Skip to main content

Home/ Diigo In Education/ Group items tagged container

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
James Spagnoletti

Göbekli Tepe - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine - 67 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...1

religion history anthropology WHAP

shared by James Spagnoletti on 17 Sep 11 - No Cached
Ruth Howard liked it
  • The Birth of ReligionWe used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
  • Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
  • At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.
  • Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages
  • Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
  • n the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpo
  • To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.
  • nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.
  • Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.
  • he pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.
  • The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's.
  • They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.
  • Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.
  • Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.
  • he site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.
  • Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building.
  • Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.
Maggie Tsai

The Classroom » Using Diigo for Organizing the Web for your Class - 13 views

theclassroom.ca/...anizing-the-web-for-your-class

diigo education review

shared by Maggie Tsai on 05 Aug 07 - Cached
  • Using Diigo for Organizing the Web for your Class 31 07 2007 A good friend of mine, Randy Lyseng, has been telling people of the tremendous power and educational value that can be gained from social bookmarking in the classroom. His personal favourite is Diigo. My preference is a social bookmarking tool called http://diigo.com. With diigo, you can highlight, add stick notes and make your comments private or public. (Randy Lyseng, Lyseng Tech: Social Bookmarking, November 2006) After listening to Randy praise Diigo at every opportunity, I finally started playing with the site (and corresponding program, more on that in a bit) this summer (I know Randy - I’m slow to catch on…)As I started to play with the system, my mind started reeling with all the possibilities. First off, like any other social bookmarking tool, Diigo allows you to put all your favorites/bookmarks in one “central” location. Students can access them from ANY computer in the world (talk about the new WWW: whatever, whenever, where ever). They just open up your Diigo page, and there are all the links. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Diigo’s power lies in it’s group annotations. That’s right, people can now write in the margins of webpages. You can highlight passages of interest, write notes, and even write a blog entry directly from another webpage, quoting passages right from the original text. Sounds great - but to do all that it must be complicated right? Nope. To use these advanced features all you need to do is run the Diigo software. This can either be done using a bookmarklet or by downloading and installing the Diigo toolbar. While both have basically the same features, the toobar is less finicky, and allows you to use contextual menus to access features quickly. I also find the toolbar’s highlighting and sticky notes to be easier to read. Ok fine… I can leave notes on webpages - so what? Here’s an example. I’m thinking about having my 7B’s record radio plays. I’ve looked them up online and found many scripts from all the old classics available. However many also contain the old endorsements from tobacco and other companies. So I go to a play that I’d like to my students to record and highlight the old commercial. If they’re using diigo when they access this page they’ll see the same text highlighted in pink, and when they mouse over the highlighted text they’ll get a hidden message from me - “I’d like you to write a new advertisement for this section. What other advertisement do you think we could write for here? Write an ad for a virtue or trait that you think is important. For example - “Here’s a news flash for every person in Canada. It’s about a sensational, new kind of personality that will make you the envy of all those around you. It’s call trustworthiness. Why with just a pinch of this great product….” They now have a writing assignment to go along with the recording of the radio play. Adding assignments is just one possibility. You can ask questions about the site, or have students carry on conversations about the text. Perhaps about the validity of some information. These notes can be made private (for your eyes only), public, or for a select group of people. You could use the same webpage for multiple classes, and have a different set of sticky notes for each one! Diigo will also create a separate webpage for each group you create, helping you organize your bookmarks/notes further! This technology is useful for any class, but I think is a must have for any group trying to organize something along the lines of the 1 to 1 project. I’m hoping to convince all the core teachers to set up a group page for their classes, and organize their book marks there! I’ve already started one for my 7B Language Arts Class! One of the first questions I was asked when I started looking at this site, and more importantly at the bookmarklets and toolbar was is it secure? Will it bring spyware onto our systems? How about stability? I’ve currently been running the Diigo bookmarklet and toolbar on 3 different browsers, Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (sorry, there’s no Safari toolbar yet), across 4 different computers and 2 different platforms with no problems. I’ve also run every virus and spyware scan I can think of, everything checks out clean. I’ve also done an extensive internet check, and can’t find any major problems reported by anyone else. To my mind it’s an absolutely fantastic tool for use in the classroom. Thanks Diigo! And thanks Randy for pointing me in the right direction!
Gareth Jones

