While many American parents are angry about the Common Core educational standards and related student assessments in math and English, less attention is being paid to the federally driven green Common Core that is now being rolled out across the country. Under the guise of the first new K-12 science curriculum to be introduced in 15 years, the real goal seems to be to expose students to politically correct climate-change orthodoxy during their formative learning years.
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shared by charlottedonoho on 28 May 15
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Schoolroom Climate Change Indoctrination - WSJ - 0 views
www.wsj.com/...ange-indoctrination-1432767611
climate change politics socratic method education environment
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The standards were designed to provide students with an internationally benchmarked science education.
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From the council’s perspective, the science of climate change has already been settled. Not surprisingly, global climate change is one of the disciplinary core ideas embedded in the Next Generation of Science Standards, making it required learning for students in grade, middle and high school.
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The National Research Council framework for K-12 science education recommends that by the end of Grade 5, students should appreciate that rising average global temperatures will affect the lives of all humans and other organisms on the planet. By Grade 8, students should understand that the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming. And by Grade 12, students should know that global climate models are very effective in modeling, predicting and managing the current and future impact of climate change.
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Relying on a climate-change curriculum and teaching materials largely sourced from federal agencies—particularly those of the current ideologically driven administration—raises a number of issues. Along with the undue authoritative weight that such government-produced documents carry in the classroom, most of the work is one-sided and presented in categorical terms, leaving no room for a balanced discussion. Moreover, too much blind trust is placed in the predictive power of long-range computer simulations, despite the weak forecasting track record of most climate models to date.
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Employing such a Socratic approach to teaching climate change would likely lead to a rational and thought-provoking classroom debate on the merits of the case. However, that is not the point of this academic exercise—which seems to be to indoctrinate young people by using K-12 educators to establish the same positive political feedback loop around global warming that has existed between the federal government and the nation’s colleges and universities for the past two decades.
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New Study: Burn it All (Fossil Fuel), Lose it All (Antarctic Ice and Today's Coasts) - ... - 0 views
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The modeling study is far more a thought experiment than a prediction, given that, even in China, there is every indication that the world’s coal, particularly, will not all be exploited.
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the loss of the entire Antarctic ice sheet would take millenniums, but up to 100 feet of sea level rise could result within 1,000 years, with the rate of the rise beginning to increase a century or two from now. That finding meshes with the 2014 paper on the “collapse” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
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In interviews, scientists said that such long-term risks raise profound moral questions for people of today. “What right do we have to do things that, even if they don’t affect us, are going to be someone else’s problem a thousand years from now?” asked Ian Joughin, an ice sheet expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new research. “Is it fair to do that so we can go on burning fuel as fast as we can?”
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he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)
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It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.
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Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.
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So Many Earth-Like Planets, So Few Telescopes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two
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As the ranks of these planets grow, astronomers are planning the next step in the quest to end cosmic loneliness: gauging which hold the greatest promise for life and what tools will be needed to learn about them.
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recalled that the first discovery of a planet orbiting another normal star, a Jupiter-like giant, was 20 years ago. Before that, she said, astronomers worried that “maybe the ‘Star Trek’ picture of the universe was not right, and there is no life anywhere else.”
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Finding Goldilocks planets closer to home will be the job of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, to be launched in 2017. But if we want to know what the weather is like on these worlds, whether there is water or even life, more powerful instruments will be needed.
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hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study. We will probably never know any more about these particular planets than we do now.
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“but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like.”
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investigating the concept of a starshade, which would float in front of a space telescope and block light from a star so that its much fainter planets would be visible.
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The goal is to have a pool of dozens of “exo-Earths” to study in order to have any chance of seeing signs of life or understanding terrestrial planets
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perhaps because as planets get bigger their mass and gravity increase, and they are better able to hang on to gas and lighter components.
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The work complements and tightens studies done last year by Geoffrey Marcy and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley; that group looks into the nature of so-called super Earths, planets bigger than ours and smaller than Neptune.
