The theory that the moon landings were hoaxed by the US government to assert their victory in the space race over Russia, is something which has grown in popularity over time.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
2More
10 Reasons the Moon Landings Could Be a Hoax - Listverse - 1 views
-
I don't know if the first Moon Landing is real or not, but this article reminds me of the conspiracy theory we learned in TOK. After reading through those reasons and evidences, the credibility of the first moon landing decreases. However, there are still possibilities that the moon landing is real. Confirmation bias may also play a role because I only noticed the "strange" part of the photo after I read the writing below. And also, I think that Richard Nixon must be one of the reason why people don't believe in the first moon landing. --Sissi (1/8/2017)
6More
Marchers Pour Into Washington to Pour Out Their Hearts - The New York Times - 0 views
-
No one seemed to mind. By the time the Women’s March on Washington officially began at 10 a.m., the protesters had arrived in a force so large that they surprised even themselves, spilling over the National Mall and the streets of the capital a day after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as president.
-
When he gave everybody a phone number to call Congress, the crowd repeated it back loudly, many smiling and nodding.
-
People were playful with their signs. There was “Cyborgs for Civility,” and “Women Geologists Rock.” Another said, “1933 Called. Don’t Answer.” A white sign in black marker read: “I know signs. I make the best signs. They’re terrific. Everyone agrees.”
- ...2 more annotations...
-
But there was also seriousness. Mary Robinson, 60, from a rural part of Northern Arizona, said she felt energized by the march, but the work ahead seemed hard.
-
“They are in rural America where there’s no jobs, no technology, and many people live on government subsidies. It’s not that they are ignorant or stupid, they are just uninformed.”
-
This Saturday I went to Philadelphia and there were a lot of police cars blocking the roads and I was wondering why they were doing that. Now I know that there was a protest going on. The presidency of Trump is surely not celebrated by many people in this region. And after reading this article, I think there is a new attitude in protest. I really like the scene described in this article that people are actually being playful with their sign. I think this new attitude is a new spice in protest and add on new possibilities of protest. If we are always being serious about everything then the world would seem so stressful. How about take a step back, reduce the tension and look at the issue more playfully. I think the best protest is not shouting slogans angrily. I think both side should leave some space and respect to each other. --Sissi (1/24/2017)
6More
iPhone manufacturer Foxconn plans to replace almost every human worker with robots - Th... - 0 views
-
The first phase of Foxconn’s automation plans involve replacing the work that is either dangerous or involves repetitious labor humans are unwilling to do.
-
In the long term, robots are cheaper than human labor. However, the initial investment can be costly.
-
There is, however, a central side effect to automation that would specifically benefit a company like Foxconn.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
So much so in fact that Foxconn had to install suicide netting at factories throughout China and take measures to protect itself against employee litigation.
-
But in doing so, it will ultimately end up putting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people out of work.
-
It has always been debatable that to what extent can robot replace human. Foxconn has long been blamed on how it treats its workers. By replacing human by robots, the company can save a lot of money and avoid a lot of condemnations and lawsuits. I think robots are definitely going to replace human on dangerous and tired work, but it is very important that the society is prepared for that change. The government should improve the education so that people can explore other possibilities of what they can do. --Sissi (12/31/2016)
40More
The Mammoth Cometh - NYTimes.com - 2 views
-
Brand helped to establish in 1996 to support projects designed to inspire “long-term responsibility.”
-
the resurrection of extinct species, like the woolly mammoth, aided by new genomic technologies developed by the Harvard molecular biologist George Church.
- ...37 more annotations...
-
Just as the loss of a species decreases the richness of an ecosystem, the addition of new animals could achieve the opposite effect.
-
National Geographic Society hosted a larger conference to debate the scientific and ethical questions raised by the prospect of “de-extinction.
-
less scientific, if more persuasive, argument was advanced by the ethicist Hank Greely and the law professor Jacob Sherkow, both of Stanford. De-extinction should be pursued, they argued in a paper published in Science, because it would be really
-
“This may be the biggest attraction and possibly the biggest benefit of de-extinction. It would surely be very cool to see a living woolly mammoth.”
-
They will replace chunks of band-tailed-pigeon DNA with synthesized chunks of passenger-pigeon DNA, until the cell’s genome matches their working passenger-pigeon genome.
-
Scientists predict that changes made by human beings to the composition of the atmosphere could kill off a quarter of the planet’s mammal species, a fifth of its reptiles and a sixth of its birds by 2050
-
This cloning method, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, can be used only on species for which we have cellular material.
-
There is a shortcut. The genome of a closely related species will have a high proportion of identical DNA, so it can serve as a blueprint, or “scaffold.”
-
By comparing the fragments of passenger-pigeon DNA with the genomes of similar species, researchers can assemble an approximation of an actual passenger-pigeon genome.