Looking in the Wrong Places | Edge.org - 5 views

www.edge.org/...er-looking-in-the-wrong-places

NaturalScience senseperception paradigm

shared by Gareth Jones on 19 May 18 - No Cached
  • We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
  • I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.
  • The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • That makes this field of science rather peculiar and probably explains why there hasn’t been much progress. But it’s not like we don’t have any questions that need to be answered. There are a lot of questions that have been around for decades. For example, what is dark energy? What is dark matter? What are the masses of the Standard Model particles? And what’s up with the foundation of quantum mechanics? Is a theory that's fundamentally not deterministic, where we cannot predict outcomes, the last word that we have, or is there something more to it? Is there maybe another underlying structure to reality?
  • but we haven't reached the fundamental level. Maybe we will never reach it. Certainly, the theories that we have right now are not all there is. The question is, of course, if we don’t have any guidance by experiment, how do we make progress? And are we doing the right thing?
  • We’ve reached this point where we have to carefully rethink if the criteria that we’re using to select our theories are promising at all. If one looks at the history of this field in the foundations of physics, progress has usually been made by looking at questions that, at least in hindsight, were well posed, where there was an actual mathematical contradiction. For example, special relativity is incompatible with Newtonian gravity. If you try to resolve this incompatibility, you get general relativity.
  • There are various similar examples where such breakthroughs have happened because there was a real problem. There was an inconsistency and people had to resolve it. It had nothing to do with beauty. Maybe beauty was, in some cases, the personal motivation of the people to work on it. There’s certainly some truth to this, but I don’t think it’s good to turn this story around and say that if we only pay attention to this motivation that comes from ideals of beauty it will lead to progress.
  • If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.
  • The way that research is funded in foundations of physics and in many other fields just puts a lot of things at a disadvantage that are not pursued anymore. Typically, everything that takes longer than three years to complete, no one will start it because they can’t afford it. They can literally not afford it.
  • Who makes the decisions about the funding? Superficially, people say that it's a funding agency, so it’s the university who get to hire people. But that puts the blame on the wrong party. In the end it’s the community itself who makes the decisions. What do the funding agencies do if they get a proposal? They send it to reviewers. And who are the reviewers? They're people from the same community. If you look at how hiring decisions are being made, there’s some committee and they are people from the same community. They have some advisory boards or something, which contains people from the same community.
  • Even if that wasn’t so, what the people in these committees would be doing is looking at easy measures for scientific success. Presently, the most popular of these measures are the number of publications and the number of citations. And maybe also whether the person has published in high-impact journals. So, these are the typical measures that are presently being used. But what do they measure? They primarily measure popularity. They indicate whether somebody’s research is well received by a lot of people in the same community. And that’s why once a research area grows beyond a certain critical mass, you have sufficiently many people who tell each other that what they’re doing is the good thing to do. They review each other’s papers and say that that’s great and it's what we should continue to do. It’s a problem in all communities that grow beyond a certain size.
  • I later came to the United States and then Canada, and that gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about quantum gravity. I also figured out that much of what goes on in quantum gravity is very detached from reality. It’s pretty much only mathematics. Yes, the mathematics is there, but I still don’t know if it’s the mathematics that describes reality.
  • That’s the very reason why we don’t normally think of gravity as a weak force. It’s the only force that is left over on long distances, and the reason for this is that it adds up. It gets stronger the more mass you pile up. More precisely, we should say that the reason we find it so hard to measure quantum gravitational effects is that we either have a particle that has very pronounced quantum properties, like, say, a single electron or something like that, but then it’s so light that we cannot measure the gravitational field. Or we have some object that is so heavy that we can measure the gravitational field, but then it doesn’t have quantum properties. Okay, so that’s the actual problem.
mrtomak

Duolingo: Home - 49 views

www.duolingo.com

shared by mrtomak on 12 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Ginna Watson on 12 Apr 14
     
    Duolingo is an intuitive, fun way to learn languages! It contains a variety of activities for both audio and visual learning. It's easy to incorporate this free, cloud-based program into your daily routine.
jnet0124

Can Mary Shelley's Frankenstein be read as an early research ethics text? | Medical Hum... - 7 views

mh.bmj.com/32

shared by jnet0124 on 13 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Can Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein be read as an early research ethics text?
    • jnet0124
      jnet0124 on 13 Nov 17
       
      SEE HEAR
  • Frankenstein is an early and balanced text on the ethics of research upon human subjects and that it provides insights that are as valid today as when the novel was written.
  • Mary Shelley conceived the idea for and started writing Frankenstein in 1816 and it was first published in 1818.1 In its historical context, the earlier 17th and 18th centuries had seen the early signs of the rise of science and experimentation. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had laid the theoretical foundations in his “Great Insauration”2 and scientists such as Boyle, Newton, and Hooke developed the experimental methods. Sir Robert Talbor, a 17th century apothecary and one of the key figures in developing the use of quinine to treat fevers, underlined this: “the most plausible reasons unless backed by some demonstrable experiments seem but suppositions or conjectures”.3
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The 18th century saw the continued construction of foundations upon which all subsequent medical experimentation has been built.
  • Lady Mary Montagu promoted smallpox vaccination; its proponents experimented on prisoners to study its efficacy, and James Jurin, the secretary of the Royal Society, developed mathematical proof of this in the face of ecclesiastical opposition.4 Many of the modern concepts of therapeutic trials were described although not widely accepted. Empirical observation through experimentation was starting to be recognised as the tool that allowed ascertainment of fact and truth. An account of Dr Bianchini’s experiments on “Le Medicin Electrique”, reported to the Royal Society explains that “The experiments were made by Dr Bianchini assisted by several curious and learned men … who not being able to separate what was true … determined to be guided by their own experiments and it was by this most troublesome though of all the others the most sure way, that they have learned to reject a great number of what have been published as facts.”5
  • Similarly, Henry Baker’s report to the Royal Society, describing Abbe Nollet’s experiments, outlined the need for comparative studies and that “treatment should not be condemned without a fair trial”6 and a Belgian doctor, Professor Lambergen, describing the use of deadly nightshade for the treatment of breast cancer wrote “Administration of this plant certainly merits the attention of the medical profession; and surely one may add entitles the medicine to future trials … nevertheless the most efficacious medicines are such if its efficacy by repeated trials be approved.”7 In the mid 18th century James Lind conducted the first controlled trial to establish a cure for scurvy and his Treatise on the Scurvy contains what could be seen in modern terminology as the first “review of the current literature” prior to a clinical trial.8
  • Her motives for writing Frankenstein are more difficult to define. In her introduction to the 1831 edition she writes that she wanted her work to … speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name … (p 7, p 8)
  • The 1818 preface, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, indicates a deeper purpose. He wrote that the story recommends itself as it “…affords a point of view on the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield…” (p 11) and that “…I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which ... moral tendencies (that) exist in the sentiments of characters shall affect the reader…”(p 12).
« First ‹ Previous 141 - 146 of 146
Showing 20▼ items per page