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"In nineteenth‐century America, there was no such person as a "professional scientist." There were professionals and there were scientists, but they were very different. Professionals were men of science who engaged in commercial relations with private enterprises and took fees for their services. Scientists were men of science who rejected such commercial work and feared the corrupting influences of cash and capitalism. Professionals portrayed themselves as active and useful members of an entrepreneurial polity, while scientists styled themselves as crusading reformers, promoters of a purer science and a more research‐oriented university. It was this new ideology, embodied in these new institutions, that spurred these reformers to adopt a special name for themselves-"scientists." One object of this essay, then, is to explain the peculiar Gilded Age, American origins of that ubiquitous term. A larger goal is to explore the different social roles of the professional and the scientist. By attending to the particular vocabulary employed at the time, this essay tries to make clear why a "professional scientist" would have been a contradiction in terms for both the professional and the scientist in nineteenth‐century America. "

If NASA ever gets a clear directive for interplanetary exploration, a new Hundred-Year Starship could be their version of the Mayflower. And like the first pilgrims, Martian explorers might set sail with the knowledge they would never return home.

With the advancement of technology, there has been an immense success in the field of television broadcasting & internet technology.

What had been lacking until relatively recently was an overarching framework or theory through which to grasp the nature of consciousness. The lack of a general theory of consciousness, of how it comes to be that there is something that it is like to be, was really the last rational bastion of opposition to the scientific assertion that consciousness emerges from the brain.

YOU NO LONGER HAVE ANY EXCUSE TO DISMISS OR CALL PEOPLE CONSPIRACY NUTS !! ALL THE THINGS WE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT AND BEEN RIDICULED OVER IS NOW ON MAINSTREAM MEDIA.. THERE ARE NO MORE EXCUSES SHEEPLE, THE SHEEPLE CANNOT IGNORE THE TRUTH ANYMORE.. IF YOU SHOW THESE CLIPS TO YOUR SKEPTICS AND THEY STILL DISMISS YOU - THEY ARE THE ONES THAT LIVE ON FANTASY ISLAND.

...Historians of science have always had a soft spot for the history of theoretical physics. The great theoretical advances of this century -- relativity and quantum mechanics -- have been documented in fascinating historical accounts that have captivated the mind of the cultivated public. There are no comparable studies of the relations between science and engineering. Breaking with the tradition of the Fachidiot, theoretical physicists have bestowed their romantic autobiographies on the world, portraying themselves as the high priests of the reigning cult.

Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [

To know what the most important virtue of our age is we need to have at least a basic understanding of our age. Our era is becoming increasingly characterized by uncertainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than a cursory elucidation of our situation is beyond the scope of this essay. There are geopolitical, economic, technological and environmental trends worth mentioning. When the more philosophical portion of this  discourse arrives I will argue that the virtue of wisdom underlies the meaningfulness and efficacy of all other virtues, and this in broad strokes is primarily due to (1) the aforementioned instability in our surroundings ; (2) the relationship between the deontological and virtue; and (3) the nature of agency itself.  Whether uncertainty itself can provide an ethical foundation for us to elaborate on will be a separate question, and finally I speculate on where wisdom leads us in the context of a philosophy that is politically active and not doomed to irrelevance to and by the larger population.

Everyone has experienced a broken knob or a broken piece off of an appliance. You also know that while trying to get a new one you might have a long waiting period. Well there might be a prototype that is here to solve that problem. The Thing-O-Matic claims to manifest any three-dimensional plastic object in just minutes. The machine was shown first at a Las Vegas trade fair and is meant to make manufacturing more common for the average person.\n\n3,000 have already been sold at $790 a device. This model only makes plastic objects but the manufacturers say that in the future models could make metal and plastic models to make super cool gadgets. The machines make objects that are six by six by seven inches. The machine is not capable of making images but it does make boxes, tubes and get this- even action figures!