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The Science of Sensory Marketing - HBR - 0 views
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learning to deploy cues, such as the sting from a swig of mouthwash and the scritch-scratch sound of a Sharpie pen, that can intensify perceptions of brands
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For example, people who had briefly held a warm beverage were more likely than people who had held a cold one to think that a stranger was friendly; this was demonstrated in an experiment by Lawrence E. Williams, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and John A. Bargh, of Yale
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Such influences are subtle—and that’s exactly why they are so powerful. Consumers don’t perceive them as marketing messages and therefore don’t react with the usual resistance to ads and other promotions.
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Consider this campaign by Dunkin’ Donuts in South Korea: When a company jingle played on municipal buses, an atomizer released a coffee aroma.
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Bank executives should make sure that branch offices exude the reassuring, wealth-suggesting aromas of wood and leather.
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The three found that imbuing pencils with the unusual scent of tea tree oil dramatically increased research subjects’ ability to remember the pencils’ brand and other details. Whereas those given unscented pencils experienced a 73% decline in the information they could recall two weeks later, subjects given tea-tree-scented pencils experienced a decline of only 8%.
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“In the past, communications with customers were essentially monologues—companies just talked at consumers,”
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Then they evolved into dialogues, with customers providing feedback. Now they’re becoming multidimensional conversations, with products finding their own voices and consumers responding viscerally and subconsciously to them.”
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Why Are Elephants and Other Animals So Wrinkly? - 0 views
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Why Are Elephants and Other Animals So Wrinkly? For African elephants, baggy skin keeps them cool in the hot sun
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"The elephant's wrinkled skin traps moisture in the hollows, which means it takes longer for the moisture to evaporate, thus keeping the elephant cooler for longer," Garrigan said.
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Elephants have few sweat glands and can't use them for regulating their body temperature, so they disperse heat in other ways, including through their baggy skin.
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"What happens when you put anti-wrinkle cream on an elephant?" (See National Geographic's elephant pictures.)
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Elephants aren't the only creased creatures that benefit from wrinkles. Take the naked mole rat, whose saggy skin makes moving around easier.
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Climate activism is doomed if it remains a left-only issue | Jonathan Freedland | Comme... - 0 views
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When candid, news editors and TV producers admit they presume their audience files climate change under “worthy but dull”. They know they should care, but they struggle.
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For the media, climate change is Kryptonite. It fails to tick almost every one of the boxes that defines a story. For one thing, it’s not new: it’s a perennial part of the background noise of 21st-century life.
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Cognitive psychologists speak of “loss aversion”: when presented with a choice between a relatively small sacrifice now and an uncertain but larger loss a generation from now, human beings rarely make the apparently obvious and rational move, to make the sacrifice. Add to that our “optimism bias”: the tendency to assume that all will be well in the end – that “they” will think of some whizzy technical fix to keep the world’s temperature stable, and humanity will dodge the bullet.
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First, campaigners have to present their case as a simple, compelling story that everyone can understand. This argument, like any political argument, won’t be won with data and graphs but with a narrative. It has to address our hearts, not our heads.
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But that still leaves what may be the largest political challenge. Right now, climate change has become an issue of the left.
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In the US, climate scepticism has become one of the defining traits of the right, a more reliable marker even than attitudes to abortion or gun control.
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Politicians, others on right, left challenge scientific consensus on some issues | The ... - 0 views
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Often, pronouncements about either subject are accompanied by the politician’s mea culpa: “I’m not a scientist, but ... ”
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It’s the butthat has caused heartburn among scientists, many of whom say such skepticism has an impact on public policy.
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“They’ve been using it as if they can dismiss the view of scientists, which doesn’t make any sense,”
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“Not just as a public figure, but as a human being, your fidelity should be to reality and to the truth,”
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Among those agreeing that climate change is both real and a man-made threat are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, the Defense Department, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society
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murkiness of those comments caused alarm among public-health officials, who say the impact of the anti-vaccination movement is being seen in a measles outbreak in a number of states and Washington, D.C.
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He said he was galled by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul’s recent assertion that the government should not require parents to vaccinate their children because it’s an issue of “freedom.”
