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We don’t even really know what a conscience is, but somebody’s going to have to program one nonetheless.

the government is paying more than $200 for each course of treatment.

But when stockpiling a smallpox drug was first proposed in 2001 after the Sept. 11 and anthrax attacks, it was expected to cost only $5 to $10 per course, said Dr. Donald A. henderson, who led a government advisory panel on biodefense in the wake of those attacks. Dr. henderson was a leader in the eradication of smallpox in the 1960s and is now at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Smallpox has such a long incubation period that the vaccine can prevent disease even if it is given as late as three days after infection. Arestvyr may also prevent infection if given early enough, but that has not been proven.

the price being charged for a patented drug was a bargain compared with AIDS antiretrovirals that cost $20,000 a year and cancer drugs that cost more than $100,000 a year.

“There are 80 million courses of Tamiflu in the strategic national stockpile,” he said. “Smallpox is just as contagious and has 30 times the mortality. By measures like that, I’d say 2 million is on the low end.”

The answer is not “because Britain is better and unique” but “because I am British and these are the stories I have been brought up on” at school, university, on TV and elsewhere. Go to another country and you will see that they have their own, equally admirable, pantheon of greats.

The area that I have been working on, the eighteenth-century search for longitude, likewise reveals the need to challenge nationalistic assumptions.

Historians and readers of History botH need to be aware of tHe biases of our education and literature. Accounts of BritisH exceptionalism, especially tHose tHat lump tHe rest of Europe or tHe world into an amorpHous group of also-rans, are more tHe result of national tradition and wisHful tHinking tHan a careful reading of tHe sources.

these ideas are not about looking within and finding oneself. They are about overcoming the self. They are, in a sense, anti-self-help.

Today, we are often told that our goal should be to look within and find ourselves, and, once we do, to strive to be sincere and authentic to that true self, always loving ourselves and embracing ourselves for who we are. All of this sounds great and is a key part of what we think of as a properly “modern” way to live.

But what if we’re, on the contrary, messy selves that tend to fall into ruts and patterns of behavior? If so, the last thing we would want to be doing is embracing ourselves for who we are — embracing, in other words, a set of patterns we’ve fallen into. The goal should rather be to break these patterns and ruts, to train ourselves to interact better with those around us.

Certainly some strains of Chinese political theory will take this vision of the self — that we tend to fall into patterns of behavior — to argue for a more paternalistic state that will, to use a more recent term, “nudge” us into better patterns.

many of the texts we discuss in the book go the other way, and argue that the goal should be to break us from being such passive creatures — calling on us to do things that break us out of these patterns and allow us to train ourselves to start altering our behavior for the better.

You argue that Chinese philosophy views rituals as tools that can liberate us from these ruts.

Rituals force us for a brief moment to become a different person and to interact with those around us in a different way. They work because they break us from the patterns that we fall into and that otherwise dominate our behavior.

In the early han dynasty, for example, we have examples of rituals that called for role reversals. The father would be called upon to play the son, and the son would play the father. Each is forced to see the world from the other’s perspective, with the son learning what it’s like to be in a position of authority and the father remembering what it was like to be the more subservient one

We tend to think that we live in a globalized world, but in a lot of ways we really don’t. The truth is that for a long time only a very limited number of ideas have dominated the world, while ideas that arose elsewhere were seen as “traditional” and not worth learning from.

imagine future generations that grow up reading Du Fu along with Shakespeare, and Confucius along with Plato. Imagine that type of world, where great ideas — wherever they arose — are thought about and wrestled with.

There’s a very strong debate going on in China about values — a sense that everything has become about wealth and power, and a questioning about whether this should be rethought. And among the ideas that are being brought into the debate are these earlier notions about the self and about how one can lead a good life. So, while the government is appropriating some of these ideas in particular ways, the broader public is debating them, and certainly with very different interpretations.

ways of working are critical in mathematical work and when they are taught and valued, many more students contribute, leading to higher achievement

mathematics education we suffer from the widespread, distinctly American idea that only some people can be “math people.” This idea has been disproved by scientific research showing the incredible potential of the brain to grow and adapt. But the idea that math is hard, uninteresting, and accessible only to “nerds” persists. 

harsh stereotypical thinking—mathematics is for select racial groups and men. This thinking, as well as the teaching practices that go with it, have provided the perfect conditions for the creation of a math underclass.