-
As with any translation, there may be errors of grammar, clumsy phrases and perhaps a few missing passages, but the book will be legible. It should, at least, tell a good story.
-
MAGE (Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering). MAGE is nicknamed the “evolution machine” because it can introduce the equivalent of millions of years of genetic mutations within minutes
-
Developmental and behavioral biologists would take over, just in time to answer some difficult questions. Chicks imitate their parents’ behavior. How do you raise a passenger pigeon without parents of its own species? And how do you train band-tailed pigeons to nurture the strange spawn that emerge from their eggs; chicks that, to them, might seem monstrous: an avian Rosemary’s Baby?
-
For endangered species with tiny populations, scientists would introduce genetic diversity to offset inbreeding.
-
They will try to alter the birds’ diets, migration habits and environment. The behavior of each subsequent generation will more closely resemble that of their genetic cousins.
-
For species threatened by contagion, an effort would be made to fortify their DNA with genes that make them disease-resistant
-
This optimistic, soft-focus fantasy of de-extinction, while thrilling to Ben Novak, is disturbing to many conservation biologists, who consider it a threat to their entire discipline and even to the environmental movement.
-
The first question posed by conservationists addresses the logic of bringing back an animal whose native habitat has disappeared. Why go through all the trouble just to have the animal go extinct all over again?
-
“If you recreate a species genetically and release it, and that genotype is based on a bird from a 100-year-old environment, you probably will increase risk.”
-
“There’s always this fear that somehow, if we do it, we’re going to accidentally make something horrible, because only nature can really do it right. But nature is totally random. Nature makes monsters. Nature makes threats. Many of the things that are most threatening to us are a product of nature. Revive & Restore is not going to tip the balance in any way.”
-
De-extinction also poses a rhetorical threat to conservation biologists. The specter of extinction has been the conservation movement’s most powerful argument. What if extinction begins to be seen as a temporary inconvenience?
-
De-extinction suggests that we can technofix our way out of environmental issues generally, and that’s very, very bad.
-
Philip Seddon recently published a 10-point checklist to determine the suitability of any species for revival, taking into account causes of its extinction, possible threats it might face upon resurrection and man’s ability to destroy the species “in the event of unacceptable ecological or socioeconomic impacts.”
-
“Is it fair to do this to these animals?” Shapiro asked. “Is ‘because we feel guilty’ a good-enough reason?” Stewart Brand made a utilitarian counterargument: “We’re going to go through some suffering, because you try a lot of times, and you get ones that don’t take. On the other hand, if you can bring bucardos back, then how many would get to live that would not have gotten to live?”
-
In “How to Permit Your Mammoth,” published in The Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Norman F. Carlin asks whether revived species should be protected by the Endangered Species Act or regulated as a genetically modified organism.
-
He concludes that revived species, “as products of human ingenuity,” should be eligible for patenting.
-
There is no authoritative definition of “species.” The most widely accepted definition describes a group of organisms that can procreate with one another and produce fertile offspring, but there are many exceptions.
-
Theseus’ ship, therefore, “became a standing example among the philosophers . . . one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
-
What is coming will go well beyond the resurrection of extinct species. For millenniums, we have customized our environment, our vegetables and our animals, through breeding, fertilization and pollination. Synthetic biology offers far more sophisticated tools. The creation of novel organisms, like new animals, plants and bacteria, will transform human medicine, agriculture, energy production and much else.
3More
Mammoth fragments from Siberia raise cloning hopes - Yahoo! News - 1 views
-
Scientists have discovered well-preserved frozen woolly mammoth fragments deep in Siberia that may contain living cells, edging a tad closer to the "Jurassic Park" possibility of cloning a prehistoric animal, the mission's organizer said Tuesday.
-
Expedition chief Semyon Grigoryev said Korean scientists with the team had set a goal of finding living cells in the hope of cloning a mammoth. Scientists have previously found bones and fragments but not living cells.
-
Some believe it's possible to recreate the prehistoric animal if they find living cells in the permafrost.
12More
Quitters Never Win: The Costs of Leaving Social Media - Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Seling... - 2 views
-
Manjoo offers this security-centric path for folks who are anxious about the service being "one the most intrusive technologies ever built," and believe that "the very idea of making Facebook a more private place borders on the oxymoronic, a bit like expecting modesty at a strip club". Bottom line: stop tuning in and start dropping out if you suspect that the culture of oversharing, digital narcissism, and, above all, big-data-hungry, corporate profiteering will trump privacy settings.
-
Angwin plans on keeping a bare-bones profile. She'll maintain just enough presence to send private messages, review tagged photos, and be easy for readers to find. Others might try similar experiments, perhaps keeping friends, but reducing their communication to banal and innocuous expressions. But, would such disclosures be compelling or sincere enough to retain the technology's utility?
-
The other unattractive option is for social web users to willingly pay for connectivity with extreme publicity.
