A Conversation with an Uber Driver  

Posted on by Richard Passov

by R. Passov

Sometimes, when you least expect to, you learn something about your country and the toll it has imposed on certain of its citizens. In ancient times these learnings weren’t so serendipitous. During WWII, for example, you would have known folks on your block who served and came back. And some who didn’t come back.

Even in that near-ancient time of the Vietnam War, likely you would have known folks in both classes. That war, or at least the US involvement, officially lasted about eight years. Over three hundred thousand US service personnel were injured and approximately 50,000 US lives were lost (and countless others.)

The Iraq war also lasted, by some measure, eight years – 2003 to 2011. Over that stretch, about 4,500 US service members made the ultimate sacrifice. Another 45,000 were wounded. (These figures are purposely misleading as they omit approximately the same number of deaths and injuries suffered by ‘contractors.’ I’ll leave this bit of Orwellian misdirection to another day.)

The US involvement in Afghanistan lasted about twenty years. Approximately 2,500 service members gave their lives while ten times that number were injured.

Judging by the ratio of wounded to dead, one was more likely to survive in Afghanistan than in Vietnam, and even more likely than in WWII. This is understandable; we’ve had over fifty years to improve our medical capabilities. But one consequence of advances in medical technology is the violence in war, when measured in such a narrow way, seems less so.

*

“They divorced when I was six,” our Uber drive offered. 

“We were so poor,” he said, “we had chickens because they could feed themselves; what you’d call free range now.” This tinge of snark caused me to look afresh at a big man in a little car, taking us to the airport near Charleston.

“Well we had them for the eggs. And every once in a while we had to eat one. When you’re that poor you figure things out, like how to cook.”

He knew he was a sight and knew, in one way or another, we were going to delve. Like a good Uber driver, he was ready to share his origin story. Read more »

Thursday, October 10, 2024

Making Sense of “The Golem”

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Cover to "The Golem: What You Should Know about Science"

On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, I taught introductory physics students how to set up circuits. They struggled. They tried to connect capacitors one to the next but, upon hooking up the battery, would find that none had charged. Or, if some capacitors had charged, others would have voltages unaccountably higher than theory would imply. Students would call me over. I would run them through my standard jokes. “Did you have faith? Did you direct your psychic energy toward the circuit?” They would roll their eyes, and I would show them how to fix it. I have taught introductory physics many times, and I know the usual ways that laboratory exercises can fail. Students often find it frustrating when I am able to come to their lab stations and get setups to work that they had concluded were fundamentally broken.

Sociologists of science have long been interested in the tacit knowledge that introductory labs are intended to convey. In the controversial final pages of The Golem: What You Should Know about Science (1993), the British sociologists Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch compare all of science to a messy introductory lab. Each student measures a different temperature of boiling water. But even after that, the teacher is able to convince the students that water boils at exactly 100º C. “That ten minutes renegotiation of what happened is the important thing,” they insist. “If only, now and again, teachers and their classes would pause to reflect on that ten minutes they could learn most of what there is to know about the sociology of science.”

During the past few weeks, I’ve been revisiting The Golem and its two sequels, The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology (1998), and Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine (2005), all co-authored by Collins, who today is at Cardiff University in Wales, and Pinch, who died in 2021. These books are entirely composed of case studies, and range from discussions of cold fusion, to macroeconomic predictions, to double-blind medical trials.

Collins and Pinch were early disciples of Thomas Kuhn, whose idea of “incommensurability” I discussed at length in an earlier column. Their first book together, Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science, attempted to apply Kuhnian lessons to scientists studying parapsychology. That topic was self-consciously controversial, but in The Golem they turned to standard science, aiming to show non-specialists how the sausage is made.

The “golem” metaphor, here, stands for science itself—a clumsy and sometimes dangerous creature, animated by the word “truth” in its mouth. Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: The Middle Way Of Universal Healthcare

Posted on by Eric Feigenbaum

by Eric Feigenbaum

Two of the most frightening words in America: Medical Debt. And this nightmare is not just something you hear as an anecdote or cautionary tale. One in three of the people reading these words are likely to have medical debt.

In 2022 roughly 100 million Americans – almost one-third of the population – were saddled with healthcare debt. Yet, more than 90 percent of Americans have some form of health insurance – because it’s less frequently a problem of being uninsured, but underinsured that puts people behind the eight ball. Unsurprisingly, when a problem is so impactful and pervasive, at least some members of the media turn their attention to it.

