2,883 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2020
    1. "We are at a time where some people doubt the validity of science," he says. "And if people feel that they are part of this great adventure that is science, I think they're more inclined to trust it. And that's really great."

      These citizen scientists in Finland helped identify a new type of "northern light". Basically, 2 people were able to take a shot of the same display at the same second, 60 miles apart, allowing for depth resolution.

  2. Jan 2020
    1. the phenomenal form

      In Fowkes, the 'form of appearance' or the Erscheinungsform.

      Exchange value is the 'form of appearance' of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it--this 'third thing' will turn out to be 'socially necessary labor time'.

      Book Two of Hegel's Science of Logic, the Doctrine of Essence, begins with a chapter on 'Der Schein,' which appears in A.V. Miller's translation as "Illusory Being" (Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. by A.V. Miller, pp. 393-408).

      Here, Hegel describes "schein" as "reflected immediacy, that is immediacy which is only by means of its negation and which when contrasted with its mediation is nothing but the empty determination of the immediacy of negated determinate being," (p. 396).

      Hegel goes on to remark that "Schein" is "the phenomenon [Phänomen] of skepticism, and the Appearance [Erscheinung] of idealism," (p. 396).

      In describing exchange value as the 'Erscheinungsform' of 'something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it'--which will be labor--Marx is clearly flirting with the terminology surrounding "Illusory Being" in the Science of Logic, which suggests labor as the 'thing-in-itself' of the exchange value. Exchange-value is the reflected immediacy that conceals the congealed labor that it is its essence.

      The passage as a whole is suggestive of how exchange value will wend its way through Marx's demonstration, unfolding from itself determinations of itself.

      Before presenting a long, difficult quotation from Hegel, I think the most straightforward way to present this reference to Hegel is to say present the argument as follows:

      In Kantian idealism, we find that the 'thing-in-itself' cannot become an object of knowledge; consciousness only ever has immediate access to the form of appearance, the 'sensible form' of a 'thing-in-itself' which never presents itself to consciousness. In referring to the value form as the 'form of appearance' of something else which does not appear, Marx is saying that just as idealism subordinates the objectivity of the world to its appearance for consciousness, exchange-value represents immediately an essence that it suppresses, and implicitly, denies the possibility of knowledge of this essence.

      Hegel writes, "Skepticism did not permit itself to say 'It is'; modern idealism did not permit itself to regard knowledge as a knowing of the thing-in-itself; the illusory being of skepticism was supposed to lack any foundation of being, and in idealism the thing-in-itself was not supposed to enter into knowledge. But at the same time, skepticism admitted a multitude of determinations of its illusory being, or rather its illusory being had for content the entire manifold wealth of the world. In idealism, too, Appearance [Erscheinung] embraces within itself the range of these manifold determinateness. This illusory being and this Appearance are immediately thus manifoldly determined. This content, therefore, may well have no being, no thing or thing-in-itself at its base; it remains on its own account as it is; the content has only been transferred from being into an illusory being, so that the latter has within itself those manifold determinateness, which are immediate, simply affirmative, and mutually related as others. Illusory being is, therefore, itself immediately determinate. It can have this or that content; whatever content it has, illusory being does not posit this itself but has it immediately. The various forms of idealism, Leibnizian, Kantian, Fichtean, and others, have not advanced beyond being as determinateness, have not advanced beyond this immediacy, any more than skepticism did. Skepticism permits the content of its illusory being to be given to it; whatever content it is supposed to have, for skepticism it is immediate. The monad of Leibniz evolves its ideas and representations out of itself; but it is not the power that generates and binds them together, rather do they arise in the monad like bubbles; they are indifferent and immediate over against one another and the same in relation to the monad itself. Similarly, the Kantian Appearance [Erscheinung] is a given content of perception; it presupposes affections, determinations of the subject, which are immediately relatively to themselves and to the subject. It may well be that the infinite obstacle of Fichte's idealism has no underlying thing-in-itself, so that it becomes purely a determinateness in the ego; but for the ego, this determinateness which it appropriates and whose externality it sublates is at the same time immediate, a limitation of the ego, which it can transcend but which has in it an element of indifference, so that although the limitation is in the ego, it contains an immediate non-being of the ego." (p. 396-397).

      In Lenin's notebooks on Hegel's Science of Logic, these sections provoke a considerable degree of excitement. Lenin's 'Conspectus of Hegel's Science of Logic' can be accessed via Marxists.org here:

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch02.htm

    2. presents

      In Ben Fowkes translation in the Penguin edition, we find "The wealth of societies…appears as."

      In the German edition, Marx uses the verb erscheint ('scheint' shares an etymological link to the English word, shine.)

      On p. 127, Marx uses the Hegelian expression, Erscheinungsform (form of appearance). In this edition, it is rendered "the phenomenal form."

      Marx uses this term to describe the way that, in order for exchange-values to present an equivalence between two distinct use-values (i.e. x corn, y silk) they must possess some common element of identical magnitude. As exchange-values, commodities "cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the 'form of appearance' [Erscheinungsform], of a content distinguishable from it," (Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. I, p. 127)

    1. Overall, we received 60 submissions for the Call for Poster Presentations. Among the high amount of excellent abstracts, the programme committee decided to accept 20 abstracts for poster presentations.

      Even a normal conference in the geo-sciences is more open than this "open science" conference. There is a limited amount of time for speakers, but why would anyone deny someone the possibility to present a poster and try to find an audience for their research? There is no scientific need for this gate keeping.

    1. Summarizing a paper in your own words restructures the content to focus on learning rather than novelty.

      In the scientific papers we convey novelty, hence, some of the early readers might confuse themselves that this is the right way to speak in a daily scientific community

    2. Blogging has taught me how to read a paper because explaining something is a more active form of understanding. Now I summarize the main contribution in my own words, write out the notation and problem setup, define terms, and rederive the main equations or results. This process mimics the act of presenting and is great practice for it.

      Why teaching others/blogging has a great value in terms of learning new topics

    3. When I first started teaching myself to program, I felt that I had no imagination. I couldn’t be creative because I was too focused on finding the syntax bug or reasoning about program structure. However, with proficiency came creativity. Programming became less important than what I was building and why.

      While learning, don't worry about the creativity, which shall come after gaining proficiency (knowledge base)

    4. In my opinion the reason most people fail to do great research is that they are not willing to pay the price in self-development. Say some new field opens up that combines field XXX and field YYY. Researchers from each of these fields flock to the new field. My experience is that virtually none of the researchers in either field will systematically learn the other field in any sort of depth. The few who do put in this effort often achieve spectacular results.

      I think we all know that...

    5. Many of us have done this on exams, hoping for partial credit by stitching together the outline of a proof or using the right words in an essay with the hopes that the professor connects the dots for us.

      Often we tend to communicate with a jargon we don't understand just to pretend we know something

  3. Dec 2019
    1. we shield ourselves from existential threats, or consciously thinking about the idea that we are going to die, by shutting down predictions about the self,” researcher Avi Goldstein told The Guardian, “or categorizing the information as being about other people rather than ourselves.