- ...9 more annotations...
-
While we should be attuned to constraints and their consequences, there are at least four problems with conceptualizing the social media user's dilemma as a version of "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen".
-
The efficacy of abandoning social media can be questioned when others are free to share information about you on a platform long after you've left.
-
Second, while abandoning a single social technology might seem easy, this "love it or leave it" strategy -- which demands extreme caution and foresight from users and punishes them for their naivete -- isn't sustainable without great cost in the aggregate. If we look past the consequences of opting out of a specific service (like Facebook), we find a disconcerting and more far-reaching possibility: behavior that justifies a never-ending strategy of abandoning every social technology that threatens privacy -- a can being kicked down the road in perpetuity without us resolving the hard question of whether a satisfying balance between protection and publicity can be found online
-
if your current social network has no obligation to respect the obscurity of your information, what justifies believing other companies will continue to be trustworthy over time?
-
Sticking with the opt-out procedure turns digital life into a paranoid game of whack-a-mole where the goal is to stay ahead of the crushing mallet. Unfortunately, this path of perilously transferring risk from one medium to another is the direction we're headed if social media users can't make reasonable decisions based on the current context of obscurity, but instead are asked to assume all online social interaction can or will eventually lose its obscurity protection.
-
The fourth problem with the "leave if you're unhappy" ethos is that it is overly individualistic. If a critical mass participates in the "Opt-Out Revolution," what would happen to the struggling, the lonely, the curious, the caring, and the collaborative if the social web went dark?
-
Our point is that there is a middle ground between reclusion and widespread publicity, and the reduction of user options to quitting or coping, which are both problematic, need not be inevitable, especially when we can continue exploring ways to alleviate the user burden of retreat and the societal cost of a dark social web.
-
it is easy to presume that "even if you unfriend everybody on Facebook, and you never join Twitter, and you don't have a LinkedIn profile or an About.me page or much else in the way of online presence, you're still going to end up being mapped and charted and slotted in to your rightful place in the global social network that is life." But so long it remains possible to create obscurity through privacy enhancing technology, effective regulation, contextually appropriate privacy settings, circumspect behavior, and a clear understanding of how our data can be accessed and processed, that fatalism isn't justified.
8More
Do Political Experts Know What They're Talking About? | Wired Science | Wired... - 1 views
-
I often joke that every cable news show should be forced to display a disclaimer, streaming in a loop at the bottom of the screen. The disclaimer would read: “These talking heads have been scientifically proven to not know what they are talking about. Their blather is for entertainment purposes only.” The viewer would then be referred to Tetlock’s most famous research project, which began in 1984.
-
He picked a few hundred political experts – people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends” – and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their minds.
-
Most of Tetlock’s questions had three possible answers; the pundits, on average, selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. These results are summarized in his excellent Expert Political Judgment.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
Some experts displayed a top-down style of reasoning: politics as a deductive art. They started with a big-idea premise about human nature, society, or economics and applied it to the specifics of the case. They tended to reach more confident conclusions about the future. And the positions they reached were easier to classify ideologically: that is the Keynesian prediction and that is the free-market fundamentalist prediction and that is the worst-case environmentalist prediction and that is the best case technology-driven growth prediction etc. Other experts displayed a bottom-up style of reasoning: politics as a much messier inductive art. They reached less confident conclusions and they are more likely to draw on a seemingly contradictory mix of ideas in reaching those conclusions (sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right). We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).
-
The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).
-
Tetlock: Yes, non-experts can encourage more accountability in the punditocracy. Pundits are remarkably skillful at appearing to go out on a limb in their claims about the future, without actually going out on one. For instance, they often “predict” continued instability and turmoil in the Middle East (predicting the present) but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations. They are essentially impossible to pin down. If pundits felt that their public credibility hinged on participating in level playing field forecasting exercises in which they must pit their wits against an extremely difficult-to-predict world, I suspect they would be learn, quite quickly, to be more flexible and foxlike in their policy pronouncements.
-
tweetmeme_style = 'compact'; Digg Stumble Upon Delicious Reddit if(typeof CN!=='undefined' && CN.dart){ CN.dart.call("blogsBody",{sz: "300x250", kws : ["bottom"]}); } Disqus Login About Disqus Like Dislike and 5 others liked this. Glad you liked it. Would you like to share? Facebook Twitter Share No thanks Sharing this page … Thanks! Close Login Add New Comment Post as … Image http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1312506743/build/system/upload.html#xdm_e=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com&xdm_c=default5471&xdm_p=1&f=wiredscience&t=do_political_experts_know_what_they8217re_talking_
12More
Can Santorum Win in November? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
-
If one were to invent a Republican politician whose background and beliefs were ideally suited to a general-election campaign against Barack Obama, that dream candidate would share a number of qualities with Rick Santorum.
