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Sean Kirkpatrick

Ethics and Politics : Joseph Roblat - 1 views

www.pugwash.org/...EthicsandPolitics.pdf

shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 26 Feb 13
     
    Ethics and Politics Discussion by Joseph Roblat
Javier E

Leaping Through The Other Side « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...leaping-through-the-other-side

god belief religion reality

shared by Javier E on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure that my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.
Emily Horwitz

Proposed Brain Mapping Project Faces Significant Hurdles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faces-significant-hurdles.html

neuroscience language research

shared by Emily Horwitz on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 26 Feb 13
     
    This article was very interesting. It at fist described some of the disconnect between what we understand about scientists and what the scientists understand; in this case, the article argued that, while the 10-year grant to neuroscientific research seems great to the general public, it is extremely complicated to even begin mapping how our neurons interact. What I found the most intriguing though, was the fact that some scientists from UC San Francisco have found the exact part of the brain, as well as their mechanisms, that control our language function. The research concluded that for those who have lost their faculties of speech, by stroke or otherwise, could eventually speak again if a prosthetic was developed. In short, the article conveyed the idea that nothing is ever as simple as it seems; although we try to make advances in science, we often just wind up with a whole other set of problems to solve.
Javier E

Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease, Study Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...heart-disease-study-finds.html

diet heart disease study mediterranean research

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study has found.
  • The magnitude of the diet’s benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.
  • The diet helped those following it even though they did not lose weight
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • they used very meaningful endpoints. They did not look at risk factors like cholesterol or hypertension or weight. They looked at heart attacks and strokes and death. At the end of the day, that is what really matters.”
  • it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, or had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.
  • “Now along comes this group and does a gigantic study in Spain that says you can eat a nicely balanced diet with fruits and vegetables and olive oil and lower heart disease by 30 percent,” he said. “And you can actually enjoy life.”
  • One group assigned to a Mediterranean diet was given extra-virgin olive oil each week and was instructed to use at least 4 four tablespoons a day. The other group got a combination of walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts and was instructed to eat about an ounce of the mix each day. An ounce of walnuts, for example, is about a quarter cup — a generous handful. The mainstays of the diet consisted of at least three servings a day of fruits and at least two servings of vegetables. Participants were to eat fish at least three times a week and legumes, which include beans, peas and lentils, at least three times a week. They were to eat white meat instead of red, and, for those accustomed to drinking, to have at least seven glasses of wine a week with meals.
  • They were encouraged to avoid commercially made cookies, cakes and pastries and to limit their consumption of dairy products and processed meats.
  • The participants stayed with the Mediterranean diet, the investigators reported. But those assigned to a low-fat diet did not lower their fat intake very much. So the study wound up comparing the usual modern diet, with its regular consumption of red meat, sodas and commercial baked goods, with a diet that shunned all that.
Javier E

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Nate Silver Offers Up a Statistical Analysis of Your Fai... - 1 views

www.mcsweeneys.net/...s-of-your-failing-relationship

romance quantification scientific method social science

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Nate Silver Offers Up a Statistical Analysis of Your Failing Relationship.
  • Ultimately, please don’t give me too much credit for this accumulated data. Although 0.0 percent of your mutual friends were willing to say anything, 93.9 percent of them saw this coming from the start.
Zack Lessner

Fiscal Ultimatum Fatigue - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...timatum-fatigue_b_2778499.html

knowledge bias politics social science

shared by Zack Lessner on 28 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Zack Lessner on 28 Feb 13
     
    Congress must act soon to come up with a concrete plan regarding spending cuts.
markfrankel18

This Story Stinks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...this-story-stinks.html

science knowledge bias reason ad hominem

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology. Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought. While it’s hard to quantify the distortional effects of such online nastiness, it’s bound to be quite substantial, particularly — and perhaps ironically — in the area of science news.
Javier E

Experts Want More Studies of Diet's Role for the Heart - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-diets-role-for-the-heart.html

diet heart research testing theories scientific method medicine nutrition knowledge