      Magically, our brain doesn't easily accept the fact that we will die some day. It was proved by the short experiment:

      volunteers were watching images of faces with words like "funeral" or "burial", and whenever they've seen their own one, the brain didn't showcase any surprise signals

    1. Brown's Vulgar Errours.

      Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths (1646), commonly known as Vulgar Errours, was an important text in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Browne, like Francis Bacon, argued that empirical evidence was necessary to support (or disprove) claims, so his "trial" here likely involved many bird dissections.

      Browne is credited with introducing a number of words to the scientific discourse, including "electricity" and--interesting for our purposes--"computer" and "hallucination."

    1. It was, perhaps, the amiable character of this man that inclined me more to that branch of natural philosophy which he professed,

      The relationships between Victor and his teachers appear to drive the interdisciplinary curiosity that leads to his later discoveries. For example, M. Waldman, who loves chemistry, notes that "I have not neglected the other branches of science," and neither does Victor.

    2. I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher

      It is unclear who this English philosopher might have been, though it might be a reference to Erasmus Darwin, who Percy Shelley cites in the novel's introduction.

    3. Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate

      Not called "science" until the mid-nineteenth century, "natural philosophy" was science in the tradition of England's Royal Society (begun 1660), with its emphasis on Baconian induction, careful experiment, and refusal of any older science that could not be proven and demonstrated in a laboratory.

    4. Cornelius Agrippa

      Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) was author of *De Occulta Philosophia**, known to practice magic, and considered nonsensical by modern natural philosophy.

    5. blood circulate

      The early modern English physician William Harvey (1578-1627) made several valuable contributions to the medical sciences, including the circulation of blood in the human body. In De Motu Cordis (1628), Harvey sets down his landmark experiments; in these, Harvey used ligatures to stem blood flow to better understand how the heart works to pump blood throughout the human body. This knowledge will be critical for Victor's creation of the Creature.

    6. Albertus Magnus

      Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) was also the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is often praised for his rejection of dogmatic philosophy and his stress on experimentation. Many books, including the Little Book on Alchemy, were falsely attributed to Magnus but likely written by Paracelsus.

    7. I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.

      Victor seems to regard himself as godlike in his research. Subsequently, he advances a personal ethics of creation about the specific "raw material" he uses for his experiments, and to the source of the raw material.

    8. elixir of life

      The philosophers stone was also called the elixir of life, or thought to create it, and to be useful for rejuvenation and for achieving immortality; for many centuries, the stone and the elixir were the most sought goal in alchemy.

    9. having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials

      Cadavers for anatomical training in this period were scarce, and thus a medical education meant to study and extend life also fostered serial killers who committed murders for the sake of selling fresh corpses. Such killing sprees were ended by the Anatomical Act of 1832 in England, which made corpses legally available for medical research.

    10. physiology

      By 1818 physiology had become a controversial branch of medicine at the center of the dispute between vitalism, the idea that a divine spark energized animal life, and materialism, the argument that chemical processes alone give rise to life. Mary Shelley was well aware of the dispute since the Shelleys' family doctor, William Lawrence, was vigorously taking up the materialist argument in works like An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology (1816). For a full view of this controversy as it relates to the novel, see Marilyn Butler, "Frankenstein and Radical Science" [1993] reprinted in J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, Norton Critical Edition, second ed. (New York: Norton, 2012): 404-416.

    11. would owe their being to me

      Victor appears so engrossed in his creation that he forgets his discoveries are predicated on the previous research of scientists and natural philosophers. He fails to acknowledge that he "stands on the shoulders of giants," to use the phrase from Sir Issac Newton (1642-1726), including his teachers, a shortcoming indicative of pride of ownership.

    12. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being

      "Creation" points toward popular literary themes, and to the Bible. It also calls into question property rights. John Locke (1632-1704) argued in Two Treatises of Government that applying one's labor to nature made that creation one's property. Shelley seems to call into question the relation of scientific research to the idea of ownership.

    13. with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour

      Victor's understanding of biological systems as machines was typical of nineteenth-century biology and physiology, and the debates between mechanists and vitalists, which still partially embraced the mechanistic perspective of human life advanced by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and others.

    14. the principles of Agrippa

      In his book De Occulta Philosophia Agrippa suggested that God placed magic in the world to make man capable of transcending the natural sphere and able to influence the superior realms.

    15. Dr. Darwin

      Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the evolutionist and poet who lived in Birmingham, England, is clearly on Percy Shelley's mind when he introduces Mary's text in the 1818 edition. Critics of the novel have not often followed this lead in thinking about it as an early work in the British evolutionary imagination. Erasmus Darwin had made "not of impossible occurrence" that one presently visible species could mutate into another. Victor contemplates this possibility—as an alarming one—when he speculates in Volume 3, Chapter 3, that the Creature's demand that he create a "mate" could result in a new evolutionary development, "a race of devils."

    16. university of Ingolstadt

      Founded in 1472 in Bavaria, about 400 miles northeast of Geneva, this university became a leading center of scientific learning in the eighteenth century; the emergence of the Illuminati in 1776 also identified the university with the radical enlightenment.

    17. philosopher’s stone

      The philosopher's stone, or "stone of the philosophers" (Latin: lapis philosophorum) was a legendary alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold (chrysopoeia, from the Greek χρυσός khrusos, "gold," and ποιεῖν poiēin, "to make") or silver.

    18. Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus

      Paracelsus (1200-1280) was a medieval Swiss theologian and physician interested in alchemy and astrology, and a pioneer in the medical revolution of the German Renaissance. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) was a German Catholic Dominican friar and bishop. Known as Albert the Great or later Saint Albert, Magnus also wrote on alchemy and was the first to comment on the writings of Aristotle and the teachings of Muslim academics, notably Avicenna and Averroes.

    19. this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation

      The special role of chemistry in Victor's apprenticeship to medicine links premodern sciences like alchemy to modern empirical science. Humphry Davy (1778-1829)was the contemporary British chemist who argued the chemistry was the key to all other sciences and useful arts of the time.

    20. our family was not scientifical, and I had not attended any of the lectures given at the schools of Geneva. My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality

      Victor explains his lack of any early scientific education as the reason he found medieval scientific works credible and often intoxicating. But while they may not have been versed in the sciences, Victor's parents educated him in languages, mathematics, and other kinds of knowledge prized by the Enlightenment.

    21. I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed 098hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs

      This description recalls an experiment by Giovanni Aldini, a Professor of Experimental Philosophy at the University of Bologna, Italy. He was also Luigi Galvani’s nephew and a strong proponent of the latter’s work. In early 1803, Aldini conducted an electrical experiment on the corpse of Thomas Foster at Newgate Prison in London. A voltaic pile sent electric currents through the dead man’s body, causing it to contract and contort and one eye to open. Such experiments were well known to the Shelleys, who attended physiological lectures in London between 1802 and 1816.

    22. should probably have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry

      Although the word comes from Arabic, "alchemy" has its roots in the ancient world, which seemed preoccupied with the transformation of materials, especially with turning base metals such as lead and tin into gold and silver. Both Victor's father and Professor Krempe sharply distinguish between the modern, rational science of chemistry and irrational, premodern alchemy.

    1. The event of these enquiries interested my understanding, I may say my imagination, until I was exalted to a kind of transport. And indeed

      This brief addition in the Thomas Copy emphasizes the extent to which Victor's interest in human physiology carries away his imagination until he is "exalted to a kind of transport."

