Conservatives put stamp on Texas textbooks - Education- msnbc.com
Adds references to "laws of nature and nature's God" to a section in U.S. history that requires students to explain major political ideas.
Replaces "democratic" in references to the form of U.S. government with "constitutional republic."
In addition to learning the Bill of Rights, the board specifies a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class.
Requires economics students to "analyze the decline of the U.S. dollar including abandonment of the gold standard."
Ensures that students learn about "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association."
In teaching about the civil rights movement, students must learn about the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent approach.
Specifies that Germans and Italians were interned in the United States as well as the Japanese during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.
Requires that the history of McCarthyism include "how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government." The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States.
In sociology, requires the teaching of "the importance of personal responsibility for life choices" in a section on teen suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.
In economics, the curriculum revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, to the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. The board also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout the texts with the “free-enterprise system.”
Board members argued about the classification of historic periods (still B.C. and A.D., rather than B.C.E. and C.E.); whether students should be required to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics (they will); and whether former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir should be required learning (she will).
Technology Review: Solar-Power Breakthrough: "In his experimental system, Nocera immerses an indium tin oxide electrode in water mixed with cobalt and potassium phosphate. He applies a voltage to the electrode, and cobalt, potassium, and phosphate accumulate on the electrode, forming the catalyst. The catalyst oxidizes the water to form oxygen gas and free hydrogen ions. At another electrode, this one coated with a platinum catalyst, hydrogen ions form hydrogen gas. As it works, the cobalt-based catalyst breaks down, but cobalt and potassium phosphate in the solution soon re-form on the electrode, repairing the catalyst."
The second remaining step in artificial photosynthesis is developing a material that absorbs sunlight, generating the electrons needed to power the water-splitting catalysts. That will allow Nocera's catalyst to run directly on sunlight; right now, it runs on electricity taken from an outlet.
The system can use electricity from any source. But there are a couple of reasons to focus on solar. First, the ultimate goal of the research is artificial photosynthesis, because solar power is the biggest source of energy we've got.
The second is a more practical issue. Note that, near the end, the article talks about the need to improve the rate of oxygen production. Right now, the rate is very close to what would be needed in artificial photosynthesis, but not fast enough to be practical in conjunction with wind power or other sources of electricity, according to NREL's John Turner.
With his start-up company, Sun Catalytix, Nocera hopes to make the system affordable enough to allow individual homes to generate their own fuel and electricity on-site. By distributing hydrogen production in this way, the new method could potentially solve the problem of hydrogen transportation
"With the economy still in need of government life support and the future of American manufacturing in doubt, relying on faulty productivity data is a formula for disaster."
FOR a quarter-century, American economic policy has assumed that the keys to durable national prosperity are deregulation, free trade and a swift transition to a post-industrial, services-dominated future.
In reality, though, wage gains for the average worker have lagged behind productivity since the early 1980s, a situation that free-traders usually attribute to workers failing to retrain themselves after seeing their jobs outsourced.In 2009, the data show, Americans needed 40 percent fewer hours to produce the same unit of output as in 1980.
But there’s a problem: labor productivity figures, which are calculated by the Labor Department, count only worker hours in America, even though American-owned factories and labs have been steadily transplanted overseas, and foreign workers have contributed significantly to the final products counted in productivity measures.
The result is an apparent drop in the number of worker hours required to produce goods — and thus increased productivity. But actually, the total number of worker hours does not necessarily change.
This continuing mismeasurement leads economists and all those who rely on them to assume that recorded productivity gains always signify greater efficiency, rather than simple offshoring-generated cost cuts — leaving the rest of us scratching our heads over stagnating wages.
Because productivity gains in part reflect job offshoring, not just the benefits of technology or better business practices, then the American economy has been much less innovative than widely assumed.
Digging through the recession reasons, this seems to me one indicator that do not work. Another is so called "value added tax", useless here, useless in Grecian economy.
