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As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic abates in many countries worldwide, and a new normal phase arrives, critically assessing policy responses to this public health crisis may promote better preparedness for the next wave or the next pandemic

A key lesson is revealed by one of the earliest and most sizeable US federal responses to the pandemic: the investment of $3 billion to build more ventilators. These extra ventilators, even had they been needed, would likely have done little to improve population survival because of the high mortality among patients with COVID-19 who require mechanical ventilation and diversion of clinicians away from more health-promoting endeavors.

Why are so many people distressed at the possibility that a patient in plain view—such as a person presenting to an emergency department with severe respiratory distress—would be denied an attempt at rescue because of a ventilator shortfall, but do not mount similarly impassioned concerns regarding failures to implement earlier, more aggressive physical distancing, testing, and contact tracing policies that would have saved far more lives?

A scientific paradigm is a framework containing all the commonly accepted views about a subject, conventions about what direction research should take and how it should be performed.

Paradigms contain all the distinct, established patterns, theories, common methods and standards that allow us to recognize an experimental result as belonging to a field or not.

The vocabulary and concepts in Newton’s three laws or the central dogma in biology are examples of scientific “open resources" that scientists have adopted and which now form part of the scientific paradigm.

Donald Trump's approval rating stands at 33%, while his disapproval is at 60%.

38% approval rating and 59% disapproval rating.

It turns out that the insurrection at the US Capitol last week did exactly that.

None of us should have been surprised. Months of escalating threats and violence at our state capitols should have served as notice of what was coming.

All too often, these rioters have been greeted as allies by Republican state legislators -- one allegedly opened the door to protesters.

In Oregon last month, where the state Capitol has been closed to the public, a Republican lawmaker, who said that legislative proceedings should be open to everyone, allegedly held open a side entrance to allow a gathered mob inside.

a personality trait where a person is so "focused on their own interests they will manipulate, deceive, and exploit others to achieve their goals."

In terms of cognitive processes, people with stronger conspiracy beliefs are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events, to attribute intentionality where it is unlikely to exist, and to have lower levels of analytic thinking.

But once a person starts inventing a narrative out of thin air, you can see very little critical thinking occurring.

This is how science works, and how it should work. If the theory fails to make the correct predictions, then you have to replace the theory. This is what you call scientific progress. You replace old theories with better ones.

And now to a question that some of you are burning to know the answer of: “Is the falsification principle falsifyable?” I once read, I don’t know if it’s true, that Karl Popper used to kick his students out of the classroom for asking such a question. The falsification principle is that what its name says, it is a principle and not a scientific theory. No, the falsification principle itself is not falsifyable, it is not scientific. It belongs to metascience, or philosophy. Don’t forget: the scientific method – hypothesis, experimentation, observation, conclusion – is also not falsifyable, still it is used by scientists on a daily basis.

The relationship between emotion and reason is commonly thought to be a problematic one. But the latest thinking challenges that assumption..

Damasio’s theory goes something like this: we are often faced with rational decisions that involve a great many conflicting and confusing alternatives. We usually decide on which course to take by weighing up the options, and deciding which one is most beneficial to our well-being. But when it is unclear which one this may be, our powers of reason are insufficient in formulating an answer. In situations like these, our emotions take over.

reason belongs in the mind, and emotion in our body, where is resides alongside instinct and other non-cognitive responses. But of course, there are few dualists left; our understanding of mental processes is much more physically-based, so we need a more satisfactory answer.

There is “no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience and none too dangerous to try. Any story that sticks is a good one,”

This newsletter is about finding ways to make this stuff stick in your mind and to arm you with the information you need to take control of your digital life.

how to start? The definition of privacy itself. I think it’s time to radically expand it.

For MacIntyre, “rationality” comprises all the intellectual resources, both formal and substantive, that we use to judge truth and falsity in propositions, and to determine choice-worthiness in courses of action

Rationality in this sense is not universal; it differs from community to community and from person to person, and may both develop and regress over the course of a person’s life or a community’s history.

So rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history: indeed, since there are also a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than justice

researchers re-examined evidence from 107 other graves in the Americas from roughly the same period. They were startled to discover that out of 26 graves with hunter tools, 10 belonged to women

the findings indicate that “women have always been able to hunt and have in fact hunted.” The new data calls into question an influential dogma in the field of archaeology. Nicknamed “man the hunter,” this is the notion that men and women in ancient societies had strictly defined roles: Men hunted, and women gathered. Now, this theory may be crumbling.

scientists re-examined the remains of a 10th-century Viking warrior excavated in Sweden at the end of the 19th century by Hjalmar Stolpe, an archaeologist. The skeleton had been regally buried at the top of a hill, with a sword, two shields, arrows and two horses.

“Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called ‘simulation games,’” Mr. Gardner wrote when he introduced Life to the world 50 years ago with his October 1970 column.

The Game of Life motivated the use of cellular automata in the rich field of complexity science, with simulations modeling everything from ants to traffic, clouds to galaxies. More trivially, the game attracted a cult of “Lifenthusiasts,” programmers who spent a lot of time hacking Life — that is, constructing patterns in hopes of spotting new Life-forms.

The tree of Life also includes oscillators, such as the blinker, and spaceships of various sizes (the glider being the smallest).

The Importance of a Positive Classroom

Simply put, students learn better when they view the learning environment as positive and supportive

A positive environment is one in which students feel a sense of belonging, trust others, and feel encouraged to tackle challenges, take risks, and ask questions

“This sort of vaccinated me for life against lazy, anticapitalist rhetoric, because when you see these empty shops, you see these people queuing for nothing in the street,” he said, “it became clear to me that we need private property and market institutions, not just for economic efficiency but for personal freedom.”

But his disenchantment with communism doesn’t mean that Mr. Piketty has turned his back on the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx, who sought to explain the “iron laws” of capitalism. Like Marx, he is fiercely critical of the economic and social inequalities that untrammeled capitalism produces — and, he concludes, will continue to worsen. “I belong to a generation that never had any temptation with the Communist Party; I was too young for that,” Mr. Piketty said, in

In his new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Harvard University Press), Mr. Piketty, 42, has written a blockbuster, at least in the world of economics. His book punctures earlier assumptions about the benevolence of advanced capitalism and forecasts sharply increasing inequality of wealth in industrialized countries, with deep and deleterious impact on democratic values of justice and fairness.

If people perceive time in varying ways, for instance, what does that say about time itself? If we misremember the past, he wonders, what else might we be wrong about? If creativity is largely a subconscious phenomenon, what else might be happening to us without our knowing?

he posits that “minds” might not belong solely to humans and animals. “Plants ‘know’ what to do, and they ‘remember,’” he writes, while “the tiny, stalked, trumpet-shaped unicellular organism Stentor employs a repertoire of at least five different responses to being touched.” Is the ability to respond to stimuli, he wonders, a sign of a mind?

“When I am writing, thoughts seem to organize themselves in spontaneous succession and to clothe themselves instantly in appropriate words. I feel I can bypass or transcend much of my own personality, my neuroses. It is at once not me and the innermost part of me.”

When Ms. Gregory consulted with a neurologist about how to delay the onset of illness, he had four words for her: “Good luck with that.” After all, no drug had proven effective in reversing Alzheimer’s disease. And preventive measures like diet and exercise, the neurologist told her, would do no good.

So you may be faced with some difficult choices within the next decade: Do you want to receive potentially alarming news about your cognitive health, or would you rather not? If you learn that you have a high risk for Alzheimer’s, is that information you will want to keep private — from employers, clients, health insurers and others? Or will you want to openly embrace it as part of your identity and publicly advocate for a cure?

Jason Karlawish, a professor of medicine and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how people at high risk of Alzheimer’s disease cope with that knowledge. “We have to make it socially acceptable to talk about having risk of getting dementia,” he told me. “I think that is one of the ground zero struggles we are going to face in the coming decades.”