    2. The appearance of the sky is indiscribably beautiful; clear by day, and illuminated at night by the Aurora Borealis w which spreads a roseate tinge over the heavens, & over the sea which reflects it’s splendour.

      Aurora Borealis or "northern lights" appear in the Arctic skies, a nighttime phenomenon caused by turbulence in the magnetosphere.

    3. Are we then near land, and is this unknown wast inhabited by giants, of which the being we saw is a specimen? Such an idea is contrary to all experience, but if what we saw was an optical delusion, it was the most perfect and wonderful recorded in the history of nature.

      This added text in the Thomas Copy is the only reference to the Creature as a "giant" in any version of Frankenstein. By the early nineteenth century giants were a distant figure of folklore rather than everyday experience, as Walton notes by thinking of the giant as an "optical delusion." The Creature in the novel measures at about eight feet tall.

    1. In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge, and made the most abstruse enquiries clear and facile to my apprehension. My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded, and soon

      In this 1831 revision, M. Waldman's influence depends less on his personality or charisma and more on his capabilities as a teacher.

    2. Such were the professor’s words—rather let me say such the words of fate, enounced to destroy me. As he went on, I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being: chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein,—more, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. I closed not my eyes that night. My internal being was in a state of insurrection and turmoil; I felt that order would thence arise, but I had no power to produce it. By degrees, after the morning’s dawn, sleep came. I awoke, and my yesternight’s thoughts were as a dream. There only 35remained a resolution to return to my ancient studies, and to devote myself to a science for which I believed myself to possess a natural talent. On the same day, I paid M. Waldman a visit.

      In this lengthy addition to 1831, Victor experiences an early flash of ruinous ambition during the chemistry lecture by M. Waldman. The new picture of Waldman as an evil force belongs to a pattern of provoking suspicion about scientific education in the 1831 edition that did not appear in the 1818.

    3. Sir Isaac Newton

      Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was a natural philosopher and is widely considered one of the most prominent figures of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.

    4. pursuits. In rather a too philosophical and connected a strain, perhaps, I have given an account of the conclusions I had come to concerning them in my early years. As a child, I had not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth, and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge along the paths of time, and exchanged the discoveries of recent enquirers for the dreams of forgotten alchymists.

      Shelley adds this 1831 passage in which she traces Victor's fascination with alchemy and outmoded scientific ideas to an impetuous childhood, while the 1818 edition shows Victor reading the ancient sciences as an adult.

    5. Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and, excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those caprices of the mind, which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations; set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation; and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science, which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics, and the branches of study appertaining to that science, as being built upon secure foundations, and so worthy of my consideration. Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin. When I look back, it seems to me as if this almost miraculous change of inclination and will was the immediate suggestion of the guardian angel of my life— the last effort made by the spirit of preservation to avert the storm that was even then hanging in the stars, and ready to envelope me. Her victory was announced by an unusual tranquillity and gladness of soul, which followed the relinquishing of my ancient and latterly tormenting studies. It was thus that I was to be taught to associate evil with their prosecution, happiness with their disregard. 29It was a strong effort of the spirit of good; but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.

      In this section, in 1831 three paragraphs of text replace a five-paragraph section in 1818.

      Awed by the destructive power of the lightning-blast and their companions discourse on galvanism, Victor throws aside the "tormenting studies" of both medieval alchemy and natural philosophy which had hitherto fueled his sense of wonder and formed the basis of his intellectual obsessions. Turning instead to mathematics, he enjoys a brief respite from his torments, but his former desires will overtake him again.

    6. I have described myself as always having been embued with a fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature. In spite of the intense labour and wonderful discoveries of modern philosophers, I always came from my studies discontented and unsatisfied. Sir Isaac Newton is said to have avowed that he felt like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth. Those of his successors in each branch of natural philosophy with whom I was acquainted, appeared even to my boy’s apprehensions, as tyros engaged in the same pursuit. The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him, and was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery. He might dissect, anatomise, and give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were 27utterly unknown to him. I had gazed upon the fortifications and impediments that seemed to keep human beings from entering the citadel of nature, and rashly and ignorantly I had repined. But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. I took their word for all that they averred, and I became their disciple. It may appear strange that such should arise in the eighteenth century; but while I followed the routine of education in the schools of Geneva, I was, to a great degree, self taught with regard to my favourite studies. My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors,

      In this revision for the 1831 edition, Victor narrates a period of exploration and disillusionment with the emergent discourse of modern rational science, encapsulated here by the figure of Newton.

    1. Personally, I think that the likelihood that one diet is the right diet for every human being is nonsense. There are lots of healthy diets, some vegan, some vegetarian, some omnivorous. I don't have a quarrel with those who avoid meat or dairy products. I do have a quarrel with those who claim they have the evidence to prove that meat and dairy products cause cancer and should be avoided altogether. The evidence isn't compelling and cherry-picking studies to support your lifestyle isn't healthy, either.

      A nice quote on the variability of humans & their best diets.

    1. Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche
    1. lants speak in a chemical vocabulary we can’t directly perceive or comprehend. The first important discoveries in plant communication were made in the lab in the nineteen-eighties, by isolating plants and their chemical emissions in Plexiglas chambers, but Rick Karban, the U.C. Davis ecologist, and others have set themselves the messier task of studying how plants exchange chemical signals outdoors, in a natural setting.
    1. Four databases of citizen science and crowdsourcing projects —  SciStarter, the Citizen Science Association (CSA), CitSci.org, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (the Wilson Center Commons Lab) — are working on a common project metadata schema to support data sharing with the goal of maintaining accurate and up to date information about citizen science projects.  The federal government is joining this conversation with a cross-agency effort to promote citizen science and crowdsourcing as a tool to advance agency missions. Specifically, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Community of Practice for Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing (FCPCCS),is compiling an Open Innovation Toolkit containing resources for federal employees hoping to implement citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. Navigation through this toolkit will be facilitated in part through a system of metadata tags. In addition, the Open Innovation Toolkit will link to the Wilson Center’s database of federal citizen science and crowdsourcing projects.These groups became aware of their complementary efforts and the shared challenge of developing project metadata tags, which gave rise to the need of a workshop.  

      Sense Collective's Climate Tagger API and Pool Party Semantic Web plug-in are perfectly suited to support The Wilson Center's metadata schema project. Creating a common metadata schema that is used across multiple organizations working within the same domain, with similar (and overlapping) data and data types, is an essential step towards realizing collective intelligence. There is significant redundancy that consumes limited resources as organizations often perform the same type of data structuring. Interoperability issues between organizations, their metadata semantics and serialization methods, prevent cumulative progress as a community. Sense Collective's MetaGrant program is working to provide a shared infastructure for NGO's and social impact investment funds and social impact bond programs to help rapidly improve the problems that are being solved by this awesome project of The Wilson Center. Now let's extend the coordinated metadata semantics to 1000 more organizations and incentivize the citizen science volunteers who make this possible, with a closer connection to the local benefits they produce through their efforts. With integration into Social impact Bond programs and public/private partnerships, we are able to incentivize collective action in ways that match the scope and scale of the problems we face.

