All posts tagged: Objects

Entitled and exploitative people are more likely to treat others as objects, study finds

Entitled and exploitative people are more likely to treat others as objects, study finds

Published by José Betancourt

A study in Poland found that people who are agreeable, intellectually curious, and who endorse positive norms of reciprocity were less likely to objectify others. In contrast, those prone to exploiting others and individuals with greater feelings of entitlement were more likely to objectify others. The research was published in Current Issues in Personality Psychology. Objectification of people is the act of treating a person primarily as an object rather than as a full human being with thoughts, feelings, and autonomy. It involves reducing someone to their body, appearance, usefulness, or a single trait (or set of traits) while ignoring their individuality. Objectification is most commonly discussed in relation to sexual objectification, but it can also occur in workplaces, politics, or everyday social interactions. People objectify others for several reasons, including social norms that emphasize status, beauty, or productivity over inner qualities. Media and advertising frequently reinforce objectification by portraying people as products to be evaluated or consumed. Psychologically, objectification can simplify social perception by reducing complex individuals into easier categories. It may also serve …

Ukraine Adopts Resolution on Evacuating Museum Objects From War Zones

Ukraine Adopts Resolution on Evacuating Museum Objects From War Zones

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Ukrainian government has passed a resolution aimed at expediting the evacuation of more than three million cultural objects from frontline regions as Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches its fourth anniversary. The war has upended civilian life in Ukraine and resulted in the damage, destruction, or disappearance of cultural sites and museum property, much of it attributed to Russian forces. “The resolution creates a more predictable, systematic, and secure model for protecting museum objects during war, combining clear rules, government accountability, and flexibility in crisis situations,” the Ukrainain culture ministry said in an announcement on February 18. Related Articles Last April, Ukraine accused Russia of enabling the theft of more than 1.7 million Ukrainian artworks and artifacts, many of which preservationists believe have entered the black market. Since Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukrainian cultural officials have appealed to counterparts in Europe and the United Kingdom for help combating what they describe as an increasingly transnational trafficking network—one that has only expanded more than three years into the full-scale invasion.  That same month, the Kherson Art Museum said Russian …

Colorado coal plant objects to Trump order to stay open : NPR

Colorado coal plant objects to Trump order to stay open : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

The Craig Station power complex in northwest Colorado has three coal-fired units. Its operators planned to retire one unit at the end of 2025, and built wind and solar farms to replace it. But the Trump administration has ordered the unit to stay open and available for now. Hart Van Denburg/CPR News hide caption toggle caption Hart Van Denburg/CPR News President Trump ran for office promising to restore a future for coal in the U.S. He now has new hardware confirming his status as a top industry ally: a trophy hailing him as the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.” Trump received the statue — a bronze coal miner bearing a pickax — from an industry lobbying group earlier this month, just before signing an executive order directing the U.S. Department of Defense to purchase additional electricity from coal plants. “We’re going to be buying a lot of coal through the military now,” Trump said. “It’s going to be less expensive and actually much more effective than what we have been using for many, many …

Poisonous Objects | Carolina A. Miranda

Poisonous Objects | Carolina A. Miranda

Published by José Betancourt

Perhaps the most unsettling monsters are those that are somewhat human. Zombies. Headless horsemen. The deadly Sirens of Greek myth. In Mapuche Indigenous lore of the southern Andes there’s the imbunche—a human infant who, over time, is transformed into a grotesquerie by malevolent brujos, or sorcerers. Its head is rotated backward, its tongue split in two, and one of its legs is folded behind its back and attached to the nape of its neck. The imbunche moves forward, crawling about on its available limbs, but always looks back. It’s a creature that haunts the imaginations of South American children, and the region’s art and literature. And it emerged whole from the recesses of my childhood nightmares this past fall as I stood before Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone at the Los Angeles exhibition space the Brick. More than eleven feet tall, this uncanny sculpture is as much a work of inventive deformation as it is a feat of creativity. Unmanned Drone began life as a bronze equestrian monument to the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that commanded …