ProPublica journalist Marshall Allen has been researching and writing about medical bills for more than 20 years – following up on readers’ emails and exploring their medical debt stories. From hospitals that gouge to insurance that is unknowingly cancelled because a credit card wasn’t processed correctly, the ways Americans find themselves paying for their most difficult, painful and vulnerable moments are innumerable. And for whatever kindness they may have received when getting treatment, the billers and collections agents who follow can be heartless.

As a result, many developed countries hold America up as the model of what they don’t want in a healthcare system. The thinking is that healthcare is a human right, not a luxury.

The problem in the American system isn’t typically the quality of care – we have some of the best medical facilities in the world along with cutting edge treatments and technology. It’s that the patient can’t typically control the costs. In the midst of needing life-saving medical care, neither patient, patient’s family nor medical providers can or should consider cost.

Only when a car accident or heart attack drives the patient $100,000 into debt, something has gone terribly wrong. Read more »

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Lithium Mines and Flowers

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

Tiehm’s buckwheat

1.

In the high desert of Nevada, a little wildflower is seen clinging precariously to barren rock. We learn that this is the only place in the world where you can find Tiehm’s buckwheat. And like all rare and understated things, it can pull at a person’s heart strings. Like buttercups or fiddleheads, to see them is to love them. And not surprising in that desolate place, the bees and spiders depend on them.

Because these flowers only exist in this one spot, they were not discovered until relatively recently— and as bad luck would have it, they sit atop one of the largest lithium deposits in the world.

And so begins The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. Written by former Reuters journalist Ernest Scheyder, this book was a surprising pick to be longlisted for the National Book Award. Neither literary in style, nor employing the novelistic narrative techniques usually favored by award-winning authors, it is written as straight, solid journalism. Interesting that it was even included on the long-list, I thought—and even more surprising was that liberal media has not paid it much attention. The only real reviews I found were in conservative papers like the WSJ and Forbes.

Intrigued I picked up a copy. Read more »

On Burnout: ‘Can’ is the New ‘Should’

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

I started reading about burnout when I walked away from teaching earlier than expected. Suddenly, I couldn’t bring myself to open that door after over thirty years of bounding to work. A series of events wiped away any sense of agency, fairness, or shared values. Their wellness lunch-and-learns didn’t help me, and I soon discovered I’m not alone.

An article published in JAMA last June looked at rising rates of burnout in healthcare, where 40% of physicians surveyed intended to leave their practice. They suggest, “To prevent a health care worker exodus, experts argue that the emphasis needs to shift from individual resilience to broader system-level improvements.” They are looking for standardized methods to affect organizational management with “evidence-based interventions.”  

Over 25 years ago, Michael Leiter and Christina Maslach came to the same conclusion. They identified six areas of worklife affecting burnout and created a specific assessment for educators. They determined the cause to be a “mismatch” between employee expectations and employer behaviours leading workers to be closer to the bleak end of a continuum from burned out to engaged. They suggest that “the task for organizations and individuals is to achieve a resolution.” This is not just a matter of throwing wellness initiatives or resilience-speak into the mix, but addressing any reasonable expectations of employees with appropriate employer interventions in all six interrelating areas. 

Feels vindicating, right?!

One problem with this solution and possibly a reason why it’s not widespread, however, is that it’s often the employees that hold the highest standards and care for the workplace who are the most affected by burnout, and they might make up a small minority of workers. People who show up to learn the right buzzwords and put in the least effort required to hit their hours without concern for the process and product of the company can feel unscathed, and those employees can make up enough of the workforce to provoke organizations to continue the micromanaging and questionable reward schemes for the many.  Read more »

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Palpable Knowledge Of Things: A Meditation

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference. (Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge)

Eugene Russell, a piano tuner interviewed by Studs Terkel in Working, said with satisfaction that the computer wouldn’t be replacing him anytime soon, even though he mentioned electronic devices—“an assist,” he said, that helps tuners. Eugene’s wife Natalie felt otherwise, saying at one point in their conversation, “It’s an electronic thing now. Anyone in the world can tune a piano with it. You can actually have a tin ear like a night club boss.”

Eugene mixed elements of beauty and delight with the technical complexity of piano tuning, recalling how he would “hear great big fat augmented chords that you don’t hear in music today” and that he would come home and say, “I just heard a diminished chord today!” Once he was tuning a piano in a hotel ballroom during “a symposium of computer manufacturers. One of these men came up and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Someday we’re going to get your job.’ I laughed. By the time you isolate an infinite number of harmonics, you’re going to use up a couple billion dollars worth of equipment to get down to the basic fundamental that I work with my ear.”