-
He would hail from the Midwest – a region filled with recession-battered swing states where the president’s support is weaker than in the country as a whole. He would be a Catholic rather than an Evangelical or a Mormon, because the Catholic vote swings back and forth between the two parties in ways that other religious demographics don’t. He would have a strong personal and biographical connection to blue-collar whites, a bloc of voters whose support President Obama has always had difficulty winning. His record would be conservative enough to excite the Republican Party’s base, but leavened with enough moderation and even populism on economic issues to reassure anxious middle-income voters that the Republican Party doesn’t just exist to serve Wall Street and the rich.
-
Santorum checks all of these boxes, while Mitt Romney – his Michigan ties and attempts to play the tribune of the middle class notwithstanding – decidedly does not. Which is why, as Romney flails and Santorum rises, a few pundits have found themselves tiptoeing toward what seems like the most counterintuitive of all possible conclusions: The possibility that the long-shot former senator from Pennsylvania, not his supposedly more electable rival, might stand a better chance of winning in November.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
This idea seems laughable if you assume that most swing voters are fiscal conservatives and social moderates, allergic to culture-war appeals and pining for a dream ticket of Michael Bloomberg and Olympia Snowe. But as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has explained, there’s more than one kind of “moderate” in American politics:
-
There are, very roughly speaking, two kinds of swing voters. One kind is economically conservative, socially liberal swing voters. This is the kind of voter you usually read about, because it’s the kind most familiar to political reporters – affluent and college educated. But there’s a second kind of voter at least as numerous – economically populist and socially conservative. Think of disaffected blue-collar workers, downscale white men who love guns, hate welfare, oppose free trade, and want higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Romney appeals to the former, but Santorum more to the latter
-
That’s because the former senator has the instincts of an activist, rather than of a president or statesman.
-
a Rust Belt background would be a potential advantage for a Republican presidential candidate. But a Rust Belt background that includes an 17-point repudiation from the Pennsylvania electorate that knew Santorum best looks more like a liability instead.
-
both Catholicism and social conservatism are potential assets in a campaign against a president who has spoken condescendingly about Middle Americans who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.” But a Catholic conservatism that manifests itself in campaign-trail critiques of contraception promises to alienate many more voters (female voters, especially) than it attracts.
-
All things being equal, a populist style that’s at odds with the Acela corridor’s attitudes and values can often play well in the heartland. But no presidential candidate can succeed without a modicum of favorable media coverage, and so a successful populist needs to be able to disarm elite journalists (as Huckabee so expertly did, schmoozing on The Daily Show and elsewhere) as often as he alienates them. And nobody has ever used the word “disarming” to describe Rick Santorum’s approach to politics.
-
his political persona is worlds away from the Washington-New York definitions of “middle-of-the-road.” But a mix of social conservatism and economic populism has a great deal of general-election potential – especially in a contest against a president whose style of liberalism can seem professorial, condescending and aloof.
-
Whether the topic is social issues or foreign policy, his zeal exceeds his prudence, and as a result his career is littered with debating society provocations (referencing “man-on-dog” sex in an argument about gay marriage, using his doomed 2006 Senate bid to educate Pennsylvanians on the evils of Hugo Chavez, etc.) that have won him far more enemies than friends. His passion for ideas and argument often does him credit, but in a national campaign it would probably do him in.
14More
How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life - NYTimes.com - 1 views
-
I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.
-
Read literally, she said that white people don’t get AIDS, but it seems doubtful many interpreted it that way. More likely it was her apparently gleeful flaunting of her privilege that angered people. But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Sacco, like Stone, had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?
-
“To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.” (She would later write me an email to elaborate on this point. “Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.”)
- ...11 more annotations...
-
Her extended family in South Africa were African National Congress supporters — the party of Nelson Mandela. They were longtime activists for racial equality. When Justine arrived at the family home from the airport, one of the first things her aunt said to her was: “This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.”
-
I wanted to learn about the last era of American history when public shaming was a common form of punishment, so I was seeking out court transcripts from the 18th and early 19th centuries. I had assumed that the demise of public punishments was caused by the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual, I thought, because a person in the stocks could just lose himself or herself in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Modernity had diminished shame’s power to shame — or so I assumed.
-
The pillory and whippings were abolished at the federal level in 1839, although Delaware kept the pillory until 1905 and whippings until 1972. An 1867 editorial in The Times excoriated the state for its obstinacy. “If [the convicted person] had previously existing in his bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. . . . The boy of 18 who is whipped at New Castle for larceny is in nine cases out of 10 ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.”
-
I told her what Biddle had said — about how she was probably fine now. I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib, but like everyone who participates in mass online destruction, uninterested in learning that it comes with a cost.
-
“Well, I’m not fine yet,” Sacco said to me. “I had a great career, and I loved my job, and it was taken away from me, and there was a lot of glory in that. Everybody else was very happy about that.”