There is a good reason for this: Justification and reasoning are two of the acts that lie at the heart of mathematics. They are, in many ways, the essence of what mathematics is.  Scientists work to prove or disprove new theories by finding many cases that work or counter-examples that do not. Mathematicians, by contrast prove the validity of their propositions through justification and reasoning.

does not simply test a mathematical definition, as the first does. It requires that students visualize a triangle, use transformational geometry, consider whether different cases satisfy the mathematical definition, and then justify their thinking.

online platform explaining research evidence on ability and the brain and on good mathematics teaching, for teachers and parents. The course had a transformative effect. It was taken by 40,000 people, and 95 percent said they would change their teaching or parenting as a result.

The young people who are successful in today’s workforce are those who can discuss and reason about productive mathematical pathways, and who can be wrong, but can trace back to errors and work to correct them.

American idea that those who are good at math are those who are fast. Speed is revered in math classes across the U.S., and students as young as five years old are given timed tests—even though these have been shown to create math anxiety in young children. Parents use flash cards and other devices to promote speed, not knowing that they are probably damaging their children’s mathematical development

The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant

gives more time for depth and exploration than the curricula it has replaced by removing some of the redundant methods students will never need or use.

And in many cases, though not all, people living in areas threatened by severe natural hazards do so by choice. If a risk has not been imposed on us, we take it much less seriously. Though Schulz’s piece certainly made a splash online, it is hard to imagine a mass exodus of Portlanders and Seattleites in response. hey, they like it there.

They don’t have much to compare the future earthquake to. After all, there hasn’t been an earthquake or tsunami like it there since roughly 1700. Schulz poeticizes this problem, calling out humans for their “ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.” Once again, this confounds our emotional connection to the risk.

But our “temporal parochialism,” as Schulz calls it, also undoes our grasp on probability. “We think probability happens with some sort of regularity or pattern,” says Ropeik. “If an earthquake is projected to hit within 50 years, when there hasn’t been one for centuries, we don’t think it’s going to happen.” Illogical thinking works in reverse, too: “If a minor earthquake just happened in Seattle, we think we’re safe.”

The belief that an unlikely event won’t happen again for a while is called a gambler’s fallacy. Probability doesn’t work like that. The odds are the same with every roll of the dice.

For individuals and government alike, addressing every point of concern requires a cost-benefit analysis. When kids barely have pencils and paper in schools that already exist, how much is appropriate to invest in earthquake preparedness? Even when that earthquake will kill thousands, displace millions, and cripple a region’s economy for decades to come—as Cascadia is projected to—the answer is complicated. “You immediately run into competing issues,” says Slovic. “When you’re putting resources into earthquake protection that has to be taken away from current social needs—that is a very difficult sell.”​

There are things people can do to combat our innate irrationality. The first is obvious: education. California has a seismic safety commission whose job is to publicize the risks of earthquakes and advocate for preparedness at household and state policy levels.

Another idea is similar to food safety ratings in the windows of some cities’ restaurants. Schulz reports that some 75 percent of Oregon’s structures aren’t designed to hold up to a really big Cascadia quake. “These buildings could have their risk and safety score publicly posted,” says Slovic. “That would motivate people to retrofit or mitigate those risks, particularly if they are schools.”

science points to a hard truth. humans are simply inclined to be more concerned about what’s immediately in front of us: Snakes, fast-moving cars, unfamiliar chemical compounds in our breakfast cereal and the like will always elicit a quicker response than an abstract, far-off hazard.

The proper question is: how can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.

Groups of people commonly depend on one another for memory in this way — not by all knowing the same thing, but by specializing. And now we’ve added our computing devices to the network, depending for memory not just on people but also on a cloud of linked people and specialized information-filled devices.

We have all become a great cybermind. As long as we are connected to our machines through talk and keystrokes, we can all be part of the biggest, smartest mind ever.

“It’s really huge what a dictionary does for understanding an ancient society,”

the sociologist William h. Whyte

The Street Life Project, as it was called, was revolutionary in urban planning, changing not only the way we think about public spaces but also what can be learned in this kind of close observational research of human interaction.

affected people’s enjoyment of a public space

We could make people happier.

Are we really talking to one another? Is modernity making us lonely?

Project for Public Spaces

time-lapse films of four major urban nodes — Bryant Park; the front steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; a corner of Chestnut Street in Center City Philadelphia; and Downtown Crossing in Boston — in order to better understand how people used the spaces and how they might be improved.

studies how digital technology changes our lives

The economics profession that Mr. Thaler entered in the early 1970s was deeply invested in proving that it was more than a mere social science.

But economic outcomes are the result of human decision-making. To achieve the same mathematical precision of hard sciences, economists made a radically simplifying assumption that people are “optimizers” whose behavior is as predictable as the speed of physical body falling through space.