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As for the caveat I’m not a scientist, “What they’re saying they implicitly think is that scientists don’t even know about climate change,”
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However, Cruz, Rubio, Portman and Paul all voted against another amendment that said human activity contributes “significantly” to the threat. Cruz has asserted to the National Journal that climate change is “a theory that can’t be proven or disproven.”
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In a separate vote, 98 senators — including Cruz, Rubio, Portman and Paul — acknowledged that climate change is “real and not a hoax.”
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The group that denied climate change is occurring has pivoted, acknowledging that it exists. Still, the group questions whether it is a man-made phenomenon.
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“There is an unwritten litmus test for GOP officeholders” to express some form of skepticism about the phenomenon, he said.
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Conservatives felt more negative emotions when they read scientific studies that challenged their views on climate change and evolution than liberals did in reading about nuclear power and fracking, but researchers believe that’s because climate change and evolution are more national in scope than the issues picked for liberals.
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didn’t stop 39 Republicans — including GOP presidential contenders Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla. — from opposing an amendment last month that blamed changing global temperatures on human activity.
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“And if you can sort of try to obscure your actual position but not offend anyone, that’s what I think they try to do,”
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But it’s possible that their comments reflect a growing disconnect between the views of the public and the scientific community.
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86 percent of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said childhood vaccines such as the one for measles-mumps-rubella should be required, 68 percent of U.S. adults agreed.
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larger gap on the subject of climate change: 87 percent of the scientists said climate change is caused mostly by human activity, while 50 percent of U.S. adults did.
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For example, while 88 percent of scientists said it is generally safe to eat genetically modified foods, only 37 percent of U.S. adults agreed.
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The study found that conservatives tend to distrust science on issues such as climate change and evolution. For liberals, it is fracking and nuclear power.
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Even those who agree that climate change is real and is man-made might not support government action
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Rosenberg said the Internet can provide affirmation of pre-existing beliefs rather than encouraging people to find objective sources of information, such as peer-reviewed journals.
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shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 15
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The Price of Denialism - The New York Times - 0 views
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-rules-of-denialism
denial skepticism ideology scientific method global warming confirmation bias psychology
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As the comedian John Oliver so aptly put it in commenting on a recent Gallup poll that found that one in four Americans disbelieve in climate change: “You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ Or ‘Do owls exist’ or ‘Are there hats?’”
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we are about to be steeped in political arguments on every conceivable issue, all carried out with the usual confusing mix of fact, opinion, opinion stated as fact and fact portrayed as opinion. How can we prepare ourselves to make sense of it?
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A good first step would be to distinguish between skepticism and what has come to be known as denialism. In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over
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When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.
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The throes of denial must feel a lot like skepticism. The rest of the world “just doesn’t get it.” We are the ones being rigorous. How can others be so gullible in believing that something is “true” before all of the facts are in? Yet a warning should occur when these stars align and we find ourselves feeling self-righteous about a belief that apparently means more to us than the preservation of good standards of evidence
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how to tell a fact from an opinion? By the time we sit down to evaluate the evidence for a scientific theory, it is probably too late. If we take the easy path in our thinking, it eventually becomes a habit. If we lie to others, sooner or later we may believe the lie ourselves. The real battle comes in training ourselves to embrace the right attitudes about belief formation in the first place, and for this we need to do a little philosophy.
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a telltale sign of denialism: that these alleged skeptics usually have different standards of evidence for those theories that they want to believe
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Surely few would willingly embrace the title of “denialist.” It sounds so much more rigorous and fair-minded to maintain one’s “skepticism.” To hold that the facts are not yet settled. That there is so much more that we do not know. That the science isn’t certain.
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The problem here, however, is that this is based not only on a grave misunderstanding of science (which in a sense is never settled), but also of what it means to be a skeptic.
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Doubting the overwhelming consensus of scientists on an empirical question, for which one has only the spottiest ideologically-motivated “evidence,” is not skepticism, it is the height of gullibility. It is to claim that it is much more likely that there is a vast conspiracy among thousands of climate scientists than that they have instead all merely arrived at the same conclusion because that is where they were led by the evidence.
