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in title, tags, annotations or urlWonderopolis | Where the Wonders of Learning Never Cease - 20 views
Looking in the Wrong Places | Edge.org - 5 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become. - The New York Times - 15 views
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What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
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We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
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I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
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or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
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In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
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I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
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I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
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A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
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There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
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I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
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versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
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I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
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they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
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step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
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None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
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They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
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I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
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changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
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a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
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Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
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there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
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ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
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I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
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Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
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I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
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I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
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we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
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A new literacy for understanding and communicating knowledge in the post-truth era. - T... - 7 views
Ed Tech and the classics! - 50 views
60 Minutes Cut Women Leaders Out Of A Story On Getting Girls Into Tech, And It Broke Th... - 7 views
Coronavirus: Deaconess asks public to sew medical face masks - 7 views
Languages Online - 43 views
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This site is designed for English as an additional language, native English speakers and MFL learners with some great ready-made resources, including videos. There is also a collection of downloadable resources for making customised games and activities which can be used in a wide range of subjects. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Cross+Curricular
Storyboard That: The World's Best FREE Online Storyboard Creator - 151 views
Pixton | World's Best Way to Make & Share Comics - 70 views
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Unleash your creativity! Fun, quick and easy to use.
Tell your story your way.Collaborate with others.New Create with friends, even at the
same time, with Team Comics™ (beta)Create real comic layouts. Edit the shape and position
of each comic panel.Express yourself. Unlimited range of expression.
Move your characters into any pose.Style your words. Give text and speech bubbles
personality in any language.Add your own images. Upload photos and personalize
with your own art.Make your own art. Group objects to create original
characters, props and backgrounds.Show your personality. Design characters of any age
— people and other animals.Fast and easy. Kickstart your creativity with
presets, shortcuts and templates.Make 'em laugh! Share instantly with friends,
family, classmates and colleagues. -
Create real comic layouts. Edit the shape and position of each comic panel. Express yourself. Unlimited range of expression. Move your characters into any pose. Style your words. Give text and speech bubbles personality in any language. Add your own images. Upload photos and personalize with your own art. Make your own art. Group objects to create original characters, props and backgrounds. Show your personality. Design characters of any age — people and other animals. Fast and easy. Kickstart your creativity with presets, shortcuts and templates. Make 'em laugh! Share instantly with friends, family, classmates and colleagues.
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Pixton is a widely used comic strip maker. The personal account is free. So many options and the click and drag editing is really easy to use. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools
You Gotta See This: Kindergarteners Act Out 'Miss Nelson Is Missing' | Edudemic - 74 views
Fake News: A Library Resource Round-Up - 70 views
Math Poems, Math Songs, Math Stories, Math Videos, Common Core Math - 47 views
Distracted Minds: 3 Ways to Get Their Attention in Class - 11 views
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The more distracted I am in my interactions with you, the less likely you are to give me your full attention.
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importance of having students share their strengths and values with you at the beginning of a semester
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The researchers also asked students whether it mattered to them that the instructors knew their names, and more than 85 percent of them said it did
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because making good use of the full physical space of a classroom is one of the most straightforward ways to keep both professor and students attentive.
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One advantage of the Zoom classes that many of us are teaching right now is that the names are all right there on the screen
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They bring their unique life stories and experiences, which can help provide new perspectives on familiar questions and challenges.
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Tell you about an important value
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Use their names regularly.
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She encourages children first to recognize and write their own names and then to compare the letters and syllables in their own names with those of the other names on the grid
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What is most deserving of our attention in the classroom, of course, are the other human beings in our presence
Leaders Don't Hide Behind Data - 6 views
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A/B testing is a trap because it insulates us from A/J testing. A/B testing is an asymptotic stroll toward a local maximum.
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What you’re not doing is inspiring your team to level up. What you’re not doing is inventing a new game. Instead, you’re playing someone else’s game.
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Leadership is the art of doing things you’re not sure of, and doing them with enrollment instead of authority.
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On the other hand, leadership is voluntary. Those who follow you must be enrolled in your journey and persuaded to follow (and contribute to) your vision.
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Digital charisma doesn’t feel like management, and it requires alternative channels. Human channels. Channels that involve actually showing up, not hiding behind a system.
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how can you possibly listen back?
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We can learn quite a bit from how the modern cultural leaders of Instagram and Facebook use their platform, despite so many of their habits we’d prefer to avoid.