  4. Nov 2019
    1. A very different conclusion was reached by a careful meta-analysis of all the available twin data, recently published in a large review that Mayer and McHugh fail to even mention.

      Phew.. Dense read. M&M used a dataset that did not measure the traits they're addressing. A larger review of multiple datasets showed different results.

    2. Of the six studies using proper probability sampling methods that have been published in the peer-reviewed literature in the past 16 years, they include only one — and it just so happens to be the one with the lowest estimate of genetic influence of the entire set.

      McHugh & Mayer cherry-picked their data to fit their desired results.

    1. It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, “is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”1
    1. Ina Schuppe Koistinen, Abhishek Krishnagopal, Sangeetha Kadur, Pooja Gupta etc gave me the inspiration to do what I wanted to do. Along the way I got exposed to more art and science creators like Gemma Anderson, Monica Zoppe, Drew Barry, Ina S. Koistinen, Christian Sardet, Sandra Black Culliton, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya

      science communication - art + science

    1. Quantum Realism: A virtual reality would be subject to virtual time, where each processing cycle is one "tick." Every gamer knows that when the computer is busy the screen lags—game time slows down under load. Likewise, time in our world slows down with speed or near massive bodies, suggesting that it is virtual. So the rocket twin only aged a year because that was all the processing cycles the system busy moving him could spare. What changed was his virtual time.

      Thought exercise. Modern "Zen koan".

    1. created a Greek alphabet carefully honed to convey scientific meaning rather than typical Greek-language prose

      type design as a means to convey scientific meaning

    2. Science sorely needs best practices in visual communication as well as in information design, a mature field with quantitative methods.

      Visual communication has scientifically proven grounds; it is not just some obscur magic from an artistic genius

    3. Some assume that an aesthetically appealing presentation signals at best a lack of priorities, and at worst a lack of rigour.

      Traditional distinction between form and content

  5. Oct 2019
    1. Die Methoden der Ethik beziehungsweise der Philosophie werden daher zuweilen nicht als "wissenschaftlich" anerkannt, da TA insgesamt dazu tendiert, sich an einem naturwissenschaftlich geprägten Wissenschaftlichkeitsideal zu orientieren.[26] Deshalb wird in der TA oft zwischen der "wissenschaftlichen Seite" – Sammlung, Bewertung und Zusammenstellung von Forschungsevidenz – und der "Werteseite" unterschieden.

      Überlegen Sie, wie die Technikfolgenabschätzung durch die Perspektive der Science Fiction bereichert werden könnte!

    1. for many women and purple can induce soothing and calmness with the image of royalty

      purple colour

    2. Colours and emotion 

      Colours and emotion

    3. Both men and women have blue as their top colour

      Blue wins

    4. The colours black & white have opposing meaning in western and eastern cultures

      west culture:

      • black = finality, death, formality
      • white = purity, peace

      east culture:

      • white = death
      • black = wealth, health, prosperity
    5. Think of each colour in context of its environment, for example do you have a mostly grey, white or muted colours on your website then make your call to action button(s) green or red

      There is no universal guide in choosing website colours. Go with your own intuition

    6. our brain processes visuals 60,000x faster than text
    7. Colour is such a pervasive part of everything we encounter visually in our world, it evokes emotions which in turn drives decision making

      Effect of colour

    8. When creating or refining your brand identity think about pairing your main colour with a complimentary colour or use the 3 grouping guides below

      colour harmony

    9. We are using colour to communicate the value of our product or service
      • Red – Passionate, Aggressive, Important
      • Orange – Playful, Energetic, Cheap
      • Yellow – Happy, Friendly, Warning
      • Green – Natural, Stable, Prosperous
      • Blue – Serene, Trustworthy, Inviting
      • Violet – Luxurious, Mysterious, Romantic
      • Pink – Feminine, Young, Innocent
      • Black – Powerful, Sophisticated, Edgy
      • Brown – Earthy, Sturdy, Rustic
      • Grey – Neutral, Formal, Gloomy
      • White – Clean, Virtuous, Healthy
      • Beige – Accentuates surrounding colours
    10. our eyes can only pick up certain light wavelengths

      We can only pick up the visible spectrum Colors

    11. The theory of colour is a discipline that stretches back to at least the 15th century. It encompasses chemistry, physics and mathematics to effectively explain colour

      The theory of colour

    12. There are 2 primary colour systems (to reproduce colour) we use on a daily basis additive & subtractive. Anything that emits light (sun, screen or projector) uses additive and everything else reflects colour and uses subtractive colour

      2 primary colour systems: 2 primary colour systems

    13. The colour wheel is where you need to start when planning a colour scheme or branding for your business and for sales and marketing campaigns. The colour wheel consists of primary, secondary and tertiary colours.
      1. Primary: can not be made from any other colours
      2. Secondary: formed by mixing the primary colours
      3. Tertiary: formed by mixing primary and secondary colours colour wheel
    14. round shapes are more trustworthy & straight sharp edges are more striking
  6. Sep 2019
    1. Google Translate translation into English:

      Freedom of information. The movement behind Open Science will soften the academic evaluation culture and pull researchers out of the clutches of journals. Interview with one of the movement's front figures, the "detached paleontologist" Jon Tennant.

      All data is born free

      By RASMUS EGMONT FOSS

      More and more researchers are frustrated by the state of science in 2019. Academic journals have too much power over research, they say. Many test results cannot be reproduced. And they are tired of being measured and weighed with a wealth of numbers that quantify the fruits of their labor. In a revolt against the prevailing norms, a growing number of dissatisfied scientists are gathering in these years behind the Open Science movement. People are angry about many things: publishers' profit margins. The time it takes to publish in journals. The way they are evaluated. Open Science is a reaction to all that, a counter-movement that brings together the frustration of a big wave that no one really knows what stands for or where to go, says British Jon Tennant, one of the leading proponents of the movement. Tennant has paused a promising career in paleontology and travels around the world as a "looser" for years to spread the enthusiasm for an open science. In particular, he has been noted as the founder of Open Science MOOC, an online community and educational platform in the field. He is currently visiting the University of Southern Denmark. The broad group of supporters ranges from those who simply want scars to make all academic articles freely available on the web, to those who want to revolutionize the work of researchers. They strive to engage colleagues in every aspect of their work, for example, by exchanging ideas, releasing early data, or the crowdsource editing process. Several organizations and scientists are joining the cause in these years. The movement is particularly characterized by iniciacives such as Plan S, a project to release all government-funded research from 2021, which is, among other things, larger by the European Commission. Also, foundations such as the Gates Foundation have promoted the ideas by forcing all beneficiaries to share their data. Common to followers is that they will bring modern research closer to the real purpose of science, as they see it: to increase the knowledge base of society by working in groups rather than in silos. Several of them have now started pointing fingers at the universities' growing evaluation culture as the main obstacle to achieving that goal. It distorts researchers' motivation and creates an unhealthy environment, they say. The biggest problem today is how scientists are measured and who has control over that evaluation system, Jon Tennant believes. Researchers are to a greater extent measured by how much and how much they publish than what they publish. It gives wrong incentives. At the same time, the evaluation process itself is guided by the commercial interests of a narrow group of publishers who do not always share the researchers' interests. Today, scientists are not in control of systems, and that is a major problem, he elaborates.

