YIS TOK

I attempted to create a person in order to emulate the aging process. The idea was that something is happening but you can't see it but you can feel it, like aging itself. Still Photographer: Keith Sirchio Animator: Nathan Meier Animator: Edmund Earle Nuke Artist: George Cuddy Music: Mark Reveley

" Why do people believe in God? What is our evidence that there is an invisible agent who has a real impact on our lives? How can those people be so confident? Enlarge This Image T. M. Luhrmann Connect With Us on Twitter For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT. Readers' Comments "Pascal's wager is not complete without the assumption of punishment for non-believers: torment and everlasting fire. Let's not forget that the fear of hell is essential to the process of indoctrination." Tom, Boston Read Full Comment » These are the questions that university-educated liberals ask about faith. They are deep questions. But they are also abstract and intellectual. They are philosophical questions. In an evangelical church, the questions would probably have circled around how to feel God's love and how to be more aware of God's presence. Those are fundamentally practical questions"

"Hamilton was no militant atheist. He was not contemptuous of faith or of the faithful-far from it; he was a longtime churchgoer-and he was therefore, I think, all the more a threat to unreflective Christianity. At heart, he was questioning whether the Christian tradition of encouraging a temporal moral life required belief in a divine order. Could someone, in other words, live by the ethical teachings of Jesus while rejecting the existence of a creator and redeemer God? The questions with which he grappled were eternal, essential, and are with us still: how does a culture that tends to be religious continue to hold to a belief in an all-powerful, all-loving divinity beyond time and space given the evidence of science and of experience?"

"There's been a range of interesting reactions to my piece on Pete Seeger's question about whether confidence in science as a source of human progress is underpinned by fact or faith. Some readers may have missed that the discussion was not about confidence in science as an enterprise, but confidence that benefits would always accrue to society from applications of scientific knowledge. "

"Does handwriting matter? Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard. But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep."

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? And can learning new ways to talk change how you think? Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky examines these questions and more in this insightful look at the developing field of cognitive linguistics.

"In their book "Scorecasting", Toby Mascowitz, an economist, and Jon Wertheim, a journalist, make the provocative argument that home-field advantage, regardless of the sport in question, is caused entirely by biased referees. Umpires in baseball are more likely to call a strike on a close pitch if the visitors are batting. Football referees grant more extra time when the home team is trailing than when it is ahead."

"One of the most fascinating examples of heuristics and biases is what we call intuition - a complex cluster of cognitive processes, sometimes helpful but often misleading. Kahneman notes that thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: Either by "orderly computation," which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we're perceiving. (For instance, seeing a woman's angry face helps us predict the general sentiment and disposition of what she's about to say.) It is the latter mode that precipitates intuition. Kahneman explains the interplay:"

"A copy of Vincent van Gogh's ear grown using genetic material from one of the Dutch artist's relatives has gone on display at a German museum. Artist Diemut Strebe made the replica using living cells from Lieuwe van Gogh, the great-great-grandson of Vincent's brother Theo. The cells were then shaped using a 3D printer to resemble the ear Van Gogh is to said to have cut off in 1888. The exhibit at the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe runs until 6 July."

"It uses an "emotional engine" and a cloud-based artificial intelligence system that allows it to analyse gestures, expressions and voice tones. The firm said people could communicate with it "just like they would with friends and family" and it could perform various tasks. It will go on sale to the public next year for 198,000 yen ($1,930; £1,150). "People describe others as being robots because they have no emotions, no heart," Masayoshi Son, chief executive of Softbank, said at a press conference. "For the first time in human history, we're giving a robot a heart, emotions.""

"Speaking to the BBC, he said that the telling of fairytales had pros and cons. "On the one hand you might expect it would inculcate supernaturalism as real." But at the same time it might have a "beneficial effect" as the child learns there are stories which are not true and which one grows out of. "A degree of magical content supports imaginative development," says Prof Yvonne Kelly of University College London, "and the transmission of the story is important as it creates intimacy, routine and a bonding experience. "Children who listen to stories show better results in measures such as literacy tests and SATs - but also in terms of social and emotional development.""

"New research from Allen Downey, a computer scientist at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, shows a startling correlation between the rise of the Internet and the decline of religious affiliation in the United States. According to MIT Technology Review, back in 1990 only eight percent of the U.S. population did not have a religious affiliation. Twenty years later in 2010 that number was up to 18 percent. That is a jump of 25 million people. Americans seem to be losing their religion, and from Downey's research we may have an answer."

"Whatever your opinion, your judgment shouldn't be swayed by whether the question is posed in your native language or in a foreign language you have mastered. But that is exactly what an international team of cognitive psychologists led by Albert Costa in Barcelona claim they have discovered: People using a foreign language are far more likely to sacrifice an innocent for the sake of many. And they think they understand why: Our mother tongue is laden with emotion, feeling, association."

"It has been jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true. But that is getting harder all the time."

" And a particular image or fact can start with one person online and inevitably become more distorted as it gets further down the line. Errors are inserted-sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident-until it winds up completely distorting our understanding of the original message. P "

"And then the New York Times took on the issue this week, with a feature on how "The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm." In it, writer Jennifer Medina reports that students at "Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and other schools" have this year all requested trigger warnings accompany certain classroom materials."

"Baber lets his surroundings serve as his orchestra and his inspiration: "It all came from when I was a little kid hearing the spokes of my bike and imagining, 'Oh, I wish I could play that like I could play these other instruments." Lately he has been doing just that: making music from sounds created by bicycle parts. "There's something really exciting and fascinating about discovering these sounds that maybe nobody's ever made on a bike," Baber said."

"A new survey for the Royal Statistical Society and King's College London shows public opinion is repeatedly off the mark on issues including crime, benefit fraud and immigration. The research, carried out by Ipsos Mori from a phone survey of 1,015 people aged 16 to 75, lists ten misconceptions held by the British public. Among the biggest misconceptions are:"

"Though the emerging possibility of deleting traumatic memories could provide some people relief, the question remains whether it would fundamentally change who they are."