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Couldn’t the scientists nonetheless be wrong? Yes, of course. The history of science has shown us that any scientific theory (even Newton’s theory of gravity) can be wrong
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this does not mean that one is a good skeptic merely for disbelieving the well-corroborated conclusions of science. To reject a cascade of scientific evidence that shows that the global temperature is warming and that humans are almost certainly the cause of it, is not good reasoning, even if some long-shot hypothesis comes along in 50 years to show us why we were wrong.
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In scientific reasoning, there is such a thing as warrant. Our beliefs must be justified. This means that we should believe what the evidence tells us, even while science insists that we must also try our best to show how any given theory might be wrong. Science will sometimes miss the mark, but its successful track record suggests that there is no superior competitor in discovering the facts about the empirical world
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When we cynically pretend to withhold belief long past the point at which ample evidence should have convinced us that something is true, we have stumbled past skepticism and landed in the realm of willful ignorance. This is not the realm of science, but of ideological crackpots
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Scientists identify vast underground ecosystem containing billions of micro-organisms |... - 0 views
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Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet.
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Researchers at the Deep Carbon Observatory say the diversity of underworld species bears comparison to the Amazon or the Galápagos Islands, but unlike those places the environment is still largely pristine because people have yet to probe most of the subsurface.
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“It’s like finding a whole new reservoir of life on Earth,” said Karen Lloyd, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “We are discovering new types of life all the time. So much of life is within the Earth rather than on top of it.
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The team combines 1,200 scientists from 52 countries in disciplines ranging from geology and microbiology to chemistry and physics.
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“The strangest thing for me is that some organisms can exist for millennia. They are metabolically active but in stasis, with less energy than we thought possible of supporting life.”
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Some microorganisms have been alive for thousands of years, barely moving except with shifts in the tectonic plates, earthquakes or eruption
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Underworld biospheres vary depending on geology and geography. Their combined size is estimated to be more than 2bn cubic kilometres, but this could be expanded further in the future
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The researchers said their discoveries were made possible by two technical advances: drills that can penetrate far deeper below the Earth’s crust, and improvements in microscopes that allow life to be detected at increasingly minute levels.
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The scientists have been trying to find a lower limit beyond which life cannot exist, but the deeper they dig the more life they find. There is a temperature maximum – currently 122C – but the researchers believe this record will be broken if they keep exploring and developing more sophisticated instruments.
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Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, said: “We must ask ourselves: if life on Earth can be this different from what experience has led us to expect, then what strangeness might await as we probe for life on other worlds?”
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Living Another Day, Thanks to Grandparents Who Couldn't Sleep - The New York Times - 1 views
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A new study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that the way sleep patterns change with age may be an evolutionary adaptation that helped our ancestors survive the night by ensuring one person in a community was awake at all times. The researchers called this phenomenon the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis,” suggesting that an older member of a community who woke before dawn might have been crucial to spotting the threat of a hungry predator while younger people were still asleep. It may explain why people slept in mixed-age groups through much of human history.
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The Hadza sleeping environment may have similarities to that of earlier humans, researchers said. They sleep outdoors or in grass huts in groups of 20 to 30 people without artificially regulating temperature or light. These conditions provide a suitable window to study the evolutionary aspects of sleep.
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more than 220 total hours of sleep observation, researchers found only 18 minutes when all adults were sound asleep simultaneously. Typically, older participants in their 50s and 60s went to bed earlier and woke up earlier than those in their 20s and 30s. On average, more than a third of the group was alert, or lightly dozing, at any given time.
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“We have a propensity to overcategorize things as disorders in the West,” said David Samson, an author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. “It might help elderly individuals to know changes they’re experiencing have an evolutionary reason.”
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“The variation may be partially explained by genetics,” she said, “but there are environmental conditions too.” As people age, their social needs and level of activity change, potentially affecting their sleep patterns.
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there is evidence of a genetic link, she added, pointing out that sleep quality declined among the older Hadza even while they remained active hunters and gatherers.
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shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 10
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Building a Nation of Know-Nothings - NYTimes.com - 1 views
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ding-a-nation-of-know-nothings
partisan misinformation truth knowledge ignorance US press
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It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
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Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate. Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
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It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy.