The piano tuner feels and practices the tune, which is hardly reducible to formulae, perhaps because it is one of those things in life that’s approximated, but not unambiguously achieved. At best, tuning a piano is a compromise: “The nature of equal temperament makes it impossible to really put a piano in tune,” Eugene explained. “The system is out of tune with itself. But it’s so close to in tune that it’s compatible.” Read more »

Who’s Taking Out the Ashes?

Posted on by Monte Davis

by Monte Davis

12+16+16 = 44. We can all agree on that.

44/12 = 3 2/3. Good so far?

That’s all the math needed to ask some  pointed questions about CCS. That stands for carbon capture and storage (or “sequestration”), a technology discussed and explored at pilot-project scale for decades. Its goal is to separate and collect the carbon dioxide from combustion, before it is released into the atmosphere, then put it in very long term storage so it doesn’t contribute to further climate change. So CCS is really CO2 capture and storage – and the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide is where the arithmetic above comes in.

Carbon’s atomic mass is 12; oxygen’s is 16. (Never mind isotopes.) So combining a carbon atom and two oxygen atoms – combustion — yields a molecular mass for CO2 of 44… or 3 2/3 times that of the “unburnt” carbon atom. These numbers are ratios, so the math is the same  for any units: completely burn 12 grams of pure carbon, and get 44 grams of CO2; burn 12 million tons, get 44 million tons of CO2. Fossil fuels aren’t pure carbon, of course, and combustion rarely burns every bit of what there is, so the emission ratio varies. Coal typically yields 2.1 times its mass in CO2; firewood, 1.6 to 1.8 times; gasoline, 2.3 times; natural gas, about 2.8 times.

Pause here, because this is deeply counterintuitive – so deeply that we don’t realize it. We’ve had chemistry for a few centuries, arithmetic for millennia. But we’ve been using fire deliberately for a million or two years, seeing the aftermath of wildfire for much longer. All that experience taught us in our bones that the ashes always weigh less than the fuel did. As for the smoke – why, just look at it! Any hominid can see that it weighs nothing at all!

Because CO2 swirls invisibly away with that smoke, and soon mixes with the air and dissipates, we’ve learned only in the latest eyeblink of time to account for all the combustion products. It takes an effort to grasp that CO2 is as much “ash” as the gray powder in the fireplace – ash that weighs more than the logs we burned. The 15 gallons of gasoline in your car’s tank weigh about 100 pounds. When it’s gone, you’ve made a present to the world of about 230 pounds of carbon dioxide, along with much smaller quantities of carbon monoxide, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, etc. Read more »

Monday, October 7, 2024

Imperfect Solutions, Imperfect Men—Revisiting JFK’s Profiles In Courage

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

We are now on opposite sides of the moral universe. —Joseph Buckingham, journalist and Massachusetts State Senator, speaking of his once esteemed friend, Daniel Webster.

Daniel Webster, by George Peter Alexander Healy, 1846. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

What a wonderful quote. Thirty years of amicable relations destroyed in the course of a three-hour speech. March 7, 1850. Senator Daniel Webster taking his leave of old friends and older ideals as he seeks the higher ground of political peacemaking. 

Webster’s story is one of eight Senators’ featured in John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles In Courage. This is as good a time as any to acknowledge what everyone knows: The book is the story of political integrity, but JFK really didn’t author most of it. The bulk of the research and writing was done by his long-time speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. Let’s also acknowledge that JFK’s dad, Joseph P. Kennedy, might have “assisted” in nailing down the prestigious award.  

Such is politics, and such is the process of image creation and image burnishing. Profiles In Courage was the end product of a JFK idea inspired by the actions of then-Senator John Quincy Adams, who, in 1807, opposed his Federalist Party’s foreign policy and was denied renomination as a result. Kennedy took the story to Sorensen, asked him to do further research, and Profiles is the result. 

The book serves a real political purpose. The Kennedys (father and son) have their eyes on the future and don’t have a lot of time to waste. JFK was under 30 when he was elected to the House in 1946; 35 when elected Senator in 1952. He’s 39 in 1956, surely old enough to set his sights higher. JFK has a great political name, charisma to burn, and even a personal history of physical courage (PT-109), but, still, at that age, the resume is clearly incomplete. A book, especially a well-received one that shows some  gravitas, might lead to a VP slot on the 1956 ticket with presumptive nominee Adlai Stevenson. A man could dream and a man could plan, and Profiles was part of the plan. 

