Armed Correlations: Gun Ownership and Violence : The New Yorker - 0 views
One of Us - Lapham's Quarterly - 0 views
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On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly
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an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”
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Only with the Greeks does there enter the notion of a formal divide between our species, our animal, and every other on earth.
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The Dark Age Of Journalism « The Dish - 0 views
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Anyone who cares deeply about quality, independent journalism should pray for paywalls and other subscription models to take hold. Because in the world of the smart and the desperate, desperate always has the last word.
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it matters that the industry that is responsible for the dissemination of information is increasingly ceding editorial control to PR firms simply to stay afloat
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Democracy is a market in which politicians design policies to get votes. Like any market, it relies on information and signals being reliably transmitted from producer to consumer and vice versa. In a situation where the producer can effectively block the signals that actually their policies are designed simply to siphon wealth from everyone else into the pockets of the rich, what do you think happens to that market? Yep, that’s right, you get a choice between red, blue and yellow versions of producers all with the same agenda.
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How the Brits Interview A Politician « The Dish - 0 views
I Love You: An Interview with Dominique Ovalle : The Other Journal - 0 views
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There is a tendency for some people to sneer at beauty or to revile it, because it is so attractive and magnetic. That makes it untrustworthy to fearful people. If people have been let down before—by life or the actions of others—there may be a tendency to mistrust things that appear to be good
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It is hard to swallow that some things are good, beautiful, and true. Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “We can be sure that whoever sneers at [beauty’s] name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
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When people do encounter something pure and beautiful, they have an opportunity to accept it, to believe it. That is the pivotal moment: when art meets life, when it meets reality, when it meets you and me. That’s where the conversation is.
Obsessed? You're Not Alone - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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“We think that things are not good unless we’re obsessed about them,” he continued. “If you’re only mildly interested in your partner, that’s not as hot as being obsessed about somebody. Being blandly detached and mild seems like a failure.”
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Contrary to our claims of obsession, Professor Davis believes that “the generation now is very low key — the emotions are flat — compared to movies from the ’50s, when people look sentimental.”
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the etymology for “obsess” dates back to the turn of the 16th century (though “obsessed” itself wasn’t used until the mid-19th century) and is related to the devil. “ ‘Possession’ meant the devil occupied your soul and you had no awareness. If you were ‘obsessed,’ it meant the devil occupied your body but you were aware.” The meaning, then, has changed from something people “are forced to do but want to stop, to something they want to do and get pleasure from,” he said.
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Girls Outnumbered in New York's Elite Public Schools - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the gap at the elite schools could be as elemental as their perception as havens for science, technology, engineering or math, making them a natural magnet for boys, just as girls might gravitate to schools known for humanities.
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Mr. Finn, who, with Jessica A. Hockett, wrote the recent book, “Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools.” “I think you’re looking at habit, culture, perceptions, tradition and curricular emphasis.”
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enrollment in highly competitive high schools is 55 percent female. “The big gender-related chasm in American education these days is how much worse boys are doing, than girls,”
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Forecasting Fox - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, to hold a forecasting tournament to see if competition could spur better predictions.
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In the fall of 2011, the agency asked a series of short-term questions about foreign affairs, such as whether certain countries will leave the euro, whether North Korea will re-enter arms talks, or whether Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev would switch jobs. They hired a consulting firm to run an experimental control group against which the competitors could be benchmarked.
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Tetlock and his wife, the decision scientist Barbara Mellers, helped form a Penn/Berkeley team, which bested the competition and surpassed the benchmarks by 60 percent in Year 1. How did they make such accurate predictions? In the first place, they identified better forecasters. It turns out you can give people tests that usefully measure how open-minded they are.
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Lockheed Martin Harnesses Quantum Technology - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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academic researchers and scientists at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been working to develop quantum computers.
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Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.
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if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster
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As ARM Chief Steps Down, Successor Talks About 'Body Computing' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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ARM was originally a project inside Acorn Computer, a personal computer maker long since broken up. From relative obscurity, ARM’s chip designs now make up nearly one-third of new chip consumption, hurting companies like Intel.
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The big coming focus, Mr. Segars said, will be deploying chips into a sensor-rich world. “Low-cost microcontrollers with a wireless interface,” he said. “There will be billions of these.” The sensor data will be processed both locally, on millions of small computers, with capabilities to make decisions locally, or collected and passed along to even bigger computer systems. “The systems will go through different aggregation points,” Mr. Segars said. “If an aggregator in the home can tell a fridge is using too much power, maybe it needs servicing.”
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“The car is ripe for a revolution. It will evolve into a consumer electronics device, paying for parking as you pull up to the curb.” Eventually, said Mr. East, “it’s getting into people’s bodies. Over the next several years, semiconductors will be so small and use so little power that they’ll run inside us as systems.”