There are differences between the group's demonstrations. For crystals, Tittel's group used thulium-doped lithium niobate, whereas Gisin's group opted for neodymium-doped yttrium silicate. In addition, a different type of laser set-up has favoured Gisin's group, which reports a maximum storage time of some 200 ns at an efficiency of more than 20%; Tittel's group reports a storage time of 7 ns at an efficiency of 2%. On the other hand, the quantum memory of Tittel's group functions at a bandwidth of 5 GHz - some 40 times greater than Gisin's group - which means, potentially, far more information could be sent in the same time.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2011) - Think you're overloaded with information? Not even close.

The new device would also allow "power proportional computing." For example, Web server farms, such as those used by Google, consume an enormous amount of power - even when there are low levels of user activity - in part because the server farms can't turn off the power without affecting their main memory.

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research has shown that it is possible and affordable for the world to achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, if there is the political will to strive for this goal.

Social media present risks and benefits to children but parents who try to secretly monitor their kids' activities online are wasting their time, says Larry D. Rosen, Ph.D., professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Rosen identifies potential adverse effects of social media, including: Teens who use Facebook more often show more narcissistic tendencies, while young adults who have a strong Facebook presence show more signs of other psychological disorders, including antisocial behaviors, mania, and aggressive tendencies. Daily overuse of media and technology has a negative effect on the health of all children, especially preteens and teenagers, by making them more prone to anxiety, depression, and other psychological disorders, and making them more susceptible to future health problems. Facebook can be distracting and can negatively impact learning. Studies found that middle school, high school and college students who checked Facebook at least once during a 15-minute study period achieved lower grades. Rosen says new research has also found positive influences linked to social networking, including: Young adults who spend more time on Facebook are better at showing "virtual empathy" to their online friends. Online social networking can help introverted adolescents learn how to socialize. Social networking can provide tools for teaching in compelling ways that engage young students. "If you feel that you have to use some sort of computer program to surreptitiously monitor your child's social networking, you are wasting your time. Your child will find a workaround in a matter of minutes," he says. "You have to start talking about appropriate technology use early and often and build trust, so that when there is a problem, whether it is being bullied or seeing a disturbing image, your child will talk to you about it." Ref.: Larry D. Rosen, Poke Me: How Social Networks Can Both Help and Harm Our Kids, 2011; 119th Annua

Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.

Multiple Discovery is a very thorough study of independent simultaneous discovery in the history of science and technology. It seems that there is almost no instance of a great discovery or invention that was not discovered independently and simultaneously. In addition to a careful historical study, Lamb and Easton present a theory to explain multiple discovery, which they call evolutionary realism.

May 4, 2011: Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity.Researchers confirmed these points at a press conference today at NASA headquarters where they announced the long-awaited results of Gravity Probe B (GP-B)."The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts," says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

A 36-year-old man has received the world's first synthetic trachea, made from a synthetic scaffold seeded with his own stem cells, in an operation at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. Professor Paolo Macchiarini of Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet led an international team, including professor Alexander Seifalian from University College London, who designed and built the nanocomposite tracheal scaffold, and Harvard Bioscience, which produced a specifically designed bioreactor used to seed the scaffold with the patient´s own stem cells. The cells were grown on the scaffold inside the bioreactor for two days before transplantation to the patient. Because the cells used to regenerate the trachea were the patient's own, there has been no rejection of the transplant and the patient is not taking immunosuppressive drugs. "The big conceptual breakthrough is that we can move from transplanting organs to manufacturing them for patients," says David Green, the president of Harvard Bioscience in Holliston, Massachusetts. Transplantations of tissue-engineered windpipes with synthetic scaffolds in combination with the patient's own stem cells as a standard procedure means that patients will not have to wait for a suitable donor organ. Patients could benefit from earlier surgery and have a greater chance of cure. This would be of especially great value for children, since the availability of donor tracheas is much lower than for adult patients.

There are some features in Windows that at times become irritating and does not let users to use PC to its fullest potential. We call it irritating it when its disturbing. While you cannot take these features out of Windows, you can make certain changes to ensure they do not appear on your screen.