Is it worth a Pulitzer, Dad intervention or not? Read more »

Georgia on My Mind

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

“Georgia on My Mind” was composed and recorded by Hoagy Carmichael (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell) in 1930. Born in 1899 and dying in 1981, Carmichael composed several hundred songs, many of which became hits, including “Stardust,” “The Nearness of You,” “Heart and Soul,” “Skylark,” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” These songs are important contributions to an amorphous and sprawling body of popular song sometimes called “the American Songbook.” The composers of these songs are said to be denizens of “Tin Pan Alley,” at the center of which we find the Brill Building, just north of Times Square at Broadway and 49th Street. For a while Carmichael worked for Southern Music, which had its office in the Brill Building.

Here is Carmichael’s 1930 recording of “Georgia on My Mind.” Many, though by no means all, standards, as they are sometimes called, have the same general form: AABA. Each letter stands for phrase eight measures, or bars, long. The A sections have the same melody and harmony which the B section has a different, and often contrasting, melody (along with its underlying harmony).

This recording begins with a short introduction featuring violinist Joe Venuti, followed by Carmichael coming in on the vocal (c. 0:15). We hit the B section at about 0:51. The B section is often called the “bridge,” presumably because it connects two A sections. Carmichael repeats the A-strain 1:08 starting at 1:08 and ending with a short violin phrase from Venti. Starting at about 1:26 the performance becomes purely instrument. First, we have what sounds like a muted trombone solo, which pretty much sticks to the melody. At 2:01 Venuti plays a violin solo on the bridge. At 2:21 we return to the A-strain with Jack Teagarden on trombone improvising a solo. That ends with the full band playing a chord at 2:39 followed by an 8-bar cornet solo played by Bix Beiderbecke (his last). Venuti, Teagarden and especially Beiderbecke were important musicians in their own right.

Notice Carmichael’s voice. It’s dry, and not particularly mellifluous. His style is relaxed, verging on conversational. It’s a style made possible by technology, a style that would be all but hopeless in live performance without a microphone and amplification. By the same token, it’s a style well-suited to recording, which was still a relatively new medium at the time. It’s a style that owes a lot to Louis Armstrong. Carmichael and Armstrong knew one another and Armstrong performed some of his song’s, e.g. “Rockin’ Chair.” Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Death of Star HD 62166 & It’s Nebula

Although you are distant

………….. distant                  distant                      distant

death-of-2440

I can see by your past aura
against a black further distance,
the most distant distance

I can see by your billowing
halo of expanding gasses
fluffed like God’s pillow
that you are ruled by laws
that also rule terrestrial things

I see the colors of your vast radiant shedding
and realize the force behind that shedding
is a predicate for everything that’s blown apart,
comes apart, falls apart, dissipates, uncomplicates,
is broken down, pulled down, unspun—

it’s hard to wrap a mind around
the truth that this is where all things,
every brilliance built and done,
fought and won, are heading,
except in tiny human scope
which mounts a persistent
counterforce of hope

Jim Culleny
11/13/16

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Sunday, October 6, 2024

Taste, Representation, and the Art of Cuisine

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

In philosophical debates about the aesthetic potential of cuisine, one central topic has been the degree to which smell and taste give us rich and structured information about the nature of reality. Aesthetic appreciation involves reflection on the meaning and significance of an aesthetic object such as a painting or musical work. Part of that appreciation is the apprehension of the work’s form or structure—it is often the form of the object that we find beautiful or otherwise compelling. Although we get pleasure from consuming good food and drink, if smell and taste give us no structured representation of reality there is no form to apprehend or meaning to analyze, so the argument goes. The enjoyment of cuisine then would be akin to that of basking in the sun. It is pleasant to be sure but there is nothing to apprehend or analyze beyond an immediate sensation.

Those who are skeptical of food and drink as serious aesthetic objects base their arguments on the claim that taste and smell are inferior to vision and audition in providing us with representations of reality. Those who defend the aesthetic potential of food and drink attempt to show that food and drink do provide us with structured representations of the world.

A representation is a mental state, such as a belief, that stands for, refers to, or depicts something else, such as an object in the world. In perceptual experience, a representation specifies the way the world appears to a subject having the experience. Vision is the perceptual modality that arguably gives us the richest representation of reality. To see an apple is to locate it in space individuated from but in relation to other objects in our visual field. And that ability to locate objects is facilitated by assigning properties such as roundness and redness to the apple which appear, not as free-floating properties, but as properties bound to the object. The representation is veridical when the world is in fact as it appears in the representation.

