Group items tagged

"In recent years, Mr. Perl said, his father traveled in India and Japan lecturing about creativity and his concern that science education was becoming too rigid. He urged students to keep a journal and write down crazy ideas. But he also urged them and his colleagues not to get too far ahead of the fundamental truth of experiment in science. In a blog post last year he wrote: "The time scale for physics progress is a century not a decade. There are no decade-scale solutions to worries about the rate of progress of fundamental physics knowledge. My advice is (a) study calculus and machine shop in high school and (b) have a long life as advised in the old song by buttoning up your overcoat and eating an apple every day. "On the other hand," he continued, "occasional scanning of the obituaries in The New York Times indicates that financiers live longer than physicists, so perhaps start a hedge fund in high school.""

"Periodically I find myself confused about my online presence and contributions. Am I using wikis, blogs, twitter, social networks, and email effectively? Effective by what criteria? Indeed, who am I trying to influence? My explorations of what others say about this recently has led me to a position-albeit a provisional one... The social, not the medium (or technology), should be the primary consideration. The criterion we need to apply in designing our online presence and contributions could be something like: "Am I welcoming and cultivating apprentices who are getting prepared to go on and cultivate the kinds of interaction in virtual and physical space that support their own work?" "

"In 2004, statistician Joseph Chang, computer scientist Douglas Rohde, and writer Steve Olson used a computer model of human genetics to show that anyone who was alive 2,000-3,000 years ago is either the ancestor of everyone who's now alive, or no one at all. Think about that: If a person alive in 1,000 BCE has any descendants alive today, they have all of us-even people from different continents and isolated populations. "

"The consensus on how destructive this system is to our planet's carrying-capacity is now clear. Yet the fact that consumerism answers our deep human needs for novelty and status - however inadequately - is rarely acknowledged. Can any appeal to transform our lifestyle priorities in a sustainable direction really ignore how radical we are as animals? How does it properly reckon with the irrepressible faculties of cognition and imagination that humans deploy to make our world anew?"

"Being good at math doesn't mean that you'll be better at evaluating the effectiveness of policies. Making citizens better statisticians is not likely to lessen polarization in our society. If this study is right, it is likely to increase it!"

An allied project (albeit on a larger scale) in Canada. "Reports on and live blogs of conferences, workshops, etc. in the various disciplines engaged in the humanistic and social study of science and technology."

"Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous."

"Beginning in 1946, U.S. Public Health Service investigators in Guatemala, funded by the National Institutes of Health, engaged in immoral, unethical, and illegal experiments infecting victims with bacteria that cause sexually transmitted diseases, without the victims' informed consent. The U.S. has left the victims untreated and uncompensated to the present day."

International Panel on Social Progress