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So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence? But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
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shared by Javier E on 10 May 19
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Son of Saul's László Nemes: 'Our civilisation is preparing for its own destru... - 1 views
www.theguardian.com/...paring-for-its-own-destruction
movie anti-Semitism totalitarian tolerance internet tech destruction western civilization movies superhero social media knowledge psychology
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László Nemes went to see a superhero movie. He didn’t last long. “I found it unwatchable and false, boring and self-referential, a world of ideal people who don’t behave as humans but more like machines.”
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such films infantilise viewers in two ways. The plots let them defer responsibility for the fate of the world to demigods; the way they are shot – lots of signposting, everything carefully controlled – offers a false sense of omniscience.
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“I’ve been extremely saddened by the way cinema has narrowed its language and created an alphabet that’s never been poorer,
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“Superhero movies take away mystery because there’s nothing in the shadows. All is revealed. And that’s not how our relationship to the world is, because, unfortunately, you can know only a fraction. So it gives a false impression of our might.”
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Genre fans must be terrible worriers, he continues; prisoners of “an extreme state of anguish” soothed only by narrative certainty. “Superhero films let people put away their fears. But this ‘saving’ is not very realistic. And if you create only objective films that avoid big questions of life, then we just create machines to eat popcorn.”
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“Sunset is really about our perception of the world,” shrugs Nemes. “It’s a labyrinth. The audience has to accept confusion as part of the process – and people don’t like that! I have come to understand that it creates major anxiety. But that is the challenge and the promise: to experience the world through the eyes of someone who is not a god. Then you’re not just a popcorn-eating machine, you’re someone for whom this experience can become personal and subjective and meaningful.
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Antisemitism has always been a barometer to measure the moral temperature of a civilisation, for almost mystical reasons. The Jew can go unseen. They are hard to distinguish and so can be the threat coming from inside. Today, it’s therefore very alarming. Almost like we’re now past a critical point.”
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“For the first time since I left Hungary I found this oppression of having to adapt my discourse to a sort of well-received set of ideas. It’s extraordinary that internet on a voluntary basis creates a new form of totalitarianism. One that is much more dangerous because people think they are free.
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“I really have the feeling that a self-assured civilisation such as ours is preparing our own destruction,” he says. “Even Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, this incredible whirlwind of creativity and positivity, was already longing for its own demise.”
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What can he say, he grins. He’s from Eastern Europe, fatalism is in his blood, Kafta taught him that while humans struggle to build meaningful things, they are also digging their own graves.
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What has actually got Nemes fretful is, it turns out, computers. They’re making it much, much worse. “We take from our brains so much power and give it to machines,” he says. “It’s unprecedented. Likewise the incredible amount of imagery we’re producing and the fact so much is virtual. We are building a sort of narcissistic image of ourselves through social media that means we perceive people as potential angels. There’s an increasing self-righteousness, and a great moral expectation on human beings I don’t think is realistic. Then there’s a backlash when we realise we can’t meet this ethical standard.
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“I would love to be wrong, but I really believe that democracy and the internet are not compatible. New technology channels so much of our darkness and we are blind to it. And sometimes the accumulation and spreading of knowledge means people reach a new level of ignorance.”
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Recently, he says, he has found himself in situations in which communication was impossible. Where he was speaking to people who couldn’t think freely because they had been enslaved by ideologies fed to them by the web. Who believed themselves individuals while reciting mass rhetoric
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Sunset is more than a historical study. It is a warning that sophisticated societies can combust. Actually, it’s a prophecy; Nemes thinks it inevitable that we will follow suit.
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“I’ve never been called a white man until recently,” he says. “But now I’m a white guy from eastern Europe who is a Jew. And so I should only speak about such people.
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“This is fractioning humanity – and it’s actually reverse racism. It works as racism, but cloaks itself in the beautiful, beautiful dress of tolerance. And that’s extremely dangerous.”
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How Tech Can Turn Doctors Into Clerical Workers - The New York Times - 0 views
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what I see in my colleague is disillusionment, and it has come too early, and I am seeing too much of it.
