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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210104T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210104T133000
DTSTAMP:20260505T191233
CREATED:20201210T202445Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210109T193528Z
UID:6098-1609761600-1609767000@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Aaron Panofsky - Citizen scientific racism: White nationalist appropriations of genetic research
DESCRIPTION:Citizen scientific racism: White nationalist appropriations of genetic research\nAaron Panofsky\nUCLA Institute for Society and Genetics\, Public Policy\, and Sociology\nThis talk presents research from a study about white nationalists and their efforts to appropriate genetics research for their own ideological and identity projects. Using historical sources and online data and interpretive methods\, I show that ideas from genetics have been prominent in public pronouncements and in online discussions among white nationalists. For example\, they discuss genetic ancestry tests to demonstrate pure European/white ancestry\, population genetics to “prove” the biological reality of race\, genetic anthropology to argue for the preservation of white “biodiversity\,” and behavior genetics to claim the intellectual and behavioral superiority of whites. Through the 20th century there was a cadre of professional scientists eager to promulgate racist interpretations of genetics research\, but facing effective scientific and ethical opposition by other researchers\, their ranks and authority greatly attenuated in the 21st. White nationalists have relied on these scientists for scientific racist ideas\, but with their decline\, white nationalists have crafted themselves into a loose citizen science movement. I show that their activities include gathering and promulgating the claims of academic scientific racists\, reinterpreting ostensibly non-racist genetics in racist ways\, and using publicly available statistics and data to generate novel racist analyses\, and exploiting the affordances of “open science” to mimic the institutional form of disciplinary science. This movement’s bid for authority is based on their claim that they represent the true spirit of scientific objectivity and a willingness to pursue data and arguments that have been suppressed by the academy\, which has been overcome by political correctness. \n 
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/aaron-panofsky-citizen-scientific-racism/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210111T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210111T133000
DTSTAMP:20260505T191233
CREATED:20201210T202104Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210120T182234Z
UID:6095-1610366400-1610371800@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Evelina Fedorenko - The human language system in the mind and brain
DESCRIPTION:The human language system in the mind and brain\nEvelina Fedorenko\nMcGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences\, MIT\nThe goal of my research program is to understand the computations and representations that enable us to share complex thoughts with one another via language\, and their neural implementation. A decade ago\, I developed a robust new approach to the study of language in the brain based on identifying language-responsive cortex functionally in individual participants. Originally developed for fMRI\, we have since extended this approach to other modalities\, like MEG and electrocorticography. Using this functional-localization approach\, I identified and characterized a set of frontal and temporal brain areas that i) support language comprehension and production (spoken and written); ii) are robustly separable from the lower-level perceptual (e.g.\, speech processing) and motor (e.g.\, articulation) brain areas; iii) are spatially and functionally similar across diverse languages (>40 languages from 11 language families); and iv) form a functionally integrated system with substantial redundancy across different components. I will highlight three key findings from our work. First\, I will show that the language brain regions are highly selective for language over diverse non-linguistic processes—from math and music\, to executive processes\, to non-verbal semantic cognition\, and even processing computer code—while also showing a deep and intriguing link with a system that supports social cognition. Second\, I will show that\, contra many leading accounts\, the language regions support both understanding of word meanings and sentence-structure building\, with no part of the language network being selective for syntactic processing. Further\, the ‘temporal integration window’ of the language system is only a few words long—in line with the fact that most dependencies among words are local across the world’s languages—and appears to be relatively insensitive to word order. Finally\, I will present recent evidence of predictive coding in the language network during naturalistic comprehension\, and show that state-of-the-art artificial neural network language models—optimized for predictive processing—accurately capture neural responses during language comprehension. The latter line of work is a critical first step to developing mechanistic accounts of language comprehension. \n 
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/evelina-fedorenko-the-human-language-system-in-the-mind-and-brain/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210125T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210125T133000
DTSTAMP:20260505T191233
CREATED:20210106T024703Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210129T213809Z
UID:6131-1611576000-1611581400@bec.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Quayshawn Spencer - A metaphysical mapping problem for race theorists and human population geneticists
DESCRIPTION:A metaphysical mapping problem for race theorists and human population geneticists\nQuayshawn Spencer\nRobert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy and Race\, Science\, & Society Working Group\, University of Pennsylvania\nIn this talk\, I identify and clarify a metaphysical mapping phenomenon that’s almost twenty years old. The phenomenon is that the populations at a fivefold subdivision of humans into biological populations—the so-called human continental populations—correspond one-to-one with the five official races of the Office of Management and Budget in the US government. After introducing and defending a four-step deductive argument that involves a key premise justified with extensive abductive reasoning\, I conclude that the metaphysical relation that’s exemplified by the aforementioned one-to-one correspondence is identity. I end by exploring interesting implications of this identity thesis for metaphysicians of race and NIH-funded medical scientists. \n  \nNote: no recording is available for this talk.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/quayshawn-spencer-a-metaphysical-mapping-problem-for-race-theorists-and-human-population-geneticists/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
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