar, and Pressley have done nothing to deserve criticism? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accuses America of running concentration camps, and lies about conditions at migrant detention centers for political points. Ayanna Pressley, while speaking at the left-wing Netroots Nation conference on Sunday, said that Democrats don't need "any more black faces that don't want to be a black voice." Ilhan Omar has made repeated anti-Semitic remarks, including the accusation that “Jewish money controls Congress,” and on Monday refused to condemn al-Qaeda. Back in May, Rasida Tlaib bizarrely stated: "There’s always kind of a calming feeling [...] when I think of the Holocaust.” These people may have been elected by their districts but they are an embarrassment to the U.S. Congress. These women are not part of the mainstream of America. They believe America is evil, they are racialists and anti-Semites. Let’s stop pretending they are garden-variety freshman members of Congress. Irrespective of their race and sex, they’re dangerous women who have been propped up by the media as de facto leaders of the Democratic Party. The power they have can’t be overstated. Criticism from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez forced Joe Biden to flip-flop on a number of issues. Yet any time they are criticized, the knee-jerk response to hurl accusations of racism and sexism at the one criticizing them. Recently, we’ve seen this happen internally in the Democratic Party, when AOC accused Nancy Pelosi of racism, with similar accusations being leveled against Joe Biden from Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris. It’s the default attack setting of contemporary Democrats, even against their own. This is what happens after years of the left capitalizing on outrage culture and victim culture in order to increase and maintain their political power.  This is why they want minority and female candidates to run for office. Not because of some noble push for diversity, but to put out candidates they feel are untouchable because to attack them is to invite accusations of racism or sexism. Let’s not forget that the left spent eight years telling us that if you disagreed with Barack Obama you were racist. Then when Hillary ran for president, if you didn’t like her you were sexist. As someone who has written two fact-based exposes on Barack Obama’s presidency I know very well how this works. I’ve been called a racist regularly for a decade. The left learned a while ago it’s easier to just hurl accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/xenophobia/fill-in-the-blank-ophobia than it is to debate issues on merit.  We can’t talk about immigration without accusations of xenophobia. We can’t talk about religious liberty without accusations of homophobia. We can’t talk about biological differences between male and female without accusations of transphobia. This is what fascism in America really looks like in 2019: Silence the opposition with accusations of bigotry. Trump knows this game, and clearly won’t be intimidated by it"

Highway operator blames errant contractor for ‘Muslim toilet’ sign - "A sign purporting to restrict toilets to Muslims at a rest area on the East Coast Expressway (Phase 2) was installed by a contractor without the knowledge of operator LPT2 Sdn Bhd"

Nick Brown Smelled Bull - "A butterfly graph, the calling card of chaos theory mathematics, purporting to show the tipping point upon which individuals and groups “flourish” or “languish.” Not a metaphor, no poetic allusion, but an exact ratio: 2.9013 positive to 1 negative emotions. Cultivate a “positivity ratio” of greater than 2.9-to-1 and sail smoothly through life; fall below it, and sink like a stone.The theory was well credentialed. Now cited in academic journals over 350 times, it was first put forth in a 2005 paper by Barbara Fredrickson, a luminary of the positive psychology movement, and Marcial Losada, a Chilean management consultant, and published in the American Psychologist, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the largest organization of psychologists in the U.S.But Brown smelled bullshit. A universal constant predicting success and fulfillment, failure and discontent? “In what world could this be true?” he wondered...  Friedman worries about “faddish things” in his field. As a disciple of the humanistic psychological tradition, he was chagrined when positive psychology erupted onto the scene in what he calls “a burst of negativity.”In 2000, writing in the American Psychologist, Martin Seligman and fellow positive psychology pioneer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote that humanistic psychology failed to “attract much of a cumulative empirical base,” that it, “spawned myriad therapeutic self-help movements,” and that the legacy of the movement is “prominently displayed in any large bookstore,” with the “‘psychology’ section (containing) at least 10 shelves on crystal healing, aromatherapy, and reaching the inner child for every shelf of books that tries to uphold some scholarly standard.”... By the late winter of 2012, Friedman, Sokal and Brown were all in touch via email and working together towards a draft of what would become “The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking.”The three men brought different skills to the plate. Brown was the outsider, the instigator, who, knowing no better, dared to question the theory in the first place. Friedman provided psychological expertise and played a diplomatic role, helping guide the paper towards publication. Sokal was the finisher, the infamous debunker with the know-how needed to dismantle the theory in hard, mathematic language.The article they wrote not only took to pieces Fredrickson and Losada’s 2005 paper, but also two earlier articles written or co-written by Losada. Taken together, Brown, Sokal and Freidman tallied a litany of abuses, which they related, one by one, in painstaking detail. “We shall demonstrate that each one of the three articles is completely vitiated by fundamental conceptual and mathematical errors”... "Why is it that no one before Nick—and I mean Nick was a first semester part-time Master’s student, at, let’s be honest, a fairly obscure university in London who has no particular training in mathematics—why is it that no one realized this stuff was bullshit? Where were all the supposed experts?”“Is it really true that no one saw through this,” he asks, “in an article that was cited 350 times, in a field which touts itself as being so scientific?”"
So much for those (e.g. many Singaporeans) who would dismiss Nick Brown based on the fact that he didn't know anything and hadn't accomplished anything

The Coronavirus and Right-Wing Postmodernism - Scientific American Blog Network - "Kuhn. He is the philosopher of science who argued, in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that science can never achieve absolute, objective truth. Reality is unknowable, forever hidden behind the veil of our assumptions, preconceptions and definitions, or “paradigms.” At least that’s what I thought Kuhn argued, but his writings were so murky that I couldn’t be sure. When I interviewed him in 1991, I was determined to discover just how skeptical he really was.Really, really skeptical, it turned out... I brought up AIDS. A few skeptics, notably virologist Peter Duesberg, were questioning whether the so-called human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, actually causes AIDS. These skeptics were either right or wrong, I said, not just right or wrong within the context of a particular social-cultural-linguistic context. Kuhn shook his head vigorously... As if to demonstrate his own views on how language obfuscates, he endlessly qualified his own statements. He seemed incapable of saying something in an unambiguous way. But what he was saying was that, even when it came to a question as seemingly straightforward—and vitally important!--as whether HIV causes AIDS, we cannot say what the “truth” is. We can’t escape interpretation, subjectivity, cultural context, and hence we can never say whether a given claim is objectively right or wrong."