-
her shaming wasn’t really about her at all. Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own — a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.
-
Social media is, on the whole, a very bad thing. It wastes time, gives at best ephemeral pleasure with a modicum of interest, causes privacy and necessary social boundaries to disintegrate, and enriches people very much at the expense of others. Anyone can make a statement they later regret. It is now impossible to genuinely retract or escape such a statement. This is outrageous. Social media brings out the very worst in people. Rather than free speech, ot also promotes - essentially requires - a ridiculous level of self-censorship or imposition of extreme global shaming. This is not a societal good.
-
Reading this article, it made me very happy to not have a Twitter account. Anyone can say something some group doesn't like and interpret its meaning in negative ways, gang up on someone and bring them down
-
Look at Sacco's tweets on her flight and at the airport...absolutely meaningless junk that has no value to anyone. Why did she feel the need to post such thoughts? Post enough mindless thoughts and you'll probably post something really, really stupid you'd wished you hadn't.
-
I do feel sorry for the guy that made a stupid joke at a conference. When he said it, it was directed to one person and someone else decided to post to the world. That kind of stuff keeps up and nobody will ever do anything remotely interesting in public for fear it is misrepresented and their life ends. Getting fired for making a (to me, anyway) harmless joke seems severe
-
The offendee, it seems to me, would have done herself and others a favor by addressing the issue directly with him. Why the need to bypass any direct communication when you can post it and shame the person for the world? That's the act of a coward and someone who's out to punish.
9More
Chinese Scientist Blasts Trump's Climate-Change Talk - China Real Time Report - WSJ - 1 views
-
A global-warming skeptic, Mr. Trump has vowed to cancel the accord, which the Obama administration helped broker, in his first 100 days as president.
-
“I think he is cute, saying whatever comes to his mind. I think the U.S. is a cute country too, because a person like him became the president,” said Prof. Ding.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
His argument: that a per capita count of emissions would be more equitable and treat all people the same.
-
One cannot both enjoy the benefits of industrialization and completely avoid the damages of it, he said.
-
“Steel made in China is sold to the U.S. The emission is done in China but the consumption happens in the U.S. It’s unfair to attribute that emission to China,” he said.
-
Unlike in the U.S., climate-change skeptics in China are an extremely rare breed—something that Mr. Ding posited was the result of better science education.
-
urged other nations to stick to the Paris agreement, calling it a “responsibility we must assume for future generations.”
-
I previously bookmarked an article about Australia's role in the Paris accords, and then I did not realize the world is in jeopardy of losing the U.S.'s involvement in it. We are one of the leading producers of gas emissions in the world, so that is scary to think about. It is interesting to see that people in such power as the leader of a forefront country do not trust the science that supports global warming, and it is kind of scary. I think it was also interesting that Prof. Ding said steel made in China is sold to the US, where people use it, so it's unfair to attribute the emission to China. That is an interesting argument considering they are making it in order to sell it, but yes we are using it, so it seems both are at fault here, possibly not just to the US. This climate change argument is all over and after our discussions about trusting science it is amazing to see the different sides up for debate that should be difficult to debate unless people debating are expert scientists in global warming/climate change.
7More
There Is No Such Thing as Alternative Medicine | Big Think - 1 views
-
Unfortunately for Hahnemann his philosophy—the less of an active ingredient remains the more powerful a remedy is (once you reach 13c on the homeopathic scale there is no longer any active ingredient left)—is nonsense.
-
This does not stop the irrational stream of unproven (or disproven) therapies arising from the holistic and wellness sphere.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
Yet a growing suspicion of corporate and political interests in the sixties inspired a new wave of holism that’s gaining strength a half-century later. We’re right to be wary of corporate agendas and political mismanagement when it comes to healthcare.
-
The reality is the most basic advice—move often and diversely; eat a balanced, whole foods diet—is boring in an age of immediate gratification.
-
The alternative is suffering, something many companies and hucksters willfully champion at a time when we can all use less of it.
-
People have been searching for more powerful and more efficient medicines. All sorts of weird ideas pop up as people try out different possibilities. Although people believe in science today, they are still willing to try out different things. Alternative medicine is where people like to spend their money on. When it comes to health, people are likely to be superstitious. Many people don't go to the doctors until the last minute. They tends to rely more on their own senses and perception when it comes to their life. I think it's because going to doctor is like trusting another person with your life, which is very hard for people. Seeking for alternative medicine give people a feeling that they can avoid the doctors. Like the medicine of eternity back in time, the alternative medicine today uses the same flaws in our reasoning. --Sissi (2/28/2017)
10More
Believe It Or Not, Most Published Research Findings Are Probably False | Big Think - 0 views
-
but this has come with the side effect of a toxic combination of confirmation bias and Google, enabling us to easily find a study to support whatever it is that we already believe, without bothering to so much as look at research that might challenge our position
-
Indeed, this is a statement oft-used by fans of pseudoscience who take the claim at face value, without applying the principles behind it to their own evidence.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
If you use p=0.05 to suggest that you have made a discovery, you will be wrong at least 30 percent of the time.