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In America today, the patient in the hospital bed is just the icon, a place holder for the real patient who is not in the bed but in the computer. That virtual entity gets all our attention. Old-fashioned “bedside” rounds conducted by the attending physician too often take place nowhere near the bed but have become “card flip” rounds
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My young colleague slumping in the chair in my office survived the student years, then three years of internship and residency and is now a full-time practitioner and teacher. The despair I hear comes from being the highest-paid clerical worker in the hospital: For every one hour we spend cumulatively with patients, studies have shown, we spend nearly two hours on our primitive Electronic Health Records, or “E.H.R.s,” and another hour or two during sacred personal time.
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The living, breathing source of the data and images we juggle, meanwhile, is in the bed and left wondering: Where is everyone? What are they doing? Hello! It’s my body, you know
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How we salivated at the idea of searchable records, of being able to graph fever trends, or white blood counts, or share records at a keystroke with another institution — “interoperability”
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I can get cash and account details all over America and beyond. Yet I can’t reliably get a patient record from across town, let alone from a hospital in the same state, even if both places use the same brand of E.H.R
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the leading E.H.R.s were never built with any understanding of the rituals of care or the user experience of physicians or nurses. A clinician will make roughly 4,000 keyboard clicks during a busy 10-hour emergency-room shift
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In the process, our daily progress notes have become bloated cut-and-paste monsters that are inaccurate and hard to wade through. A half-page, handwritten progress note of the paper era might in a few lines tell you what a physician really thought
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so much of the E.H.R., but particularly the physical exam it encodes, is a marvel of fiction, because we humans don’t want to leave a check box empty or leave gaps in a template.
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For a study, my colleagues and I at Stanford solicited anecdotes from physicians nationwide about patients for whom an oversight in the exam (a “miss”) had resulted in real consequences, like diagnostic delay, radiation exposure, therapeutic or surgical misadventure, even death. They were the sorts of things that would leave no trace in the E.H.R. because the recorded exam always seems complete — and yet the omission would be glaring and memorable to other physicians involved in the subsequent care. We got more than 200 such anecdotes.
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The reason for these errors? Most of them resulted from exams that simply weren’t done as claimed. “Food poisoning” was diagnosed because the strangulated hernia in the groin was overlooked, or patients were sent to the catheterization lab for chest pain because no one saw the shingles rash on the left chest.
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I worry that such mistakes come because we’ve gotten trapped in the bunker of machine medicine. It is a preventable kind of failure
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Our $3.4 trillion health care system is responsible for more than a quarter of a million deaths per year because of medical error, the rough equivalent of, say, a jumbo jet’s crashing every day.
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Much of that is a result of poorly coordinated care, poor communication, patients falling through the cracks, knowledge not being transferred and so on, but some part of it is surely from failing to listen to the story and diminishing skill in reading the body as a text.
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a professor at M.I.T. whose current interest in biomedical engineering is “bedside informatics,” marvels at the fact that in an I.C.U., a blizzard of monitors from disparate manufacturers display EKG, heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, temperature and more, and yet none of this is pulled together, summarized and synthesized anywhere for the clinical staff to use
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What these monitors do exceedingly well is sound alarms, an average of one alarm every eight minutes, or more than 180 per patient per day. What is our most common response to an alarm? We look for the button to silence the nuisance because, unlike those in a Boeing cockpit, say, our alarms are rarely diagnosing genuine danger.
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By some estimates, more than 50 percent of physicians in the United States have at least one symptom of burnout, defined as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, cynicism and decreased efficacy at work
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It is on the increase, up by 9 percent from 2011 to 2014 in one national study. This is clearly not an individual problem but a systemic one, a 4,000-key-clicks-a-day problem.
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The E.H.R. is only part of the issue: Other factors include rapid patient turnover, decreased autonomy, merging hospital systems, an aging population, the increasing medical complexity of patients. Even if the E.H.R. is not the sole cause of what ails us, believe me, it has become the symbol of burnou
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burnout is one of the largest predictors of physician attrition from the work force. The total cost of recruiting a physician can be nearly $90,000, but the lost revenue per physician who leaves is between $500,000 and $1 million, even more in high-paying specialties.