Ronald Dworkin's 'Religious Atheism' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Dworkin, too, believes there is no contradiction in the term “religious atheism,” and offers no less towering examples than Shelley, Einstein and William James to show that it’s possible to adopt what he calls a “religious attitude,” a worldview which “accepts the full, independent reality of value,” as distinct from scientific fact, and which holds that both individuals and the natural world they inhabit have intrinsic, transcendental value, without believing in a personal God
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Dworkin’s goal is to emphasize “the importance of what is shared” by subscribers of both “godly and godless religion.” That, in a word, he thinks, is faith. And while believers may think their faith in God differs substantially from the “faith” of an atheist, Dworkin’s rather startling conclusion is that the faith of theists is necessarily identical to that of religious atheists.
Commentary: The problem with Wikipedia - The Washington Post - 0 views
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The site does not allow corporations, individuals or organizations to defend themselves transparently or submit information on their own behalf. This is a serious flaw and a real challenge for a site that has become a fundamental source for so many around the world. This policy results in many articles on the site that are inaccurate or even blatantly false.
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I decided to provide a resource to the Wikipedia editors and help them get the story straight. I signed up as a Wikipedia editor under the name QorvisEditor. Under this handle, my goal was not to edit client or Qorvis pages, but to become a direct source from which established Wikipedia editors could ask questions about our company and work. Within minutes of signing up, I was blocked by established editors for personally representing the interests of the firm — not for editing anything incorrectly, mind you. This action prevented me from having any direct interaction with any editor in the future, and thus prevented me from providing any first-hand information to any editor. This action also prevents any other Wikipedia editor from having a direct dialogue with the firm.
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This inane policy would violate the basic tenets of even the most partisan of small-town newspapers or the most crooked court rooms. This dangerous policy violates the fundamental rules of reporting, of debate and of discussion
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Taking back the economy: the market as a Res Publica | openDemocracy - 0 views
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Freedom in the republican tradition requires enjoyment of the fundamental liberties with the security that only a rule of law can provide. You must be publicly protected and resourced in such a way that it is manifest to you and to all that under local (not unnecessarily restrictive) conventions: you can speak your mind, associate with your fellows, enjoy communal resources, locate where you will, move occupation and make use of what is yours, without reason for fearing anyone or deferring to anyone. You have the standing of a liber or free person; you enjoy equal status under the public order and you share equally in control over that order.
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The rules of public order constitute the possibility of private life in the way in which the rules of a game like chess constitute the possibility of playing that game. They represent enabling (or enabling-cum-constraining) rules, not rules that merely regulate a pre-existing domain.
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This republican image runs into sharp conflict with a more received picture, celebrated by right-wing libertarians, according to which the rules of public order regulate the private sphere rather than serving – now in the fashion of one culture, now in the fashion of another – to make it possible
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Drones, Ethics and the Armchair Soldier - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the difference between humans and robots is precisely the ability to think and reflect, in Immanuel Kant’s words, to set and pursue ends for themselves. And these ends cannot be set beforehand in some hard and fast way
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Working one’s way through the complexities of “just war” and moral theory makes it perfectly clear that ethics is not about arriving easily at a single right answer, but rather coming to understand the profound difficulty of doing so. Experiencing this difficulty is what philosophers call existential responsibility.
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One of the jobs of philosophy, at least as I understand it, is neither to help people to avoid these difficulties nor to exaggerate them, but rather to face them in resolute and creative ways.
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The Future of Sex - The European - 1 views
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Consider the most likely scenario for how human sexual behavior will develop over the next hundred years or so in the absence of cataclysm. Here’s what I see if we continue on our current path:
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Like every other aspect of human life, our sexuality will become increasingly mediated by technology. The technology of pornography will become ever more sophisticated—even if the subject matter of porn itself will remain as primal as ever.
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As the technology improves, society continues to grow ever more fragmented, and hundreds of millions of Chinese men with no hope of marrying a bona-fide, flesh-and-blood woman come of age, sex robots will become as common and acceptable as dildos and vibrators are today. After all, the safest sex is that which involves no other living things…
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The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers » Pressthink - 2 views
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In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.
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Who gets credit for the phrase, “view from nowhere?” # A. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title.
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Q. What does it say? # A. It says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.” #
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U.S. Stockpiles Smallpox Drug in Case of Bioterror Attack - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The United States government is buying enough of a new smallpox medicine to treat two million people in the event of a bioterrorism attack, and took delivery of the first shipment of it last week. But the purchase has set off a debate about the lucrative contract, with some experts saying the government is buying too much of the drug at too high a price.
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Smallpox was eradicated by 1980, and the only known remaining virus is in government laboratories in the United States and Russia
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Experts say the virus could also be re-engineered into existence in a sophisticated genetics lab.
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After reading this article, I thought about how much fear and the perceived threat of terrorism can be used quite effectively as manipulative tools. The article seemed to suggest that, because the US is so afraid/wary of a bioterrorism attack involving smallpox, we were willing to pay an excessive amount of money for emergency-use vaccines.
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