After so-called behavioral economics began to go mainstream, Professor Thaler turned his attention to helping solve a variety of business and, increasingly, public policy issues. As these tools have been applied to practical problems, Professor Thaler has noted that there has been “very little actual economics involved.” Instead, the resulting insights have “come primarily from psychology and the other social sciences.”

it is actually “a slur on those other social sciences if people insist on calling any policy-related research some kind of economics.”

Professor Thaler’s narrative ultimately demonstrates that by trying to set itself as somehow above other social sciences, the “rationalist” school of economics actually ended up contributing far less than it could have. The group’s intellectual denial led to not just sloppy social science, but sloppy philosophy.

Economists would do well to embrace both their philosophical and social science roots. No amount of number-crunching can replace the need to confront the complexity of human existence.

It is not only in academics that the most difficult questions are avoided behind a mathematical smoke screen. When businesses use cost-benefit analysis, for instance, they are applying a moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, popularized by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.

Compared against alternative moral philosophies, like those of Kant or Aristotle, Mill has relatively few contemporary adherents in professional philosophical circles. But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost-benefit analysis,” corporations hope to circumvent the need to confront the profound ethical issues implicated.

The “misbehaving” of Professor Thaler’s title is supposed to refer to how human actions are inconsistent with rationalist economic theory

Another change that interested the panellists was the increased number of collaborative and multiple authored papers now submitted to journals, which led them to think about the ethics of acknowledgement. In Meurig Thomas’s view the author is, simply, “the person that primarily thinks about the experiment, plans it, and writes it. I can sleep more comfortably at night this way. If I claim to be a senior author, I have to write it and I have to concoct what the experiment was, and defend it.” Chaloner suggested that authorship has grown “because of the pressure for people to have publications in their names”, with an “agreement to let you come onto this paper and I’ll get on yours next time”. Frith referred to this as “gaming”.

Despite all of the technological developments in the last fifty years, there has been no quick or easy response to questions over refereeing, and the event ended with the feeling that although there is no doubt technology has transformed the way science is communicated, its effect has not invariably simplified the process.

With a fortune estimated at $12.5 billion, Dr. Simons now runs a tidy universe of science endeavors, financing not only math teachers but hundreds of the world’s best investigators, even as Washington has reduced its support for scientific research. his favorite topics include gene puzzles, the origins of life, the roots of autism, math and computer frontiers, basic physics and the structure of the early cosmos.

In time, his novel approach helped change how the investment world looks at financial markets. The man who “couldn’t write programs” hired a lot of programmers, as well as physicists, cryptographers, computational linguists, and, oh yes, mathematicians. Wall Street experience was frowned on. A flair for science was prized. The techies gathered financial data and used complex formulas to make predictions and trade in global markets.

Working closely with his wife, Marilyn, the president of the Simons Foundation and an economist credited with philanthropic savvy, Dr. Simons has pumped more than $1 billion into esoteric projects as well as retail offerings like the World Science Festival and a scientific lecture series at his Fifth Avenue building. Characteristically, it is open to the public.

On a wall in Dr. Simons’s office is one of his prides: a framed picture of equations known as Chern-Simons, after a paper he wrote with Shiing-Shen Chern, a prominent geometer. Four decades later, the equations define many esoteric aspects of modern physics, including advanced theories of how invisible fields like those of gravity interact with matter to produce everything from superstrings to black holes.

“He’s an individual of enormous talent and accomplisHment, yet He’s completely unpretentious,” said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist wHo is tHe president of Rockefeller University. “He manages to blend all tHese admirable qualities.”

Forbes magazine ranks him as the world’s 93rd richest person — ahead of Eric Schmidt of Google and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, among others — and in 2010, he and his wife were among the first billionaires to sign the Giving Pledge, promising to devote “the great majority” of their wealth to philanthropy.

For all his self-deprecations, Dr. Simons does credit himself with a contemplative quality that seems to lie behind many of his accomplishments.“I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world,” Dr. Simons said of his youthful math enthusiasms. “I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.”

The problem is the way that wealth has come to be distributed. The share of national income that accrues to the top one percent, which had stayed at about 10 percent from 1954 to 1980, has risen to about 23 percent. In a $15 trillion economy, the difference represents a premium of almost $2 trillion a year, or more than twice the current annual federal budget deficit. As far as I’m concerned, that money belongs to the rest of us, especially the bottom 80 percent, whether in the form of increased pay or higher public spending. By manipulating the legislative and legal systems—which is to say, by buying them—the rich have simply stolen it.

The outcome is the lottery society that’s with us now. Social mobility has slowed to a crawl. If you work hard and play by the rules, it probably won’t make a damn bit of difference