-
The problem is being tackled head on in the field of psychology which was shaken by the Stapel affair in which one Dutch researcher fabricated data in over 50 fraudulent papers before being detected.
-
The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested relationships, the less likely the findings are to be true.
-
For scientists, the discussion over how to resolve the problem is rapidly heating up with calls for big changes to how researchers register, conduct, and publish research and a growing chorus from hundreds of global scientific organizations demanding that all clinical trials are published.
-
As we learned in TOK, science is full of uncertainties. And in this article, the author suggests that even the publication of science paper is full of flaws. But the general population often cited science source that's in support of them. However, science findings are full of faults and the possibility is very high for the scientists to make a false claim. Sometimes, not the errors in experiments, but the fabrication of data lead to false scientific papers. And also, there are a lot of patterns behind the publication of false scientific papers.
6More
Why Westerners and Easterners Really Do Think Differently | Big Think - 0 views
-
While the studies cover many different topics, the subject of an individualistic or holistic thinking style is noteworthy.
-
In one study, complex images were shown to test subjects from East Asia and North America. The scientists tracked the eye movements of the participants in order to gauge where their attention was focused. It was found that the Chinese participants spent more time looking at the background of the image, while the Americans tended to focus on the main object in the picture. Holistic and individualistic thinking manifested in one clear example.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
One is that the staple food of a region may have something to do with it. This is excellently seen in China, where the northern half of the country grows wheat and the southern half grows rice. Rice growing is a labour intensive activity, that requires the coordination of several neighboring farms to do properly. Wheat farming, on the other hand, takes much less work and does not require coordination of irrigation systems in order to work.
-
Even today, more than 100 years after the colonization effort, the effects of living in a society that was so recently a frontier show up in individual and holistic thinking tests. With residents of Hokkaido demonstrating tendencies towards individualism to a larger extent than the rest of the Japanese population.
-
I really like the author stating that "Of course, these tendencies are generalizations." This shows that this study is not to categorize people into east and west, two groups. But this tendency is worth-noticing. The trials presented in the article shows different possibilities of why there is a difference. I think this cultural difference is similar to why Australia has very distinctive animal compare to the other continents. Since in the ancient times, westerners and easterners are isolated to each other, they took different approaches to develop their civilization. However, I really like the author emphasizing that this difference is not a stereotyping, it is the result of population analysis and observations. --Sissi (2/6/2017)
3More
NASA's Big Announcement? A New Solar System That Could Sustain Life | Big Think - 0 views
-
Our solar system is spread out by comparison. This cramped little system finds each planet’s orbit closer to their star, TRAPPIST-1, than Mercury is to ours. Of all the planets discovered, TRAPPIST-1f is the most likely to sustain life, NASA scientists say. Those closer planets may be too hot to contain liquid water, while those beyond may be too cold.
-
Another interesting consideration, this star, since it burns so slowly, will likely outlive ours by a trillion years. So if the Earth is vanquished and the situation is right, we may find a new Eden on TRAPPIST-1f.
-
I think this is a very striking discovery because it gives us possibilities that there might be alien lives. We have been searching potential planet that can sustain life for a long time and now scientists claim that they have found one at 40 light year away from us. It may lead us to discovery of new living creatures. --Sissi (2/27/2017)
2More
6 Humans With Real "Superpowers" That Science Can't Explain - Collective Evolution - 0 views
-
was responsible for holding a number of sessions to test the validity of psychokinesis (moving objects with the mind). In these sessions, attendees were taught how to initiate their own PK events using various metal objects. Individuals were able to completely bend or contort their metal specimens with no physical force being applied whatsoever
-
great example of something we can never definitively prove or refute because of so many possible variables. how are we to synthesize a full understanding of all of our human inputs: for example, visual paredoilia, confirmation bias, a magic trick, or an actual genetic mutation ?? We do not know if sci-fi will become scientific reality. We do not even know what we don't know Evie K (3/4/17)
12More
A New Form of Stem-Cell Engineering Raises Ethical Questions - The New York Times - 0 views
-
researchers at Harvard Medical School said it was time to ponder a startling new prospect: synthetic embryos.
-
But in the future, they may develop into far more complex forms, the researchers said, such as a beating human heart connected to a rudimentary brain, all created from stem cells
- ...8 more annotations...
-
The embryonic cells develop into three types, called germ layers. Each of those germ layers goes on to produce all the body’s tissues and organs.
-
This triggered communication by the cells, and they organized themselves into the arrangement found in an early mouse embryo.
-
Even if ethicists do manage to agree on certain limits, Paul S. Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis, wondered how easy it would be for scientists to know if they had crossed them.