Jul 7, 1946 - Maj. Gen. A. Kolissonitko of the soviet army greeted eight Americancorrespondents at Weimar by saying he was glad to prove how false and foolish is the fable of the iron curtain around the Russian occupation zone of Germany. IRON CURTAIN'. LIFTS, BUT-ONLY FOR QUICK PEEK ... From'IRON CURTAIN' LIFTS, BUT ONLY FOR QUICK PEEK - Related web pages
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May 25, 1948 - The Iron Curtain, controversial film version of the Canadian spy trials, comes to the screen of Loew's, starting Friday. The 20th CenturyFox picture has attracted much at tention for its outspoken attack on . Communism, and been picketed in several centres. The amazing disclosures of a ... FromControversial film iron Curtain' Due into Loew's Theatre Friday . - Related web pages
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Feb 14, 1950 - What does the switch in Russian policy in East Ger many portend for Europe? It seems that for the present there is to be no more talk of Ger man unity, or of "getting' back to the Potsdam Agreement." Moscow has become bent on thoroughly Communising the part of Germany it controls, ... FromClamping Down The Iron Curtain . - Related web pages
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Jun 12, 1951 - United States air force headquarters tonight called off as hopeless a search along the iron curtain border for two United States jet fighters that vanished Friday--possibly in communist Europe. FEAR US JETS. LOST BACK OF. IRON CURTAIN Hunt in West Europe Fails to Yield Clew ... FromFEAR US JETS LOST BACK OF IRON CURTAIN - Related web pages
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May 5, 1952 - The latest State Department regulator regarding visits by American citizens to the Soviet Union or the countries it controls sets up a uniform procedure for all, extending provisions formerly applicable only to some. With regard to all these nations citizens of this country must now ... FromIRON CURTAIN PASSPORTS - Related web pages
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Sep 17, 1953 - Missing Mrs. Donald MacLean, whose British diplomat husband is believed behind the Iron Curtain, was reported today to have left her automobile here last Friday night and said she would come back for it in. Missing Family Feared Behind Iron Curtain . LAUSANNE. Sept. ... FromMissing Family Feared Behind Iron Curtain - Related web pages
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Nov 16, 1955 - some positive achievement 'at the Geneva conference has evaporated as a result of an ex tension of the prevailing dead lock to the last item on the agenda — namely, the lifting of the Iron Curtain. At the Western Foreign Ministers have pointed out, the problem of the Iron Curtain lies ... FromThe Iron Curtain Stays . - Related web pages
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Jun 30, 1956 - President Eisenhower today approved a United States policy on relations withRussia which is designed to tear down the Soviet Iron Curtain. Decision Ends 6-Month Debate Within Administration on Policy Toward Russia. WASHINGTON, June 29 (Al President Eisenhower today approved a United ... FromEisenhower OKs Plan to Banish Iron Curtain - Related web pages
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Nov 29, 1963 - West European newspapers Tuesday praised President Johnson for what they called courage and sincerity in pledging himself to continue the fight for the late President Kennedy's policies. West and Iron -Curtain Papers Praise Johnson. ' Pursuit of Kennedy Policies Hailed as 5 Evidence of ... FromWest and Iron Curtain Papers Praise Johnson - Related web pages
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Jul 13, 1989 - BUDAPEST (AP) - US President George Bush, proclaiming "the Iron Curtainhas begun to part," yesterday saluted Hungary's strides toward economic and political freedom. "For the first time, the Iron Curtain has begun to part. And Hungary, your great country, is leading the way," Bush ... FromMarx U students cheer Bush Proclamation that 'Iron Curtain has begun to …- Related web pages
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“Scientists must continually earn the public’s trust or we risk descending into a new Dark Age where ideology trumps reason,” Dr. Pachauri said in an e-mail message.
But some scientists said that responding to climate change skeptics was a fool’s errand.
He said that the recent flurry of hostility to climate science had been driven as much by the cold winter as by any real or perceived scientific sins.
“There have always been people accusing us of being fraudulent criminals, of the I.P.C.C. being corrupt,” Dr. Schmidt said. “What is new is this paranoia combined with a spell of cold weather in the United States and the ‘climategate’ release. It’s a perfect storm that has allowed the nutters to control the agenda.”
The answer is simple, he said.
“Good science,” he said, “is the best revenge.”
Good science means a $ 30 to $ 60 / CO2 metric ton tax increase. Nope better breakfast. Forget a new car. $ 7 / gal at gas pump. That is the price for a science melting Himalaya glaciers.