      JON Tennant and the Open Science movement will do away with what German sociologist Steffen Mau has dubbed “the quantification culture of science. Over the past few decades, many universities have begun to adapt their culture to live up to the rankings and scoring systems that give prestige in the field. In the researchers' everyday life, factors such as circulation rates and h-indices (a measure of a researcher's influence) as well as the impact factors of journals, for example, have gained great importance for their career and reputation among colleagues. The voices behind Open Science want a new model. It must promote quality research and be responsible to the community rather than narrow interests. The first step is to expand access to academic articles. Researchers need to be able to build on everyone's work, and private publishers should not have the power over the product, they say. According to advocates like Jon Tennant, we should also open up the entire scientific process by using the Internet better. The journals must still have a place in the system, but today their old-fashioned model stands in the way of communicating our research effectively. We are not taking advantage of network technology opportunities well enough, he says. From a new idea arises, until the method is developed, data is obtained and the conclusions are available, everyone should be able to follow and propose improvements, the invitation reads. For example, researchers should publish their plans for new projects before they begin collecting data (a so-called pre-registration) and should be encouraged to share their results before the article is published (a micro-publication). But as long as publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature have power over researchers' careers, researchers lack the incentive to collaborate openly and inspire each other, Jon Tennant believes. A more open and free process could also solve the reproducibility crisis in science by making studies more transparent. At the same time, it has the potential to prevent large amounts of time wasting, as researchers will be able to see other people's failed projects before starting their own. OPEN Science is part of a larger modern movement, which, according to Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, is "the first since 1789 to invent a whole new freedom of value information. There is the idea that data has the right to be free and that humans should not restrict its movements. The mindset is the phloxof behind projects like Wikipedia, Google and Open Source in software programming. Based on that logic, the power must lie with the community and not a narrow group of editors when the quality of the researchers' work needs to be assessed (for it must, after all). We should not discard the peer review model, merely reform it, says Jon Tennant: We still need to evaluate the quality of research, but we should take advantage of opportunities in online community and networking. However, a new evaluation culture has its own pitfalls, and the biggest uncertainties about the Open Science agenda stem from this. Prestigious journals such as Nature and Science give scientists and lay people confidence that their articles are trustworthy. Everyone needs these kinds of pointers when navigating the academic world. At the same time, there is no guarantee that the quality of research will increase when the masses decide. The risk of a democratic evaluation system is that it creates a new and more intense quantification cult, where research articles are instead measured on colleagues' ratings, as we know it from services like Uber and Tripadvisor. Competition for prestige is an inevitable part of any industry, and today's race will simply be replaced by a new one - on other terms. Here, other studies will lose the battle, probably those with a narrower appeal. The established institutions have an ambivalent relationship with the Open Science movement. Leaders at universities and publishers positively mention it in closed forums, Jon Tennant says, but would rather stick to their existing benefits as long as they can. They also hesitate because the consequences of the new regime are unpredictable. Everyone is scared to move like the first, he says.

    2. Original content in Danish:

      Informationsfrihed. Bevægelsen bag Open Science vil mildne den akademiske evalueringskultur og trække forskerne ud af tidsskrifternes kløer. Interview med en af bevægelsens frontfigurer, den «løsgående palæontolog» Jon Tennant.

      Alle data er født frie

      Af RASMUS EGMONT FOSS

      Flere og flere forskere er frustrerede over videnskabens tilstand anno 2019. Udgiverne af akademiske tidsskrifter har for stor magt over forskningen, siger de. Mange forsøgsresultater kan ikke reproduceres. Og de er trætte af at blive målt og vejet med et væld af tal, som kvantificerer frugten af deres arbejde. I et oprør mod de herskende normer samler et stigende antal utilfredse forskere sig i disse år bag bevægelsen Open Science. Folk er vrede over mange ting: Udgivernes profitmargener. Tiden, der tager at publicere i tidsskrifter. Måden, de bliver evalueret på. Open Science er en reaktion mod alt det, en modbevægelse, der samler frustrationen i en stor bølge, som ingen rigtigt ved, hvad står for, eller hvor bevæger sig hen, fortæller britiske Jon Tennant, en af de førende fortalere for bevægelsen. Tennant har sat en lovende karriere inden for palæonrologien på pause og rejser verden rundt som «løsgænger« for ar udbrede begejstringen for en åben videnskab. Han har især gjort sig bemærket som stifter af Open Science MOOC, et online fællesskab og uddannelsesplatform på området. I disse måneder er han på besøg på Syddansk Universitet. Den brede gruppe af støtter spænder fra dem, der blot ønsker ar gøre alle akademiske artikler frit tilgængelige på nettet, til dem, som ligefrem vil revolucionere forskernes arbejde. De stræber efter at indvie kolleger i alle aspekter af deres arbejde, for eksempel ved at udveksle ideer, frigive tidlige data eller crowdsource redigeringsprocessen. Adskillige organisationer og videnskabsfolk slutter sig til sagen i disse år. Bevægelsen er især kendetegnet ved iniciaciver som Plan S, et projekt om at frigive al statsfinansieret forskning fra 2021, der blandt andet størres af EU-Kommissionen. Også fonde som Gates Foundation har fremmet ideerne ved at tvinge alle støttemodtagere til at dele deres data. Fælles for tilhængerne er, at de vil bringe den moderne forskning tættere på videnskabens ækte formål, som de ser der: at forøge samfundets vidensbase ved at arbejde i flok frem for i siloer. Flere af dem er nu begyndt at pege fingre ad universiteternes voksende evalueringskultur som den vigtigste hindring til at nå det mål. Den forvrænger forskernes motivation og skaber er usundt miljø, siger de. Det største problem i dag er, hvordan forskere bliver målt, og hvem der har kontrollen over det evalueringssystem, mener Jon Tennant. Forskere bliver i højere grad målt på, hvor og hvor meget de publicerer, end hvad de udgiver. Det giver forkerte incitamencer. Samtidig er selve evalueringsprocessen styret af kommercielle interesser hos en snæver gruppe udgivere, som ikke altid deler forskernes interesser. I dag er forskerne ikke i kontrol over systemer, og det er et stort problem, uddyber han.