Situated around 2,400 miles from the nearest continent, the Hawaiian Islands are about as remote as it’s possible for islands to be. In the last 5 million years, they’ve been repeatedly colonized by far-traveling animals, which then diversified into dozens of new species. Honeycreeper birds, fruit flies, carnivorous caterpillars ... all of these creatures reached Hawaii, and evolved into wondrous arrays of unique forms.

The most spectacular of these spider dynasties, Gillespie says, are the stick spiders. They’re so-named because some of them have long, distended abdomens that make them look like twigs. “You only see them at night, walking around the understory very slowly,” Gillespie says. “They’re kind of like sloths.” Murderous sloths, though: Their sluggish movements allow them to sneak up on other spiders and kill them.

Gillespie has shown that the gold spiders on Oahu belong to a different species from those on Kauai or Molokai. In fact, they’re more closely related to their brown and white neighbors from Oahu. Time and again, these spiders have arrived on new islands and evolved into new species—but always in one of three basic ways. A gold spider arrives on Oahu, and diversified into gold, brown, and white species. Another gold spider hops across to Maui and again diversified into gold, brown, and white species. “They repeatedly evolve the same forms,” says Gillespie.

Armand Marie Leroi is a scientist, and Aristotle is his hero. This conjunction is interesting because, in the official telling of modern science’s origins, Aristotle is hardly regarded as heroic. Instead he’s portrayed as the obstacle over which the early heroes of the scientific revolution — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — had to leap in order to impose a genuinely explanatory methodology over the often deceptive input of sense perception.

What Aristotle had sundered, the celestial and the terrestrial, were united under one mechanics. And the rest, as they say, is history.

He cannot mention Plato without hissing, often characterizing him as anti-scientific or, at the very best, a poor scientist: “Plato’s science is barely distinguishable from theology.” Instead Leroi’s heart belongs to Aristotle, who not only was, like him, an enthusiastic student of biology, particularly of zoology, but who also, unlike Plato, was besotted by the world of appearances. Aristotle, as Leroi makes wonderfully clear, exemplifies one kind of scientific aptitude. He was an enthralled observer of the natural world, bedazzled by data, seeking causal explanations not in abstract numbers but in concrete details acquired through avid sense perception.

In 2016, astronomers found a potentially habitable planet called Proxima b around the star Proxima Centauri, which is only 4.2 light-years from Earth. Now, researchers have traced a second signal they believe belongs to a super-Earth orbiting the same star, increasing the intrigue of this neighboring planetary system and its potential.

After the discovery of the first planet around Proxima Centauri, researchers speculated about the existence of another planet in the system. Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes in Chile to trace light signals that appeared to be coming from that direction.

The radial velocity method is based on gravity and the Doppler effect, in which light increases or decreases in frequency as a source and observed objects move toward or away from each other.

Bangladesh is one of dozens of countries on the frontline of the climate emergency. Here global heating is no theoretical calamity of the future, but a very real, present danger.By 2050, it is predicted that one in seven people in the country will be displaced by climate breakdown. The sea level is projected to rise by 50cm over this time period and Bangladesh may lose approximately 11% of its land. Deadly storms are usually a question of when, not if.

For example, Mondal says that where once his peers would farm mainly rice, now they have taken to fishing. They use floating cages, allowing fish to breed in a secure area. Also, if water levels rise, the cages will too, so flooding is less of an issue.“About 20 to 30 years ago there would be a minimum of two crops per farming family but now because of waterlogging we have no more than one,” he says. Each cage is owned by one home and yields about 15,000 taka (£135) in additional income for the families a year. It’s also a consistent source of food, which could be vital if natural disaster hits. “In the last two years there was not too much rain but two years ago we were flooded,” Mondal says. “We worry about the future. If there is heavy rainfall the water could remain logged for a long period of time and we would have to take shelter on main road. We would stay there with our remaining belongings.”