The GDP, generally expressed as a per-capita figure and often adjusted to reflect purchasing power, represents the market value of good and services produced within a nation's boundaries. Sounds reasonable. Until we consider what it doesn't measure: the general progress in health and education, the condition of public infrastructure, fuel efficiency, community and leisure.
One new calculation that's been attracting attention is the Happy Planet Index (HPI), which combines economic metrics with indicators of well-being, including subjective measures of life satisfaction, which have become quite sophisticated (HPI uses data from Gallup, World Values Survey, and Ecological Footprint). The HPI assesses social and economic well-being in the context of resources used, looking at the degree of human happiness generated per quantity of environment consumed. The HPI metric was driven in part by the recognition that the environmental costs of economic growth must be figured into standard-of-living reports.
(See the worst business deals of 2009.)
The matter of how a nation measures performance is far from trivial, says Gus Speth, particularly at a time when environment sustainability is on many people's minds. He observes: "You tend to get what you measure, so we'd better measure what we want." In other words, to a certain extent we are what we count.
(See pictures of the stock market crash of 1929.)
For Nic Marks, the key shift introduced by the HPI is its "move away from measuring production and toward measuring consumption. The HPI serves as a signpost pointing more toward a society we want to live in — the delivery of good lives rather than the delivery of more goods."
So how does the U.S. fare in HPI terms? Not so good. It sits pretty far down the list at 114. The U.K. is 74, behind Germany, Italy and France. Topping the chart is Costa Rica, which has long life expectancy, high life satisfaction, and a per capita ecological footprint one-fourth the size of the U.S.
...without any major wars or world-shaking political or geopolitical disruptions.
...that three major struggles — the banks vs. President Obama, China vs. Google & friends, and the world vs. Iran — can be defused with win-win compromises rather than win-lose confrontations.
Moreover, our financial crisis was the result of a broad national breakdown in ethics
The economics of recovery were always hard, but in 2010 politics and geopolitics could make them even harder. Pray that cooler heads prevail.
In the book, Carroll recounts the history of scientists thinking about the "arrow of time," the clock's curiously one-dimensional march ever onward (we have up and down, right and left, backwards and forwards, but time just zips along ever forward). In particular, he revisits some of the 19th century thinkers, such as statistical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, overshadowed today by 20th century icons like Einstein.
Boltzmann and colleagues put entropy, energy's tendency toward disorder, on a statistical basis, offering a physics interpretation of time. Time results from entropy sending events, everything from the egg scrambled for your breakfast to stars running out of steam over billions of years, heading relentlessly one-way, never to unscramble themselves or restart their fires again.
One of the mysteries of the universe is its beginning in a highly-ordered low-entropy state, a hot, dense ball of energy some 13.7 billion years ago called the Big Bang. (Which was low-entropy in the sense that its energy was so useful for making stars, galaxies, planets, people and everything else, energy once spent that it couldn't be re-ordered like that breakfast egg that could be scrambled, poached or served sunny side up, but never put back together again.) "Why highly-ordered but not perfectly ordered,"
German opinion, Good is perfect, close to perfect order means close to God
Trucks, like any industrial tools in shrink to fit times, a looking for optimum point. As working element in logistics they daily are in the cutting point of technological and negotiating scissors. Customers always want an minimum price. Expenses are strong correlated with the diesel price. In good old times, this means less computing and more common sense, the price of 1 loaded mile = price of 1 diesel gal. Well, for optimum I will take this as reference point. On the another hand, without profit truck is out from the road in no time. This is an criteria. Negotiating is not my strongest point, always I'm using negotiators in my job, my point of view is technological. Leave the diesel price, from my observations high diesel price means increase of profit, maintenance expenses are the core of the business profitability.
Two centuries ago Leibniz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.
Volvo trucks position on the interstate system. And any driver depend upon.