      JON Tennant og Open Science-bevægelsen vil gøre op med det, som den tyske sociolog Steffen Mau har døbt "kvantificeringskulturen i videnskaben. Over de seneste årtier er mange universiteter begyndt ar tilpasse deres kultur for at leve op til de ranglister og pointsystemer, som giver prestige på feltet. l forskernes hverdag har faktorer som cirationsrater og h-indeks (en målestok for en forskers indflydelse) samt tidsskrifternes impact factors for eksempel opnået stor betydning for deres karriere og anseelse blandt kolleger. Stemmerne bag Open Science ønsker en ny model. Den skal fremme kvalitetsforskning og være ansvarlig over for fællesskabet frem for snævre interesser. Første skridt er ar udbrede adgangen til akademiske artikler. Forskere skal kunne bygge videre på alles arbejde, og private udgivere bør ikke have magten over produktet, siger de. I følge talsmænd som Jon Tennant bør vi også åbne hele den videnskabelige proces op ved at bruge internettet bedre. Tidsskrifterne skal fortsat have en plads i systemet, men idag står deres gammeldags model i vejen for at kommunikere vores forskning effektivt. Vi udnytter slet ikke netværksteknologiens muligheder godt nok, siger han. Fra en ny ide opstår, til metoden udvikles, data indhentes, og konklusionerne foreligger, skal alle kunne følge med og foreslå forbedringer, lyder opfordringen. Forskere bør for eksempel publicere deres planer for nye projekter, inden de går i gang med at indsamle data (en såkalt førregistrering) , og de skal opfordres til at dele deres resultater, før artiklen udkommer (en mikroudgivelse). Men så længe udgivere som Elsevier og Springer Nature har magt over forskernes karrierer, mangler forskerne incitamentet ril at samarbejde åbent og inspirere hinanden, mener Jon Tennant. En mere åben og fri proces vil også kunne løse reproducerbarhedskrisen i videnskaben ved at gøre studier mere transparente. Samtidig har det potentialet til at forhindre store mængder tidsspilde, da forskere vil kunne se andres fejlslagne projekter, før de begynder deres eget. OPEN Science er del af en større moderne bevægelse, som ifølge den israelske historiker Yuval Noah Harari er "den første siden 1789, der har opfundet en helt ny værdiinformationsfrihed. Der er ideen om, ar data har ret til at være frit, og at mennesker ikke bør begrænse dets bevægelser. Tankesættet udgør fllosofien bag projekter som Wikipedia, Google og Open Source inden for softwareprogrammering. Ud fra den logik skal magten ligge hos fællesskabet og ikke en smal gruppe af redaktører, når kvaliteten af forskernes arbejde skal vurderes (for der skal den trods alt). Vi skal ikke kassere peer review-modellen, blot reformere den, siger Jon Tennant: Vi skal stadig evaluere kvaliteten af forskningen, men vi bør udnytte mulighederne i online fællesskab og netværk. En ny evalueringskultur har dog sine egne faldgruber, og de største usikkerheder ved agendaen i Open Science stammer herfra. Prestigefyldte tidsskrifter som Nature og Science giver forskere og lægfolk tillid til, at deres artikler er troværdige. Alle har brug for den slags pejlemærker, når de skal navigere i den akademiske verden. Der er samtidig ingen garanti for, at forskningens kvalitet stiger, når masserne bestemmer. Risikoen ved et demokratisk evalueringssysrem er, at det skaber en ny og mere intens kvantificeringskult, hvor forskningsarcikler istedet måles på kollegernes ratinger, som vi kender det fra tjenester som Uber og Tripadvisor. Konkurrencen om prestige er en uundgåelig del af enhver branche, og dagens ræs vil blot erstattes af et nyt – på andre præmisser. Her vil andre studier tabe kampen, formentlig dem med en smallere appel. De etablerede institutioner har et ambivalent forhold til Open Science-bevægelsen. Ledere hos universiteter og udgivere omtaler den positivt i lukkede fora, fortæller Jon Tennant, men vil helst holde fast i deres eksisterende fordele, så længe de kan. De tøver også, fordi konsekvenserne af det nye regime er uforudsigelige. Alle er bange for ar flytte sig som de første, siger han.

    1. Find one of the best manufacturers of portable sinks to get portable sinks for classrooms. MONSAM Portable Sinks offer a wide range of portable sinks for the science lab workstations. Visit their website, to order one for your science lab.

    1. Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist.A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
  7. Aug 2019
    1. This teacher’s guide contains a brief synopsis of each chapter

      this is funny

    1. The idea of historiology as a science implies that the disclosure of historical entities is what it has seized upon as its own task. Every science is constituted primarily by thematizing. That which is familiar prescientifically in Dasein as disclosed Being-in-the-world, gets projected upon the Being which is specific to it. With this projection, the realm of entities is bounded off. The ways of access to them get ‘managed’ methodologically, and the conceptual structure for interpreting them is outlined. If we may postpone the question of whether a ‘history of the Present’ is possible, and assign [zuweisen] to historiology the task of disclosing the ‘past’, then the historiological thematizing of history is possible only if, in general, the ‘past’ has in each case already been disclosed. Quite apart from the question of whether sufficient sources are available for the historiological envisagement of the past, the way to it must in general be open if we are to go back to it historiologically. It is by no means patent that anything of the sort is the case, or how this is possible.

      Heidegger: "Every science is constituted primarily by thematizing" || Just as Heidegger does not reject facticity outright he is equally careful in his critique of the limits of thematization. Indeed, the two discussions seem to correspond on many points. Is thematization a kind of meta-factualization? A factualization with a temporal component?

    1. Retrieval practice boosts learning by pulling information out of students’ heads (by responding to a brief writing prompt, for example), rather than cramming information into their heads (by lecturing at students, for example). In the classroom, retrieval practice can take many forms, including a quick no-stakes quiz. When students are asked to retrieve new information, they don’t just show what they know, they solidify and expand it. Feedback boosts learning by revealing to students what they know and what they don’t know. At the same time, this increases students’ metacognition — their understanding about their own learning progress. Spaced practice boosts learning by spreading lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time so that new knowledge and skills are not crammed in all at once. By returning to content every so often, students’ knowledge has time to be consolidated and then refreshed. Interleaving — or practicing a mix of skills (such as doing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems all in one sitting) — boosts learning by encouraging connections between and discrimination among closely related topics. Interleaving sometimes slows students’ initial learning of a concept, but it leads to greater retention and learning over time.

      How can I build this into my curriculum?

  8. Jul 2019
    1. Science is part of culture, and how science is done depends on the culture in which it is practised. Consider how many medical studies were based on male mice and male patients, and so missed important biomedical insights.

      Blaming various cultures as being anti-science has come a long way for the western world. Their viewpoint however is based on the kind of socio-cultural backdrop of their own society and fails to understand or accommodate ideas from cultures that are different from theirs.

    1. The scientists were astonished by the results: selective noradrenaline release re-wired the connectivity patterns between different brain regions in a way that was extremely similar to the changes observed in humans exposed to acute stress. Networks that process sensory stimuli, such as the visual and auditory center of the brain, exhibited the strongest increase in activity. A similar rise in activity was observed in the amygdala network, which is associated with states of anxiety.
  9. Jun 2019
    1. Success ina data science project comes not from access to any one exotic tool, but from having quantifiablegoals, good methodology, crossdiscipline interactions, and a repeatable workflow.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. So many people today – and even professional scientists – seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering.

      a nice way to put it

  10. May 2019
    1. The first difficulty is that the robot’s utility function did not quite match our utility function. Our utility function is 1 if the cauldron is full, 0 if the cauldron is empty, −10 points to whatever the outcome was if the workshop has flooded, +0.2 points if it’s funny, −1,000 points (probably a bit more than that on this scale) if someone gets killed … and it just goes on and on and on.

      But it is very difficult to fully express these utility functions in code. The goal is to literally turn our ethics into code -- to translate them into coherent data structures, algorithms, and decision trees. We want to deduce our moral intuitions and more.

