Gravity Probe B Project Confirms Einstein Space-Time Ideas - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Observations of planets, the Moon and particularly the shifting orbits of the Lageos research satellites had convinced astronomers and physicists that Einstein’s predictions were on the mark. Nevertheless, scientists said that the Gravity Probe results would live forever in textbooks as the most direct measurements, and that it was important to keep testing theories that were thought to be correct.
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Empty space in the vicinity of Earth is indeed turning, Dr. Everitt reported at the news conference and in a paper prepared for the journal Physical Review Letters, at the leisurely rate of 37 one-thousandths of a second of arc — the equivalent of a human hair seen from 10 miles away — every year. With an uncertainty of 19 percent, that measurement was in agreement with Einstein’s predictions of 39 milliarcseconds.
Tools for Thinking - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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emergence
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emergence
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emergence
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In Defense of Naïve Reading - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of “research.” By and large they were produced for the pleasure and enlightenment of those who enjoyed them.
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But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities ─ especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied ─ needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting
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The main aim was research: the creating and accumulation and transmission of knowledge. And the main model was the natural science model of collaborative research: define problems, break them down into manageable parts, create sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines for the study of these, train students for such research specialties and share everything. With that model, what literature and all the arts needed was something like a general “science of meaning” that could eventually fit that sort of aspiration. Texts or art works could be analyzed as exemplifying and so helping establish such a science. Results could be published in scholarly journals, disputed by others, consensus would eventually emerge and so on.
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The Joy of Psyching Myself Out - The New York Times - 0 views
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that neat separation is not just unwarranted; it’s destructive
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Although it’s often presented as a dichotomy (the apparent subjectivity of the writer versus the seeming objectivity of the psychologist), it need not be.
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IS it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you be both a psychologist and a writer?
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Denying Genetics Isn't Shutting Down Racism, It's Fueling It - 0 views
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For many on the academic and journalistic left, genetics are deemed largely irrelevant when it comes to humans. Our large brains and the societies we have constructed with them, many argue, swamp almost all genetic influences.
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Humans, in this view, are the only species on Earth largely unaffected by recent (or ancient) evolution, the only species where, for example, the natural division of labor between male and female has no salience at all, the only species, in fact, where natural variations are almost entirely social constructions, subject to reinvention.
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if we assume genetics play no role, and base our policy prescriptions on something untrue, we are likely to overshoot and over-promise in social policy, and see our rhetoric on race become ever more extreme and divisive.
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The Moral Instinct - The New York Times - 2 views
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Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
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The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished
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If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.
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Half Of The Jury In The Chauvin Trial Is Nonwhite. That's Only Part Of The Story : Live... - 0 views
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The jury chosen for the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, is notable because it is significantly less white than Minneapolis itself.
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three Black men, one Black woman and two jurors who identify as multiracial.
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50% of the panel that will vote on Chauvin's fate will be Black or multiracial.
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Justified True Belief - TOK RESOURCE.ORG - 0 views
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This traditional unpacking of the idea of knowledge follows naturally after the Student knowledge claims. The Wittgenstein and the polysemy of language unit will also inform the class activities presented below; especially for differentiating between opinion and belief.
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TRUE:The knowledge claim is True rather than False. It corresponds to the real world. It is a fact. It is “what is the case.”
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JUSTIFIED:The knowledge claim is justified with adequate evidence. Justification requires Coherence with previous data and Clarity with regard to language and logic. There can be no Contradiction or strong Counter evidence.
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Opinion | Humans Are Animals. Let's Get Over It. - The New York Times - 0 views
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The separation of people from, and the superiority of people to, members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.
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Like Plato, Hobbes associates anarchy with animality and civilization with the state, which gives to our merely animal motion moral content for the first time and orders us into a definite hierarchy.
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It is rationality that gives us dignity, that makes a claim to moral respect that no mere animal can deserve. “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality,” writes Immanuel Kant in “Critique of Practical Reason.” In this assertion, at least, the Western intellectual tradition has been remarkably consistent.
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Opinion | Why Covid's Airborne Transmission Was Acknowledged So Late - The New York Times - 0 views
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A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.
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The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”
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on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.
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America Is Flunking Math - Persuasion - 1 views
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One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.
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The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous genocidal policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America
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Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world.
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Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift | Simply Psychology - 0 views
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Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not evolve gradually towards truth.