As long as truck is on warranty, services authorized to fix any breakdown may be are on the limit of factory profitability. Next, what next, disaster. Easy to feel European optimum: after warranty one or two years on the road and expenses exceed the cost of a new car. Or, to mention here the words of an Canadian colleague, after 3000 miles you have to spend one week for maintenance. At current legal speed and hours of duty: one week over the road, one on the shop. I've driving few Volvo's over the road in last time looking at excellent MPG stories from truck stops involving Volvo truck's. Classic American trucks have 6 to 6.3 mpg., Volvo 7+. Is huge and is real using "13 speed" gearbox. For full automatic 6.2 to 6.8 mpg. Any car performance in this area have huge maintenance costs. Otto invented diesel engine long time ago, it is a German invention that it suppose do not work. After is started, over 500 rpm may be it work, at 800 rpm is working, the best performances are at 1250 rpm. Where is the fuel economy ? In the driver hand, always. From the factory, they have to select between economy point and power point at the design start. For me it seems economy point, I do not have power at low rpm, is OK after 70 mph. A truck have after him another vehicle that have 53' , so if you have a slow vehicle in front of you, in California or Arizona, maintenance shop is waiting for you at next location. If, and only if, you a lucky enough to get there. There means "authorized shop". Those are rare. Detroit diesel always are asking for the proof of damaged part, protecting truckers, Volvo will found another damaged part(s) so, you will take the truck out from the shop without any warranty remembering that Gestapo logo: "in Wald da sind die Räuber" (in forest are there the robbers).
Personal experience: Diagnose in Elko, Nevada: Harness failure probably injectors. Volvo send three times wrong harness to the shop, using only one service for this wasting 10 of my days, after that truck was on tow for 400 miles to Salt lake City, Utah. Here the harness was OK, but two injectors damaged, $ 1000 each. And the truck have damaged another mechanical part and will brake the vent belt. All of us know this story as "Volvo by purpose failure". Any mechanic will fix that problem in two or three hrs. Not a dealer, they have to sell $ 4000 parts.
In the Continental USA, a single driver is working maximum 550 miles/day at 1 to 1.5 $/mile to the truck. Five days for the truck expenses and my by one day for his expenses. If you feel like a Pharaoh.
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. they perform reliably. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
I do not discuss here about jewelry, it is about safety over the road.
Almost 90% of all accidents are due to the human factor. When looking at single accidents, 10-20% is due to tired drivers. Halo... a driver is not operating an computer so move the safety point to the driver.
Trucks, like any industrial tools in shrink to fit times, a looking for optimum point. As working element in logistics they daily are in the cutting point of technological and negotiating scissors. Customers always want a minimum price. Expenses are strong correlated with the diesel price. In good old times, this mean less computing and more common sense, the price of 1 loaded mile = price of 1 diesel gal. Well, for optimum I will take this as reference point. On the another hand, without profit truck is out from the road in no time. This is an criteria. Negotiating is not my strongest point, always I'm using negotiators in my job, my point of view is technological. Leave the diesel price, from my observations high diesel price mean increase of profit, maintenance expenses are the core of the business profitability.
Two centuries ago Leibniz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.
Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, it could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.
Volvo trucks position on the interstate system. And any driver depend upon.
As long as truck is on warranty, services authorized to fix any breakdown may be on the limit of factory profitability. Next, what next, it is a disaster. Easy to feel European optimum: after warranty one or two years on the road and expenses exceed the cost of a new car. Or, to mention here the words of an Canadian colleague, after 3000 miles you have to spend one week for maintenance. At currently legal speed and hours of duty: one week over the road, one on the shop. I've been driving few Volvo's over the road in last time looking at excellent MPG stories from truck stops involving Volvo trucks. Classic American trucks have 6 to 6.3 mpg., Volvo 7+. Is huge and is real using "13 speed" gearbox. For full automatic 6.2 to 6.8 mpg. Any car performance in this area have huge maintenance costs. Otto invented diesel engine long time ago, it is a German invention that it suppose do not work. After is started, over 500 rpm may be it work, at 800 rpm is working, the best performances are at 1250 rpm. Where is the fuel economy ? In the driver hand, always. From the factory, they have to select between economy point and power point at the design start. For me, it seems economy point, I do not have power at low rpm, is OK after 70 mph. A truck have after him another vehicle that have 53' , so if you have a slow vehicle in front of you, in California or Arizona, maintenance shop is waiting for you at next location. If, and only if, you a lucky enough to get there. There means "authorized shop". Those are rare. Detroit diesel always are asking for the proof of damaged part, protecting truckers, Volvo will found another damaged part(s) so, you will take the truck out from the shop without any warranty remembering that Gestapo logo: "in Wald dasind die Räuber" (in the forest, there are robbers).