Thus, vision does not present us with a heterogeneous heap of properties; rather properties are part of structured wholes with objects appearing as solid, individuated entities. Vision then is enormously helpful to us as we navigate through the world because it represents the spatial relations between things as well as their boundaries.

Many philosophers have argued that tastes and aromas lack essential elements of a representation. Read more »

Friday, October 4, 2024

Identities, Partly Relational Concepts

Posted on by David J. Lobina

by David J. Lobina

An apparently non-negotiable assumption of modern identity politics, though this was not always the case (see this regarding a certain non-philosopher), is that the individuation of personal characteristics is an intrinsic affair – that is, it is down to an individual to determine and state what they are, this often following from lived experience, and thereby constituting an exclusively internal matter. In a loose sense, this is unexceptional; it is common for one to simply assume the truth of what others say about themselves. After all, one doesn’t expect people to lie about where they are from, their background or what they believe in.

Granted that, the individuation of some personal characteristics does not appear to be entirely and absolutely an intrinsic matter: some identities seemingly depend upon the implicit (and sometimes explicit!) recognition of peers – an extrinsic and relational affair. In such cases, individuation would be partly determined by one’s environment, and thus not too dissimilar to what philosophers call “extensional conditions” (see here for an application to the debate around mental content). This specific point is not usually spelled out in discussions of personal identities, but it does turn up here and there. Something along these lines is implicitly assumed, uncontroversially so, I believe, to the individuation of national identities, the case I shall focus on here – and the argument is likely to generalise. Read more »

Thursday, October 3, 2024

The Banality of Armageddon

Posted on by Laurence Peterson

by Laurence Peterson

Typhon missile launcher

I am writing this on Sunday afternoon, the 29th of September, 2024.  The Guardian (UK version) informs me that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) have confirmed that dozens of Israeli aircraft are attacking what they say to be “military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime” in Yemen, and may be preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon. This is after a week of bombing in Lebanon that has resulted in at least 650 deaths (500 in one day, about a third of the number slaughtered on October the 7th of last year) and the assassination of the leader of  Hezbollah, a major political party in Lebanon that has deep roots in the wider Lebanese society. Israel also assassinated a number of other key members of Hezbollah, as well as a senior Iranian official in Lebanon. And this after the remote detonation of pagers and other hand-held devices attached to bombs by Israel that killed maybe a score of people, but wounded thousands, and set much of the country into panic at the thought that any nearby electronic device might blow up and kill or seriously maim simple bystanders. And all this after months of unprecedented carnage and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank.

Not long ago, the incidence of one of these events, or maybe two concurrently, would be enough for me to become very concerned about the possibility of the outbreak of wider war that might just cascade into some kind of confrontation between powers possessing nuclear weapons. Now, though I firmly believe the international situation is as grave as any I have lived through in my 63 years on planet Earth, the constant succession and routinization of these kinds of events these days is taking a kind of toll on me: I am coming, emotionally speaking, to expect that these kinds of happenings that seem to demand immediate and thorough resolution to any sane person will simply pile up, like the bodies of the victims of the tragedies associated with those events. Maybe this is a kind of defense mechanism, like a sort of geopolitical learned-helplessness. Whatever it is, it is disconcerting, disorienting and highly disagreeable. Read more »

The KPI Μachine

Posted on by Eleni Petrakou

by Eleni Petrakou

Decorative artwork. Various types that look related to academia, industry, science and the church with ominous and cartoonish appearances. Art deco and dystopian undertones.
From the webcomic Dresden Codak

Let this text be a string of anecdotes this columnist has been exposed to, mostly through her work in research and academia. Said work was spread in space and time. The anecdotes, however, come from the western world and its sphere of influence.

*

The first-year student is asking me what to do about the courses by those lecturers who don’t know how to answer her questions.

Five minutes later she’s asking the same thing again.

In the meantime she explained that she’s aware many students lack the background necessary for higher education and of the reasons why. And that yes, she knows she can find lectures from elsewhere online.

*

The senior lecturer is showing me photos of past exam answer sheets. It is clear that some science students don’t know lower high school math.

All of them passed the exams thanks to their marks for the other half of the questions, graded by his co-teaching colleague.