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I hold out hope that artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms will transform our experience, particularly if natural-language processing and video technology allow us to capture what is actually said and done in the exam room.
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as with any lab test, what A.I. will provide is at best a recommendation that a physician using clinical judgment must decide how to apply.
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True clinical judgment is more than addressing the avalanche of blood work, imaging and lab tests; it is about using human skills to understand where the patient is in the trajectory of a life and the disease, what the nature of the patient’s family and social circumstances is and how much they want done.
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The seriously ill patient has entered another kingdom, an alternate universe, a place and a process that is frightening, infantilizing; that patient’s greatest need is both scientific state-of-the-art knowledge and genuine caring from another human being. Caring is expressed in listening, in the time-honored ritual of the skilled bedside exam — reading the body — in touching and looking at where it hurts and ultimately in localizing the disease for patients not on a screen, not on an image, not on a biopsy report, but on their bodies.
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As he was nearing death, Avedis Donabedian, a guru of health care metrics, was asked by an interviewer about the commercialization of health care. “The secret of quality,” he replied, “is love.”/•/
Show your stripes: These striking graphics that portray a warming climate are available... - 0 views
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The oceans are warming faster than we thought, and scientists suggest we brace for impa... - 1 views
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Trump Will Withdraw U.S. From Paris Climate Agreement - The New York Times - 0 views
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WASHINGTON — President Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, weakening efforts to combat global warming and embracing isolationist voices in his White House who argued that the agreement was a pernicious threat to the economy and American sovereignty.
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drawing support from members of his Republican Party but widespread condemnation from political leaders, business executives and environmentalists around the globe.
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. The Paris agreement was intended to bind the world community into battling rising temperatures in concert, and the departure of the Earth’s second-largest polluter is a major blow.
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A statement from the White House press secretary said the president “reassured the leaders that America remains committed to the trans-Atlantic alliance and to robust efforts to protect the environment.”
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The president’s speech was his boldest and most sweeping assertion of an “America first” foreign policy doctrine since he assumed office four months ago.
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“At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be.”
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shortsightedness about the planet and a reckless willingness to shatter longstanding diplomatic relationships.
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In his remarks, Mr. Trump listed sectors of the United States economy that would lose revenue and jobs if the country remained part of the accord, citing a study — vigorously disputed by environmental groups — asserting that the agreement would cost 2.7 million jobs by 2025.
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“Even in the absence of American leadership; even as this administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got,” Mr. Obama said.
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In recent days, Mr. Trump withstood withering criticism from European counterparts who accused him of shirking America’s role as a global leader and America’s responsibility as history’s largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gasses.
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said the decision would ultimately harm the economy by ceding the jobs of the future in clean energy and technology to overseas competitors.
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“It undermines America’s standing in the world and threatens to damage humanity’s ability to solve the climate crisis in time.”
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maybe he believes this will help in the short term, but our generation will end up dealing with a lot of the effects. the US is already a leader in pollution emissions; this can only make that worse. that means it is up to individuals to take responsibility for emissions now that the country is not presented that way.
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Photos of Snowflakes Like You've Never Seen Them Before - The New York Times - 0 views
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Sextillions of snowflakes fell from the sky this winter. That’s billions of trillions of them, now mostly melted away as spring approaches.
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“How do snowflakes form?” Dr. Libbrecht said during an online talk on Feb. 23 that was hosted by the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. “And how do these structures appear — and just, as I like to say, literally out of thin air?”
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The “damn thing” was the camera system for photographing snowflakes. He wanted to use the best digital sensors, ones that captured a million pixels. “The real snowflake is very, very fragile,” he said. “It’s super intricate. So you want high resolution.”
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Dr. Myhrvold also found a special LED, manufactured by a company in Japan for industrial uses, that would emit bursts of light 1/1,000th as long as a typical camera flash. This minimizes heat emitted from the flash, which might melt the snowflake a bit.