Personal experience: Diagnose in Elko, Nevada: Harness failure probably injectors. Volvo send three times wrong harness to the shop, using only one service for this wasting 10 of my days, after that truck was on tow for 400 miles to Salt lake City, Utah. Here the harness was OK, but two injectors damaged, $ 1000 each. And the truck have damaged another mechanical part and it had broken the vent belt. All of us know this story as "Volvo by purpose failure". Any mechanic will fix that problem in two or three hrs. Not a dealer, they have to sell $ 4000 parts.
In the Continental USA, a single driver is working maximum 550 miles/day at 1 to 1.5 $/mile to the truck. Five days for the truck expenses and my by one day for his expenses. If you feel like a Pharaoh.
Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy effort. They perform reliably. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
I do not discuss here about jewelry, it is about safety over the road.
Almost 90% of all accidents are due to the human factor. When looking at single accidents, 10-20% is due to tired drivers. Halo... a driver is not operating a computer, so move the safety point to the driver.
Some time ago I have introduced in this blog "Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy", a new approach, a new contribution. Marketing prof. late have the same question with strange answers :
a same question was posted some time ago...i gave this answer that was accepted by the one posed the question! hope that it will help u too!IMC presents the concept of integrated philosophy/way of thinking which governs all the business tactics of communication (advertising, sales promotion, public relations). In other words, all the approaches in order to communicate a message whether this is via advertising, or sales promotion or public relations, must rely on the same axis of communication. Starting from the needs of the customer, all the different actions of creating and implementing the communication strategy are harmonised under the same concept (with a unified voice, unified message), in this way the final consumer will have a unified perception for the product or service and will be motivated to take action (trial or re-buy of the product)in simple words, IMC means exploiting all the means to promote a product from formal advertising to arranging interviews and press conferences in order to activate positive publicity! IMC may even include handing out leaflets or exploiting word of mouth! SOFIA
For dummies, I suppose, strategy is tactics! Again two opposite words in the same definition. Luckily, the Google define function is working so, my opinions is, in the cases like this think "machines know better".
Twenty-five years ago the Internet as we now know it was in the process of being birthed by the National Science Foundation. Since then it's been an information explosion. From e-mail to eBay, communication and shopping have forever changed. By Barrett Lyon, Opte.org
1 World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee created user-friendly "Web pages" that could travel over the Internet, a network built to shuttle research between universities. The world logged on: 747 million adults in January. 2 E-mailTech’s answer to the Pony Express . Programs such as 1988’s Eudora made it easy to use. In-boxes have been filling up ever since. Nearly 97 billion e-mails are sent each day. 3 Graphical user interface (GUI) Most computer displays were blinking lines of text until Apple featured clickable icons and other graphic tools in its 1984 Mac. Microsoft's Windows took GUI ( pronounced 'gooey' ) to the masses. By Mark Lennihan, AP
4 AOL AOL turned people on to Web portals, chat rooms and instant messaging. Early subscribers paid by the hour. AOL once boasted 35 million subscribers. It bought Time Warner for $106 billion in 2001. 5 Broadband The answer to the drip-drip-drip of dial-up, high-speed Internet service fuels online entertainment. About 78% of home Internet users in the U.S. have broadband, up from less than 1% in 1998. 6 Google So popular it’s a verb. The search powerhouse, with a market capitalization of nearly $149 billion, perfected how we find info on the Web. Google sites had nearly 500 million visitors in December. 7 Mosaic/Netscape Created by Marc Andreessen and others, Mosaic was the first widely-used multimedia Web browser. Spin-off Netscape Navigator ruled the ‘90s until Microsoft’s Internet Explorer took off around ‘98. 8 eBay Thanks to eBay, we can all now buy and sell almost anything (skip the body parts). eBay has 230 million customers worldwide who engage in 100 million auctions at any given time. Screenshot