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Science has a paradigm which remains constant before going through a paradigm shift when current theories can’t explain some phenomenon, and someone proposes a new theory.
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A scientific revolution occurs when: (i) the new paradigm better explains the observations, and offers a model that is closer to the objective, external reality; and (ii) the new paradigm is incommensurate with the old.
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Why Study History? (1985) | AHA - 0 views
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Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past
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Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.
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Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!
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How to Get It Wrong - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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economics needs rethinking in the wake of a disastrous crisis, a crisis that was neither predicted nor prevented.
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it’s important to realize that the enormous intellectual failure of recent years took place at several levels. Clearly, economics as a discipline went badly astray in the years — actually decades — leading up to the crisis. But the failings of economics were greatly aggravated by the sins of economists, who far too often let partisanship or personal self-aggrandizement trump their professionalism. Last but not least, economic policy makers systematically chose to hear only what they wanted to hear. And it is this multilevel failure — not the inadequacy of economics alone — that accounts for the terrible performance of Western economies since 2008.
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Hardly anyone predicted the 2008 crisis, but that in itself is arguably excusable in a complicated world.
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Bringing genetics into trans identity is a terrifying path | Fury | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views
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This study was looking at the relationship between these genes and the possibility that they are a factor in what causes gender dysphoria.
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By examining a link between genetics and gender dysphoria, this study is investigating a potential biological cause for the existence of transgender people.
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“This is nothing new. These arguments have happened before with research into the ‘gay gene’ in the late 1980s and early 90s.”
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Knowledge formation and its history - Research themes - CLUE+ Research Institute for Cu... - 0 views
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Knowledge is a key concept and an instrument of high value in contemporary society.
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The ambition illustrates the idea that knowledge is conceived as a goal and an ideal for education and development of individuals and groups, including academic education and research, as well as a profitable instrument for researchers, employers, entrepreneurs, and government institutions in our society.
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And these discussions of knowledge
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Trump's rebuke of Fauci encapsulates rejection of science in virus fight - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Trump broke with Fauci, who has served under six presidents, on Wednesday over the infectious disease expert's warnings that getting businesses and schools back open too quickly would lead to unnecessary suffering and death.
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The delicate dynamic between Fauci and Trump has been watched for months. Its latest fraying marks the most pronounced clash yet in the tussle between science and politics that has long plagued the administration's fight against the coronavirus.
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He has yet to initiate a serious national conversation about the vital need to get the economy firing again balanced against the level of death and illness that is acceptable to the country given that the pandemic could worsen if states open up too quickly.
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Coronavirus: China to boost mass surveillance machine, experts say - 0 views
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China could use the coronavirus outbreak to boost its mass surveillance capabilities as it looks to technology to help contain the epidemic in the world’s second-largest economy.The Communist Party has built a vast surveillance state through different methods with technology at its core.As artificial intelligence and the use of data becomes more advanced, Beijing has found increasingly effective ways to track the Chinese population, including facial recognition.
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With over 77,000 coronavirus cases confirmed in China alone, the government has mobilized its surveillance machine, a move experts said could continue even after the virus has been contained.
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The Chinese government has also enlisted the help of tech giants like Tencent, owner of popular messaging app WeChat and Alibaba subsidiary, Ant Financial, which runs payments app Alipay. On both WeChat and Alipay, users can put in their Chinese ID numbers and where they have travelled. Users will then be assigned a QR code based on a traffic light color system which instructs them about how long they need to be in quarantine, or whether they are free to travel. A QR code is a type of barcode which is widely used on digital platforms in China.
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Do You Use Only 10% of Your Brain? | Mental Floss - 0 views
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We may be biased, but we think the human brain is pretty special.
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This myth is so prevalent that it is unquestioningly accepted as a pivotal plot point in movies, a motivational tactic for self-improvement, or justification for claims about ESP and other supposed untapped abilities of the human mind. A 2013 poll surveying over 2000 Americans found that 65 percent believed the 10 percent myth. A 2007 study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that even some doctors weren't immune to the fallacy. But the truth is that everyone uses 100 percent of their brain.
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Decades later, the myth has persevered because of the attractive possibility it seems to present. It absolves us for not reaching our full potential, offers a persistent insecurity for self-help gurus to appeal to, and provides a pseudo-scientific explanation for the limits of human comprehension.
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