The Secret Life of Old Objects

The Secret Life of Old Objects

Published by Jenni Sidey

Typically, any object that has been around longer than we have can give us a feeling of warmth. For example, scuffed-up wooden chairs, ceramics that have a small crack, and black-and-white photos curling at the edges all possess a hidden richness. They give off a soft vibration of all the stories they have held. Objects that have weathered time are more than just objects. They are companions. They tell us we are part of a longer timeline that extends both before us and will extend after us. Nostalgia plays a part in this, of course. Researchers like Holbrook and Schindler (2003) have shown that the memories tied to familiar things can tug at us in powerful ways. This is why a childhood toy can still stir something in us decades later, or why a record player feels more soulful than a streaming app. Old things act almost like small, solid pieces of the past. They are shortcuts to memory we can touch. Continuity, Identity, and the Comfort of Imperfection In addition to reminiscing, nostalgia also …

CSU objects to some new community college degrees, igniting debate over who can teach what

CSU objects to some new community college degrees, igniting debate over who can teach what

Published by Sam Flores

Constance Duffle, a paramedic in Siskiyou County at the Oregon border, serves a vast wilderness region woefully in need of health professionals. She has enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program in paramedicine, newly offered at College of the Siskiyous. A degree offers pathways to a raise, improved service to her community and opportunities to train future paramedics. Without this close-to-home education, there would be “no way” she could work a full-time job and care for her children, Duffle said. “I went through medic school before I was married, before I had kids,” Duffle said. If the program had been available to her then, she would have pursued it “in a heartbeat.” Duffle’s experience is a promising story in the state’s five-year-old higher education venture that has allowed community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees. But as the degree programs have grown in popularity, disagreements continue to emerge between California State University and California Community Colleges as competition for students tightens. In the latest stress point, CSU has objected to 16 community college degree proposals, contending that …

JWST finds nine category-defying objects. Have astronomers found their “platypus?”

JWST finds nine category-defying objects. Have astronomers found their “platypus?”

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. In the animal kingdom, one of the most bizarre discoveries of all-time was the platypus. When reports of the platypus reached the western hemisphere, most leading naturalists at the time assumed it was a hoax, including the first European scientists to examine a specimen in 1799. It was an animal that laid eggs, yet it was a mammal. It had the bill of a duck, but the tail of a beaver. It had (at least, the males do) venomous spurs on their hind legs, but also the ability to locate other creatures in the water through a specialized sense known as electroreception, common in sharks but very rare among mammals. And yet, the platypus exists with all of these properties, even if it would take decades (or more than a century) before we understood how such a creature could come to exist. Astronomers have just encountered a very similar situation by …

Israel objects to line-up of Trump panel for post-war Gaza

Israel objects to line-up of Trump panel for post-war Gaza

Published by Sam Flores

WORLDWIDE INVITES In Canada, a senior aide to Prime Minister Mark Carney said he intended to accept Trump’s invitation, while in Turkey, a spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he had been asked to become a “founding member” of the board. Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said Cairo was “studying” a request for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to join. Sharing an image of the invitation letter, Argentine President Javier Milei wrote on X that it would be “an honour” to participate in the initiative. In a statement sent to AFP, Blair said: “I thank President Trump for his leadership in establishing the Board of Peace and am honoured to be appointed to its Executive Board.” Blair is a controversial figure in the Middle East because of his role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump himself said last year that he wanted to make sure Blair was an “acceptable choice to everybody”. Blair spent years focused on the Israeli-Palestinian issue as representative of the “Middle East Quartet” – the United Nations, European Union, United …

We Could Hitch a Ride to Unknown Frontiers on Super-Fast Interstellar Objects Like 3I/ATLAS

We Could Hitch a Ride to Unknown Frontiers on Super-Fast Interstellar Objects Like 3I/ATLAS

Published by José Betancourt

Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Earth on December 19, coming within just 167 million miles. Scientists have been closely monitoring the object — which is largely believed to be a natural comet and only the third of its kind to have been directly observed in the solar system — as it continued on its highly eccentric trajectory. The encounter with Earth, however, turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax, as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has long championed the far-fetched theory that the object may be an alien spacecraft, lamented in a blog post titled “3I/ATLAS Ignores Earth.” Instead of doing something you might expect of aliens during their closest approach to Earth, it simply cruised on by. While hopes that we were just visited by an alien race diminish even further, Loeb made an interesting pivot in a follow-up piece, proposing that other objects like 3I/ATLAS could be useful for our future attempts to explore beyond our solar system. “The Voyager Golden Records, containing a time capsule of …