Satyugjit Virk
Marina Blum
Measles was once a nearly ubiquitous childhood plague, a rite of passage with sometimes deadly outcomes. However, the disease has all but disappeared in the vaccination era – few people cross paths with the measles, few know anyone who has been infected. The veritable erasure of the disease from public life stems from widespread use of the measles vaccine, whose success effectively revolutionized societys relationship with measles from one of grudging resignation, to a near ignorance. It is the nature and details of this change in perception that I will […]
Hoa Francisco Ngo
Wherever religion is, its Siamese twin secularism follows closely behind it. The border between the two concepts is not so clear, though, particularly among practicing Catholics who hold to orthodox Church views in modern democratic nations. These borders are not inherent to either religion or secularism; instead, they are drawn by the modern state in order to regulate religious groups for political ends. My project explores the boundaries of religion and secularism in modern in Japan in the context of the Catholic institution of Opus Dei. The Opus Dei center […]
Boris Rodin
Tatiana Vacova
Lia Kraemer
Nitin Ubhayakar
Kathryn Boden
Over the past two decades Tibetan Buddhism and modern Science have been seriously engaging each other in topics of consciousness, origins, and happiness. The excitement of the possible convergence between science and spirituality in a conversation that has been historically polarized between secular and religious values has overshadowed investigative research that aims to understand the quality and impact of the interaction. To start this process, I will look at the lasting effects of two programs; Science For Monks (SFM) and the Emory Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) on Tibetan Buddhist communities […]
Rodrigo Ochigame
Given the vast amount of information on the internet, filtering is inevitable. No one can see, hear, or read everything. However, information filtering algorithms generally lead to anti-democratic outcomes in the distribution of political speech. Algorithms that rank by popularity or average rating tend to disproportionately suppress minority viewpoints, causing a ‘tyranny of the majority’ situation in which people see only the least controversial information. Meanwhile, algorithms that involve personalization tend to suppress information that diverges from readers’ own viewpoints, creating polarized ‘echo chambers’ where like-minded people speak only with […]