Group items tagged

A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice.

Conclusion: Innate tendencies are impossible

in a new study published in Science, scientists studying groups of people from different societies have suggested that our sense of fairness may depend on the type of society we live in.

Lead researcher Joseph Henrich observed that members of smaller groups were unwilling to punish selfish behavior and were willing to keep much of the money for themselves. This may be because smaller communities lack the social norms or informal institutions like markets and religion, causing them to have narrower concepts of fairness.

Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there’s another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?

There, I think, is a possibility of many kinds of life that might be radically different from what we’re looking for because we only know how to look for what occurs to us. And a large part of what occurs to us comes from what we see looking around the Earth. So we assume it’s carbon-based, we assume it’s water. Those might be good assumptions. I believe there is other carbon-based life elsewhere. I don’t know if it’s all that way. But when you come to the possibility of other chemical basis for life, if you think of life as just maybe some kind of self-propagating, evolving system that forms in certain conditions of complexity and flow and chemical interaction, then maybe it doesn’t have to be carbon-based – in which case I can imagine the possibility of life in much hotter, much colder places: on stars, in interstellar clouds, in comets, in the atmospheres of planets very different from our own. And then, if you want to get even farther out, maybe you can talk about life at very different scales. What about interactions amongst subatomic particles that somehow have some kind of complexity where civilizations rise and fall in a nanosecond that we never know about because they’re inside of our particles? Or on a huge scale, galaxies that are somehow living, orbiting, sandwiches of things forming complexity. You can get pretty far out there if you wanted.

Why we rose to rule, while our hominin relatives died out, has long been a curiosity for scientists.

This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleontologists say they’ve studied the period about 200 million years ago when dinosaurs first came to power, and found that while catastrophic volcanic activity may not explain dinosaur extinction, it could have explained why dinosaurs’ competitors disappeared and the terrible lizards took over the planet.

The scientists examined how two different isotopes (or forms) of carbon fluctuated during these volcanic eruptions. They found that the “heavy” form of carbon was depleted relative to the “light” form. They say this reflects disturbances in the carbon cycle at this time, including a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and aerosols (fine solid particles)

Extending this common trope of American environmentalism to the question of climate engineering would be writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, who views geoengineering as the “junkie logic” of a culture addicted to technological solutions.

In The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, Brand wrote of humanity’s responsibility as Earth’s gardeners and caretakers, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Recently he updated his thinking. “Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: ‘ We are as gods and have to get good at it.’”

Certainly I don't think Tom Friedman makes a great foreign policy analyst, but I'm not willing to write off the profession's ideas any more than I'm willing to write off those of IR scholars or other political scientists or anthropologists or sociologists or soldiers or career diplomats or intelligence officers or, for that matter, business people or philosophers or graduate students who blog.

The key, then, isn't so much for publications to stop asking journalists to do their foreign policy analysis, but to get a better mix of people from all kinds of relevant professions to help enrich their content.

Some scientists are calling for more study of technological interventions to forestall catastrophic global warming. Why?

When a report on climate change hit the U.S. president's desk, the suggestion was not to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, scientific advisors counseled intervention via technology in the climate system itself—a practice now known as geoengineering. And the president was not Barack Obama, George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton—it was Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

Typically what people call geoengineering is divided into two major classes.

the mighty microbes, which constitute 50 to 90 percent of the oceans' total biomass, according to newly released data.

This genetic data has revealed that there might be as many as 100 times more microbe genera than researchers had assumed. One study conducted in the English Channel landed 7,000 new genera alone. Current estimates place the number of marine microbial species at about a billion, according to a prepared statement by John Baross of the University of Washington and chair of the International Census of Marine Microbes's scientific advisory council.

according to a new book by astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and science writer David Darling, we’ve had good evidence of microbial life on Mars since NASA’s Viking missions in the late 1970s.

The Viking researchers thought life on Mars would be heterotrophic, feeding off abundant organic compounds distributed everywhere all over the Martian surface. That picture was wrong, and studies of extremophiles on Earth have made us think differently about Mars.

The p-value is an all-purpose measure that scientists often use to determine whether or not an experimental result is “statistically significant.”

The p-value puts a number on the effects of randomness. It is the probability of seeing a positive experimental outcome even if your hypothesis is wrong.

Many scientific papers make 20 or 40 or even hundreds of comparisons. In such cases, researchers who do not adjust the standard p-value threshold of 0.05 are virtually guaranteed to find statistical significance in results that are meaningless statistical flukes.

It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world.

Now while anyone may have as narrow (or as wide) aesthetic tastes as they please, in a philosopher of aesthetics, such prejudices are deeply problematic. How can a philosopher provide insights on aesthetics applicable to all (or at least most) individuals when their tastes are so confined within the narrow bounds of their own narcissistic agendas?

In 1974, psychologists Art Aron and Donald Dutton hired a woman to stand in the middle of this suspension bridge. As men passed her on their way across, she asked them if they would be willing to fill out a questionnaire. At the end of the questions, she asked them to examine an illustration of a lady covering her face and then make up a back story to explain it.

they had their assistant go through the same routine on a wide, sturdy, wooden bridge standing fixed just a few feet off of the ground.