  11. Apr 2019
    1. Women in science are cited less than their male colleagues. They have a harder time getting work published in notable journals, including the flagships Science and Nature. They are likely paid less than their peers (a 2013 study found that women working in physics and astronomy were paid 40 percent less than men). And they are more likely to face workplace harassment.
    2. Researchers are protesting grant processes that overwhelmingly fund male-led projects, and scientific societies are reforming their sexual harassment policies.
    1. A Vision for Scholarly Communication Currently, there is a strong push to address the apparent deficits of the scholarly communication system. Open Science has the potential to change the production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge for the better, but there is no commonly shared vision that describes the system that we want to create.

      A Vision for Scholarly Communication

  12. Mar 2019
    1. Coral reefs are projected to decline by a further 70-90% at 1.5°C.

      How will that effect the species that rely on the reefs for shelter? Will some be able to survive?

    1. The main purpose of the Discovery IN is to provide interfaces and other user-facing services for data discovery across disciplines. We explore new and innovative ways of enabling discovery, including visualizations, recommender systems, semantics, content mining, annotation, and responsible metrics. We apply user involvement and participatory design to increase usability and usefulness of the solutions. We go beyond academia, involving users from all stakeholders of research data. We create FAIR and open infrastructures, following the FAIR principles complemented by the principles of open source, open data, and open content, thus enabling reuse of interfaces and user-facing services and continued innovation. Our main objectives are:
    1. To investigate whether and how user data are shared by top rated medicines related mobile applications (apps) and to characterise privacy risks to app users, both clinicians and consumers.

      "24 of 821 apps identified by an app store crawling program. Included apps pertained to medicines information, dispensing, administration, prescribing, or use, and were interactive."

    1. This page enables one to download the book "How People Learn" for free and allows one to link to related content. This book was not originally written for adult learning but is included here because it is a valuable resource, an entire book provided for free, with immediate relevance to adult learning even if every example, etc. is not based on adult learning. Rating 4/5

    1. This link is for the Association of Information Science and Technology. While many of the resources are available only to those who are association members, there are a great many resources to be found via this site. Among the items available are their newsletter and their journal articles. As the title suggests, there is a technology focus, and also a focus on scientific findings that can guide instructional designers in the presentation and display of visual and textual information, often but not exclusively online. Instructional designers are specifically addressed via the content of this site. A student membership is available. Rating 5/5

    1. A nano-porous carbon composite membrane has been found to display high water flux due to exceptionally high surface diffusion, together with an excellent salt rejection [2616, 2958].

      With an excellent ability to reject salt, how often does membrane fouling become an issue when desalinating seawater? to a point where it causes water flux decline and lowers the quality of the water produced.

      ~ Anthony Y.

  13. Feb 2019
    1. As Shulman (1986) noted, this knowledge would include knowledge of concepts, theories, ideas, organizational frameworks, knowledge of evidence and proof, as well as established practices and approaches toward developing such knowledge. Knowledge and the nature of inquiry differ greatly between fields, and teachers should understand the deeper knowledge fundamentals of the disciplines in which they teach

      It is important to not only understand what the content is that we are teaching but to understand what goes into the content that we are teaching. The article gives exampled of art and science; the importance is not only on the art or science it is the history and understanding of artists and their meaning and "knowledge of scientific facts and theories, the scientific method, and evidence-based reasoning"

    1. Research methodologies and methods used must be open for full discussion and review by peers and stakeholders.

      So does this mean totally open? As in publish your protocols open?

    1. we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

      We essentially cannot collect enough data and have to resort to speculation. Is this true?

    1. creating obscurities through disputation,

      lol @ this.

      "creating obscurities through disputation" sounds an awful lot like "broadening the knowledge base of humanity." Arguing toward ever more precise ideas and their articulations is the driving force of the Enlightenment.

    1. every individual has the means to decide how their knowledge is governed and managed to address their needs
    2. knowledge commons

      The idea of a "knowledge commons" was referenced in the book, "Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture" by Eric Holt-Giménez in the context of agroecological knowledge inherent in agrarian communities in Latin America.

  14. Jan 2019
    1. abstract independently existing “object”

      Since forever, apparently, science has relied on Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover," in a sense. Not a god exactly, but some real or imagined unaffected observer whose presence serves as a fixed point from which to accumulate data. Why are we tempted to think this way? Aren't we all moving? What fixed point is there? I'm tempted to go back to the analogy of floating baskets tied together. There is an illusion of being grounded, but we aren't really.

    1. This is the meaning of the “Day of Resurrection,” spoken of in all the scriptures, and announced unto all people. Reflect, can a more precious, a mightier, and more glorious day than this be conceived, so that man should willingly forego its grace, and deprive himself of its bounties, which like unto vernal showers are raining from the heaven of mercy upon all mankind?

      I think this meaning is that "Resurrection" is the return of a Manifestation in another human frame. And this is stated to be clearly more glorious than the literal interpretations of past scripture.

      Why is it clearly more glorious?

      1. Everyone has access. And it leads to empowerment.
      2. It allows us to keep science, which is pretty awesome.
      3. It doesn't allow us to just wait for the rapture - see point 1 about empowerment.
      4. It allows us to see all religions as united in spirit.
      5. Related to point 3 and 4, it allows us to unite with non-religious people.
      6. All of this without "doing violence to the facts".
    1. This is one of the most important decisions in an EFA (Thompson, 2004; Warne & Larsen, 2014), and these decisions can make g artificially easier or harder to identify.

      Deciding the number of factors to retain can be extremely subjective. But that was why it was so important to pre-register our work. We wanted to choose methods for making this decision before seeing the data so that no one could accuse of us of trying to monkey with the data until we got the results we wanted.

    2. For the sake of transparency, we find it important to explicitly state deviations from our preregistration protocol. First, in our preregistration, we stated that we would search for (cognitive OR intelligence) AND the name of a continent or population. However, searching for a continent was not feasible in finding data sets. We also had difficulty generating a list of population groups (e.g., ethnic groups, tribal groups) that would be useful for our search procedures.

      This was my second time I pre-registered the study and the first time my student co-author had. We are still getting the hang of it.

    1. he would extend this to "science" tout court-does not use value-free lan-guage, that value-free language does not exist, and that we cannot posit a purely transparent language devoid of distracting ornament, through which we transact business with pure facts.

      This reminds me of an article I read in my Feminist Epistemologies class, "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles," which shook me to my core. It argues that science and culture are intertwined and that they influence and reinforce one another. The scientific descriptions of egg, sperm, reproduction, and ovulation she provides to support her argument show how dangerous the perpetuation of the idea of "value-free" and/or unbiased language can be (and is).

    2. Value-free language and the possibility of a self-contained discipline make possible both modern sci-ence and that mapping of humanistic inquiry onto a scientific model which has created modern social science as well.

      And yet, any mapping of humanistic inquiry onto a scientific model would lead to the creation of incomplete maps, of certain lies. One of those lies? If you can't use the scientific method to come to know something, then that something isn't knowledge/true/truth/fact.

    1. A comment at the bottom by Barbara H Partee, another panelist alongside Chomsky:

      I'd like to see inclusion of a version of the interpretation problem that reflects my own work as a working formal semanticist and is not inherently more probabilistic than the formal 'generation task' (which, by the way, has very little in common with the real-world sentence production task, a task that is probably just as probabilistic as the real-world interpretation task).

    2. There is a notion of success ... which I think is novel in the history of science. It interprets success as approximating unanalyzed data.