-
Spotting a primitive streak is easy. Determining whether a collection of neurons connected to other tissues in a dish can feel pain is not.
-
Scientists wonder about the response in terms of ethics to their new idea and possibility of synthetic embryos. They might be able to grow into structures that could help in the human body, but to what extent would they stop growing, or would they feel pain? Are we creating life?... just to destroy it?
15More
What's at Stake in a Health Bill That Slashes the Safety Net - The New York Times - 0 views
-
It is startling to realize just how much the social safety net expanded during Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2016, means-tested entitlements like Medicaid and food stamps absorbed 3.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, almost a full percentage point more than in 2008
-
Public social spending writ large — including health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, poverty alleviation and the like — reached 19.3 percent of G.D.P.
-
Government in the United States still spends less than most of its peers across the industrialized world to support the general welfare of its citizens.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
Last week, President Trump’s sketch of a budget underscored how little interest he has in the nation’s social insurance programs — proposing to shift $54 billion next year to the military
-
Republicans in the House plan to vote this week to undo the Affordable Care Act. That law was Mr. Obama’s singular contribution toward an American welfare state, the biggest expansion of the nation’s safety net in half a century.
-
Welfare reform did hurt many poor people by converting antipoverty funds into block grants to the states. But it was accompanied by a big increase in the earned-income tax credit, the nation’s most effective antipoverty tool today.
-
“No other Congress or administration has ever put forward a plan with the intention of having fewer people covered.”
-
Under the House Republican plan, 24 million more Americans will lack health insurance by 2026, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
-
Millions of Americans — poor ones, mainly — will use much less health care. They will make fewer outpatient visits, have fewer mammograms and cholesterol checks.
-
Who knows where this retrenchment takes the country? Maybe attaching a work requirement to Medicaid, as conservatives propose, will prod the poor to get a job. Or perhaps it will just cut more people from Medicaid’s rolls. Further up the income ladder, losing a job will become more costly when it means losing health insurance, too.
-
Might depression and mental health problems destabilize families, feeding down into the health, education and well-being of the next generation?
-
Yet it is worth remembering that among advanced nations, the United States is a laggard in life expectancy and has one of the highest infant mortality rates.
-
If American history provides any sort of guidance, it is that continuing to shred the social safety net will definitely make things worse.
16More
Clouds' Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds. More Photos » Temperature Rising Enigma in the Sky This series focuses on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences. More From the Series » if (typeof NYTDVideoManager != "undefined") { NYTDVideoManager.setAllowMultiPlayback(false); } function displayCompanionBanners(banners, tracking) { tmDisplayBanner(banners, "videoAdContent", 300, 250, null, tracking); } Multimedia Interactive Graphic Clouds and Climate Slide Show Understanding the Atmosphere Related Green Blog: Climate Change and the Body Politic (May 1, 2012) An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change (May 1, 2012) A blog about energy and the environment. Go to Blog » Readers’ Comments "There is always some possibility that the scientific consensus may be wrong and Dr. Lindzen may be right, or that both may be wrong. But the worst possible place to resolve such issues is the political arena." Alexander Flax, Potomac, MD Read Full Comment » Post a Comment » Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.
-
They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.
-
At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.
- ...13 more annotations...
-
His idea has drawn withering criticism from other scientists, who cite errors in his papers and say proof is lacking. Enough evidence is already in hand, they say, to rule out the powerful cooling effect from clouds that would be needed to offset the increase of greenhouse gases.
-
“If you listen to the credible climate skeptics, they’ve really pushed all their chips onto clouds.”
-
Dr. Lindzen is “feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message, and wants to hear it put forth by people with enough scientific reputation that it can be sustained for a while, even if it’s wrong science,” said Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Washington. “I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”
-
With climate policy nearly paralyzed in the United States, many other governments have also declined to take action, and worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases are soaring.
-
The most elaborate computer programs have agreed on a broad conclusion: clouds are not likely to change enough to offset the bulk of the human-caused warming. Some of the analyses predict that clouds could actually amplify the warming trend sharply through several mechanisms, including a reduction of some of the low clouds that reflect a lot of sunlight back to space. Other computer analyses foresee a largely neutral effect. The result is a big spread in forecasts of future temperature, one that scientists have not been able to narrow much in 30 years of effort.
-
The earth’s surface has already warmed about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, most of that in the last 40 years. Modest as it sounds, it is an average for the whole planet, representing an enormous addition of heat. An even larger amount is being absorbed by the oceans. The increase has caused some of the world’s land ice to melt and the oceans to rise.
-
Even in the low projection, many scientists say, the damage could be substantial. In the high projection, some polar regions could heat up by 20 or 25 degrees Fahrenheit — more than enough, over centuries or longer, to melt the Greenland ice sheet, raising sea level by a catastrophic 20 feet or more. Vast changes in rainfall, heat waves and other weather patterns would most likely accompany such a large warming. “The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. “Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.”