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • when it comes to diet and heart disease, doctors — and patients — have been going on hunches.
  • Dr. Estruch said he and his colleagues were so buoyed by the success of their study that they were planning another one. They intend to randomly assign people to consume the Mediterranean diet or to exercise while following a similar diet that is lower in calories. The hope is that adding weight loss and exercise will prevent even more heart disease.
  • for now, chaos reigns. The public is bombarded with diet advice, often contradictory and often lacking a rigorous scientific grounding, medical experts said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “Diets are an extreme case of accepting evidence we want to believe,”
  • That includes doctors, he added, who overlook that the evidence for the low-fat diets they often recommend is the sort “we would never accept in the practice of medicine.”
  • Doctors are in a bind, said Dr. Daniel J. Rader, a heart disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. When patients ask what to eat, he said, “you have to give them something.”
  • the best they have are studies that look at intermediate markers of risk, like cholesterol levels. In the end, he said, “most doctors just give dietary platitudes.”
Javier E

Survival Of The Highest « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...survival-of-the-highest

intelligence adaptation drugs evolution

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the Savanna-IQ Interaction H
  • this hypothesis predicts that individuals of higher intelligence are more likely to engage in novel behavior that goes against cultural traditions or social norms.
  • a forty-year-long study funded by the British government paralleled this hypothesis, and found that “very bright” individuals with IQs above 125 were about twice as likely to have tried psychoactive drugs than “very dull” individuals with IQs below 75. As Kanazawa explains, “Intelligent people don’t always do the ‘right’ thing, only the evolutionarily novel thing.”
Javier E

Illustrating With Words Alone « The Dish - 1 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...lustrating-through-words-alone

illustration writing

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Sam Sacks details the turn against illustrated stories and novels among early 20th century writers, including Henry James and Virginia Woolf, who were suspicious of what visuals did to the integrity of their art:
  • So writers somewhat defensively cleaved to this division: pictures were about superficial titillation; prose was about essences. And over time the opinion hardened that the old custom of accompanying illustration was a form of aesthetic corruption.
  • Writers who stick to this dichotomy are missing out, especially in the age of e-readers that “allow you to read text, look at pictures, and watch videos on the same device.”
Javier E

A Nasty New World « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...a-nasty-new-world

colonial US history barbarism genocide slavery 17th

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Bernard Bailyn The Barbarous Years, which details the “little-remembered” brutality of life in the American colonies during the 17th century:
  • Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being “flayed alive” means?
  • yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture,
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.
Javier E

A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939 | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...ique-for-producing-ideas-young

creativity innovation ideas technique learning method principles

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas. Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up [of] so called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.
  • So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.
  • What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Every really good creative person…whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested — from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information.
  • Then and only then, Young promises, everything will click in the fourth stage of the seemingly serendipitous a-ha! moment: Out of nowhere the Idea will appear. It will come to you when you are least expecting it
  • articulates the increasing importance of quality information filters in our modern information diet. This notion of gathering raw material is the first step in his outline of the creative process:
  • [W]hen you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.
  • In his third stage of the creative process, Young stresses the importance of making absolutely “no effort of a direct nature”: It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.
  • Young calls the last stage “the cold, gray dawn of the morning after,” when your newborn idea has to face reality: It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a work-a-day world. Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious. When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.
  • what’s perhaps most interesting is the following note he made to the postscript of a reprint: From my own further experience in advertising, government, and public affairs I find no essential points which I would modify in the idea-producing process. There is one, however, on which I would put greater emphasis. This is as to the store of general materials in the idea-producer’s reservoir. […] I am convinced, however, that you gather this vicarious experience best, not when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself.
Sean Kirkpatrick

Can one find love on the show, The Bachelor - 0 views

tv.yahoo.com/...an-lowe-returns-194300215.html

psychology language

shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 06 Mar 13
     
    Seeing the articles that you posted about online dating, I thought I would research some other ways to "find love," and I thought the bachelor was an interesting way. Article explains how the main character Sean seeks to find love in a different way, by picking out of a large amount of females on a series of dates.
Sean Kirkpatrick

Manti Teo "girlfriend" : Catfish - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 06 Mar 13
     
    Article summarizing the term "Catfish," or someone you meet online. How can one trust someone behind a computer screen? Do emotion or reason come into play when online dating? TOK moment: Manti Teo, etc.
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