      This article makes a solid argument for why statistical and probabilistic models are useful, not only for prediction, but also for understanding. Perhaps this is a key point that Noam misses, but the quote narrows the definition to models that approximate "unanalyzed data".

      However, it seems clear from this article that the successes of ML models have gone beyond approximating unanalyzed data.

    3. But O'Reilly realizes that it doesn't matter what his detractors think of his astronomical ignorance, because his supporters think he has gotten exactly to the key issue: why? He doesn't care how the tides work, tell him why they work. Why is the moon at the right distance to provide a gentle tide, and exert a stabilizing effect on earth's axis of rotation, thus protecting life here? Why does gravity work the way it does? Why does anything at all exist rather than not exist? O'Reilly is correct that these questions can only be addressed by mythmaking, religion or philosophy, not by science.

      Scientific insight isn't the same as metaphysical questions, in spite of having the same question word. Asking, "Why do epidemics have a peak?" is not the same as asking "Why does life exist?". Actually, that second question can be interested in two different ways, one metaphysically and one physically. The latter interpretation means that "why" is looking for a material cause. So even simple and approximate models can have generalizing value, such as the Schelling Segregation model. There is difference between models to predict and models to explain, and both have value. As later mentioned in this document, theory and data are two feet and both are needed for each other.

    4. This page discusses different types of models

      • statistical models
      • probabilistic models
      • trained models

      and explores the interaction between prediction and insight.

    5. Chomsky (1991) shows that he is happy with a Mystical answer, although he shifts vocabulary from "soul" to "biological endowment."

      Wasn't one of Chomsky's ideas that humans are uniquely suited to language? The counter-perspective espoused here appears to be that language emerges, and that humans are only distinguished by the magnitude of their capacity for language; other species probably have proto-language, and there is likely a smooth transition from one to the other. In fact, there isn't a "one" nor an "other" in a true qualitative sense.

      So what if we discover something about the human that appears to be required for our language? Does this, then, lead us to knowledge of how human language is qualitatively different from other languages?

      Can probabilistic models account for qualitative differences? If a very low, but not 0, probability is assigned to a given event that we know is impossible from our theory-based view, that doesn't make our probabilistic model useless. "All models are wrong, some are useful." But it seems that it does carry with it an assumption that there are no real categories, that categories change according to the needs, and are only useful in describing things. But the underlying nature of reality is of a continuum.

  15. jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk
    1. To Guide Data Collection

      This seems to be, essentially, that models are useful for prediction, but prediction of unknowns in the data instead of prediction of future system dynamics.

    2. Without models, in other words, it is not always clear what data to collect!

      Or how to interpret that data in the light of complex systems.

    3. Plate tectonics surely explains earthquakes, but does not permit us to predict the time and place of their occurrence.

      But how do you tell the value of an explanation? Should it not empower you to some new action or ability? It could be that the explanation is somewhat of a by-product of other prediction-making theories (like how plate tectonics relies on thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and rock mechanics, which do make predictions).

      It might also make predictions itself, such as that volcanoes not on clear plate boundaries might be somehow different (distribution of occurrence over time, correlation with earthquakes, content of magma, size of eruption...), or that understanding the explanation for lightning allows prediction that a grounded metal pole above the house might protect the house from lightning strikes. This might be a different kind of prediction, though, since it isn't predicting future dynamics. Knowing how epidemics works doesn't necessarily allow prediction of total infected counts or length of infection, but it does allow prediction of minimum vaccination rates to avert outbreaks.

      Nonetheless, a theory as a tool to explain, with very poor predictive ability, can still be useful, though less valuable than one that also makes testable predictions.

      But in general, it seems like data -> theory is the explanation. Theory -> data is the prediction. The strength of the prediction depends on the strength of the theory.

    1. Theseunderstandings of spatial technologies build on les-sons from science and technology studies (STS)research that describes the processes by which dataand technologies come to assume and reify social andpower relations, worldviews, and epistemologies(Feenberg1999; Pinch and Bijker1987; Wajcman1991; Winner1985)

      Good summation of Bijker's and Winner's STS work

  16. Dec 2018
    1. Le commerce de l’échange savant dont les règles, les formes et les lieux peuvent être mis en cartes produit diverses sortes de validations qui permettent à leurs bénéficiaires d’entrer dans la négociation de situations matérielles : l’expression République des Lettres couvre, et mêle tout à la fois ces formes, ces lieux et un bon nombre de ces situations. Alors que l’échange et la validation des savoirs par les institutions académiques sont soumis à des conditions d’accès étroites et à des délais de publication encore plus longs pour les mémoires reçus par les sociétés que pour ceux de leurs propres membres, les périodiques savants s’ouvrent à des contributions d’origines très diverses qu’ils publient rapidement.

      cohabitation et complémentarité des formes de communication savante (voir l'intervention de Judith). Le périodique apparaît comme une ouverture.

    1. Our under-standing of the gap is driven by technological exploration through artifact cre-ation and deployment, but HCI and CSCW systems need to have at their corea fundamental understanding of how people really work and live in groups, or-ganizations, communities, and other forms of collective life. Otherwise, wewill produce unusable systems, badly mechanizing and distorting collabora-tion and other social activity.

      The risk of CSCW not driving toward a more scientific pursuit of social theory, understanding, and ethnomethodology and instead simply building "cool toys"

    2. The gap is also CSCW’s unique contribution. CSCW exists intellectually atthe boundary and interaction of technology and social settings. Its unique intel-lectual importance is at the confluence of technology and the social, and its

      CSCW's potential to become a science of the artificial resides in the study of interactions between society and technology

    3. Nonetheless, several guiding questions are required based on thesocial–technical gap and its role in any CSCW science of the artificial:• When can a computational system successfully ignore the need fornuance and context?• When can a computational system augment human activity withcomputer technologies suitably to make up for the loss in nuance andcontext, as argued in the approximation section earlier?• Can these benefits be systematized so that we know when we are add-ing benefit rather than creating loss?• What types of future research will solve some of the gaps betweentechnical capabilities and what people expect in their full range of so-cial and collaborative activities?

      Questions to consider in moving CSCW toward a science of the artificial

    4. The final first-order approximation is the creation of technical architecturesthat do not invoke the social–technical gap; these architectures neither requireaction nor delegate it. Instead, these architectures provide supportive oraugmentative facilities, such as advice, to users.

      Support infrastructures provide a different type of approximation to augment the user experience.

    5. Another approximation incorporates new computational mechanisms tosubstitute adequately for social mechanisms or to provide for new social issues(Hollan & Stornetta, 1992).

      Approximate a social need with a technical cue. Example in Google Docs of anonymous user icons on page indicates presence but not identity.

    6. First-order approximations, to adopt a metaphor from fluid dynamics, aretractable solutions that partially solve specific problems with knowntrade-offs.

      Definition of first-order approximations.

      Ackerman argues that CSCW needs a set of approximations that drive the development of initial work-arounds for the socio-technical gaps.

      Essentially, how to satisfy some social requirements and then approximate the trade-offs. Doesn't consider the product a solution in full but something to iterate and improve

      This may have been new/radical thinking 20 years ago but seems to have been largely adopted by the CSCW community