*

Minor detail in Guardian article a few months ago. A seasoned professor says that the quality of studies is going down and for the first time ever she had to fail more than 10% of students.

*

The friend who quit academia is listening to me being concerned about grade inflation. She comforts me by adding that at one university, on her first day at work, she was made to sign an agreement that she wouldn’t ever fail more than 15% of students. Read more »

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Bridging Innovation and Empathy: Bill Gates’s “What’s Next?”

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Bill Gates has long been one of the world’s leading optimists, and his new documentary, “What’s Next,” serves as a testament to his hopeful vision of the future. But what makes Gates’s optimism particularly compelling is that it is grounded not in dewy-eyed hopes and prayers but in logic, data, and an unshakable belief in the power of science and technology. Over the years, Gates and his wife Melinda, through their foundation, have invested in a wide array of innovative technologies aimed at addressing some of the most pressing issues faced by humanity. Their work has had an especially transformative impact on underserved populations in regions like Africa, tackling fundamental challenges in healthcare, energy, and beyond. In this new, five-part Netflix series, Gates showcases his trademark pragmatism and curiosity as he engages with some of the most complex and important challenges of our time: artificial intelligence (AI), misinformation, inequality, climate change, and healthcare. His approach stands out especially for his willingness to have a dialogue with those with whom he might strongly disagree.

Episode 1: “What Can AI do for us?”

In the first episode, Gates delves into the world of artificial intelligence, a topic of both fascination and fear. He speaks with leading researchers at companies like OpenAI, exploring the transformative potential of AI, and even brings in science fiction luminaries like James Cameron to provide a broader cultural context. As Cameron wryly notes, the pace of AI development has made much of science fiction obsolete, an observation that underscores just how quickly this technology is evolving.

But the episode also raises important concerns about the ethical implications of AI. As Gates and the experts explore, AI has the potential to drastically reshape society—not just technologically but emotionally. For instance, the growing reliance on AI for decision-making and even companionship could have unforeseen consequences on human relationships and autonomy. The potential loss of huge slices of jobs to AI is another well-known concern. Ultimately, a recurring theme throughout the episode is the importance of ensuring that AI development keeps a “human-in-the-loop,” emphasizing the need for ethical guardrails as we push the boundaries of what this technology can achieve. Read more »

Learning English

Posted on by Azi Amirsadri

by Azadeh Amirsadri

I lived in Philadelphia in 1977 and would go to the Gallery mall on Market Street, a walking distance from our river front apartment. One day, around lunch, I decided to get Chinese food at the food court and looking for a place to sit, I asked two older ladies if I could sit at their table, since the place was packed. As I was picking through the food, separating the celery and water chestnuts, one of the old ladies said “It looks like you are digging for gold.” I not only didn’t understand what she meant,I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me. She pointed to her rings and then to my ring and enunciated “looking for gold” with a smile. I had a game I played when I wasn’t in the mood to speak English, so I said I didn’t understand, which was true in this case. She pointed to my ring and said “You are looking for gold” and again I smiled politely and went on separating the food and trying not to make eye contact and not to engage. She told her friend “I wonder where she is from” and later “I bet she is rich because she is wearing a lot of jewelry” and they went on talking about me and I went on pretending I didn’t understand what they were saying.

Another time, I was at the window seat of a domestic flight and didn’t want to speak to anyone. The couple next to me was anxious and they were catastrophizing about their luggage not arriving at their destination, about the drinks and snacks not being enough and were trying to reel me into their conversation. I looked at them, shook my head and smiled, and pretended I didn’t understand them. I was trying to sleep anyway, but when the flight attendants came with the drinks cart, the couple got agitated and woke me up saying Coke? Coke? Then they talked about how I will miss getting a drink, and returned to all the bad things that were about to happen.

Learning English was rather easy for me; perhaps because my mother had told me from an early age that I was good with languages. Also, speaking two other languages made it easier to learn a new language. I attended classes in Falls Church, VA in a trailer behind an elementary school with other adults who were new to the country. Our group was made up of a lot of Vietnamese people who had arrived as boat people, Central Americans running from civil wars, and of course Iranians. Our teacher was Mrs. B and I was amazed at how cool it was to just have a letter for a last name. Of course, I had no idea that ESL teachers do this to simplify their longer names for their students who are already struggling with learning a new language. The Iranians in class were mostly kind to each other, respecting our social norms, yet also very competitive. Since we couldn’t communicate with the other groups, we kept our dramas within our own. Read more »