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Water is a simple molecule consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. When temperatures drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the molecules start sticking to one another — that is, they freeze.
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“Because it has this complicated path through the clouds, it gives a complicated shape,” Dr. Libbrecht said. “They’re all following different paths, and so each one looks a little different, depending on the path.”
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To counter Dr. Myhrvold’s claims, Mr. Komarechka took an image that he says was even higher resolution. Dr. Myhrvold responded with a lengthy rebuttal explaining why his images were, nonetheless, more detailed.
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Bottom Trawling for Fish Boosts Carbon Emissions, Study Says | Time - 0 views
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It’s been well established by now that the agricultural systems producing our food contribute at least one fifth of global anthropogenic carbon emissions—and up to a third if waste and transportation are factored in.
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According to calculations conducted by the report’s 26 authors, bottom trawling is responsible for one gigaton of carbon emissions a year—a higher annual total than (pre-pandemic) aviation emissions.
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measures how much each so-called “pixel” contributes to global marine biodiversity, fish stocks and climate protection, based on a complex analysis of location, water temperature, salinity and species distribution, among other factors. It also tracks how much CO2 each pixel is capable of absorbing as a carbon sink.
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Worse still, the practice also impacts the ocean’s ability to absorb atmospheric carbon: if the water is already saturated from sources down below, it will be unable to absorb human-caused emissions from above, hamstringing one of our best assets in the fight against climate change.
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Technological innovations such as green power generation and battery storage are vital for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. But we still need to reduce atmospheric carbon, and so far technology has not been able to do that affordably and at scale.
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Keep the Filibuster, There Are Better Ways to Reform | Time - 0 views
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After passing an immense $1.9 trillion COVID aid package that was one of the most expensive and significant pieces of social legislation in a generation, the Biden administration realizes that much of the rest of its agenda—election reform, gun control, and civil rights—is dead on arrival in the Senate, a Senate that Democrats only narrowly control.
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The reason, of course, is the filibuster, the procedural maneuver that allows 41 senators to block multiple forms of substantive legislation.
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This would be a serious mistake that would enhance partisan polarization and increase political instability. There are better ways to achieve policy reform. There are better ways to lower the temperature of American politics.
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I discovered that thoughtful progressives and thoughtful conservatives each suffered from different, deep fears about our political future. Progressives feared minoritarian rule. Conservatives feared majoritarian domination. Ending the filibuster, perversely enough, makes both fears more real.
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The Republican Party has won exactly one popular vote for president since 1988, George W. Bush’s narrow 2.4 percent edge over John Kerry in 2004. Yet it won three presidential elections in that span of time
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Republicans not only have a present electoral college advantage over Democrats, they also have inherent advantages in both the House and the Senate.
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Do away with the filibuster, and it’s entirely possible that the next Republican government could enjoy immense legislative power without a majority of the popular vote. In fact, they could lose voters by margins numbering in the millions, yet still exercise decisive control over the government.
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The Democratic Party is seeking to pass laws that would introduce dramatic changes in American elections, transform free speech doctrine, and potentially limit religious liberty.
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The GOP, for example, is currently in the grips of a Trumpist base that prioritizes angry opposition over compromise. The party largely lacks a positive agenda, so (with some notable exceptions) its priority is clear: No compromise, even when compromise might be prudent. Stop the Democrats. Some Republicans have gone further, descending into a fantasy world of dark conspiracies.
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That means most Americans live in jurisdictions where, for example, election rules, civil rights laws, gun laws, and a wide variety of economic and social policies are within their partisan control.
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Research demonstrates that a majority of Americans are exhausted by partisan politics. Motivated minorities drive most American polarization.
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A combination of redistricting reform and voting reforms like ranked-choice voting can limit the powers of partisan extremists. Ranked-choice voting—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—most notably can reduce the chances of highly-partisan pluralities dominating political primaries.
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The answer to polarization and gridlock is not partisan escalation. Ending the filibuster would only ramp up partisan acrimony and increase the level of fear and anxiety around American elections. There are better paths through American division. We should try those before we enable drastic measures like majoritarian dominance or minoritarian control.