-
But the problem of how clouds will behave in a future climate is not yet solved — making the unheralded field of cloud research one of the most important pursuits of modern science.
-
for more than a decade, Dr. Lindzen has said that when surface temperature increases, the columns of moist air rising in the tropics will rain out more of their moisture, leaving less available to be thrown off as ice, which forms the thin, high clouds known as cirrus. Just like greenhouse gases, these cirrus clouds act to reduce the cooling of the earth, and a decrease of them would counteract the increase of greenhouse gases. Dr. Lindzen calls his mechanism the iris effect, after the iris of the eye, which opens at night to let in more light. In this case, the earth’s “iris” of high clouds would be opening to let more heat escape.
-
Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained “some stupid mistakes” in his handling of the satellite data. “It was just embarrassing,” he said in an interview. “The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.” Last year, he tried offering more evidence for his case, but after reviewers for a prestigious American journal criticized the paper, Dr. Lindzen published it in a little-known Korean journal. Dr. Lindzen blames groupthink among climate scientists for his publication difficulties, saying the majority is determined to suppress any dissenting views. They, in turn, contend that he routinely misrepresents the work of other researchers.
-
Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late. By then, they say, the atmosphere would contain so much carbon dioxide as to make a substantial warming inevitable, and the gas would not return to a normal level for thousands of years.
-
In his Congressional appearances, speeches and popular writings, Dr. Lindzen offers little hint of how thin the published science supporting his position is. Instead, starting from his disputed iris mechanism, he makes what many of his colleagues see as an unwarranted leap of logic, professing near-certainty that climate change is not a problem society needs to worry about.
-
“Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, ‘We’re sure it’s not a problem,’ ” said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. “It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.”
22More
What Have We Learned, If Anything? by Tony Judt | The New York Review of Books - 0 views
-
During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.
-
the twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist—praising famous men and celebrating famous victories—or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering.
-
The problem with this lapidary representation of the last century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now, thankfully, emerged is not the description—it was in many ways a truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance—unencumbered by past errors—into a different and better era.
- ...19 more annotations...
-
Today, the “common” interpretation of the recent past is thus composed of the manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them (Jewish, Polish, Serb, Armenian, German, Asian-American, Palestinian, Irish, homosexual…) marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood.
-
The resulting mosaic does not bind us to a shared past, it separates us from it. Whatever the shortcomings of the national narratives once taught in school, however selective their focus and instrumental their message, they had at least the advantage of providing a nation with past references for present experience. Traditional history, as taught to generations of schoolchildren and college students, gave the present a meaning by reference to the past: today’s names, places, inscriptions, ideas, and allusions could be slotted into a memorized narrative of yesterday. In our time, however, this process has gone into reverse. The past now acquires meaning only by reference to our many and often contrasting present concerns.
-
the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed
-
Today, the opposite applies. Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears.
-
What is significant about the present age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have abandoned not merely the practices of the past but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.
-
Until the last decades of the twentieth century most people in the world had limited access to information; but—thanks to national education, state-controlled radio and television, and a common print culture—within any one state or nation or community people were all likely to know many of the same things.
-
it was precisely that claim, that “it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good,” which until very recently distinguished democracies from dictatorships. We pride ourselves on having defeated the “evil empire” of the Soviets. Indeed so. But perhaps we should read again the memoirs of those who suffered at the hands of that empire—the memoirs of Eugen Loebl, Artur London, Jo Langer, Lena Constante, and countless others—and then compare the degrading abuses they suffered with the treatments approved and authorized by President Bush and the US Congress. Are they so very different?
-
American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.
-
the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.
-
That same contrast may account for the distinctive quality of much American writing on the cold war and its outcome. In European accounts of the fall of communism, from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, the dominant sentiment is one of relief at the closing of a long, unhappy chapter. Here in the US, however, the story is typically recorded in a triumphalist key.5
-
For many American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth century is that war works. Hence the widespread enthusiasm for our war on Iraq in 2003 (despite strong opposition to it in most other countries). For Washington, war remains an option—on that occasion the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort.6
-
Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a misidentification of the enemy.
-
This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with “Islamofascists,” “extremists” from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant “Islamistan,” who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy “our way of life”—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.
-
How else are we to explain our present indulgence for the practice of torture? For indulge it we assuredly do.
-
“But what would I have achieved by proclaiming my opposition to torture?” he replied. “I have never met anyone who is in favor of torture.”8 Well, times have changed. In the US today there are many respectable, thinking people who favor torture—under the appropriate circumstances and when applied to those who merit it.
-
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today
-
We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and “exceptional” circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and “terrorists,” between “us” and “them”—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur “never again.” So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?
-
We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war’s indefinite continuance.