9 Amazon.comJeff Bezos’ baby began as an always-in-stock book seller. It survived the tech bubble and now is the definitive big box online store. It was the second most-visited online retailer in December, after eBay. 10 Wi-fi Have coffee shop, will compute: Wireless fidelity lets us lug our laptops out of the office and connect to the Net on the fly. More than 200 million Wi-Fi equipped products sold last year. 11 Instant Messaging LOL! Web surfers began to “laugh out loud” and BRB (“be right back”) in the mid-‘90s, with the launch of ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger. Millions use it to swap messages and photos, even telephone pals. By John Makely, AP
12 Yahoo! Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created this popular Web portal in 1994. It remains a favorite for email, photo sharing (it owns Flickr) and other services. Screenshot
13 Compuserve/Prodigy In the 1980s, they became the first mainstream companies to offer consumer Internet access. CompuServe was more for the geek set; Prodigy was more for the masses. 14 The Well The precursor for social networking, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, founded in 1985, was the original (now longest-running) virtual community. It gained popularity for its forums. 15 Vices Regulators scrapped plans for a .xxx domain, but vice remains one of the Net’s biggest businesses. Online gambling, illegal in the U.S., topped $12 billion last year; online porn was $2.84 billion. Searches for "Paris Hilton video" return about a million hits. By David Rae Morris, USA TODAY
16 Spam/Spyware Unsolicited e-mail, and software that watches your Web habits, mushroomed from annoyance to menace. Junk e-mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 messages sent over the Internet. 17 Flash Adobe’s Flash player is on 98% of all computers. Seen a video on YouTube or MySpace? Then you’ve probably used Flash. It animated the Web, spawning zillions of online cartoons and videos. 18 Online mapping tools MapQuest started saving marriages in 1996 by offering turn-by-turn directions. Followers such as Yahoo and Google beam directions to cellphones and offer satellite images of neighborhoods. 19 Napster Created in Shawn Fanning’s dorm room, Napster let more than 26 million people tap into a free database of music. Record companies shut it down. In its wake emerged legitimate download sites, such as Apple’s iTunes. Handout
20 YouTube The video-sharing site, bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, ignited a user-generated revolution online and introduced millions to the delights of Stephen Colbert, Chad Vader and Lonelygirl15. 21 The Drudge Report Matt Drudge’s news site helped break the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998, paving the way for politically-minded bloggers everywhere. He claims to have about 500 million visitors a month. 22 Bloggers The more than 75 million Web logs have changed how the world gets its news. Bloggers have challenged the traditional media, lobbied for and against wars, started debates, and posted far too many pictures of their pets. 23 Craigslist Craig Newmark’s gathering place for (mostly) free classified ads changed the way we find apartments, cars and dates. The site relies on users who supply friendly neighborhood information - about 14 million ads a month. 24 MySpace This online hangout has replaced the mall as a home away from home for teenagers. The site has more than 173 million personalized pages. News Corp paid $580 million for it in 2005. Handout
25 Gaming and virtual worlds More than 19 million globally pay to explore three-dimensional Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games such as World of Warcraft and virtual communities such as Second Life, which let players do business or just hang out. Both use the easy connections fostered by the Web to build communities. The Vocabulary of Professionals http://www.chemistry.org/portal/a/c/s/1/acsdisplay.html?DOC=careers%5Cfeatures%5Carticles_vocab.html
Today as I was riding into work on the train, I read a newspaper advertisement aimed at people trying to find a job. Some of the words were hard to make out, because the woman holding the paper kept shifting in her seat. She’s not really into sharing. But the headline that caught my eye was, "Learn the 40 Words that Professionals Use". Amazed that they only use forty, I wanted to know more. Generally, I don’t read from the woman in front of me, because frankly, her tastes don’t match my own. Lately, she has vacillated between exploitive entertainment-industry rags and paperbacks filled with romantic woes. I never found out how the previous one ended, but in the last passage I read Camilla and Thor were racing away from the castle of her torment on a thunderous steed with rain pounding down upon their ravaged bodies clad only in! Well, you get the picture. Words can say a lot about you: -the ones you use in conversation, -the ones you choose to read, -and the ones you write. Limiting your vocabulary to say, forty words, can stunt your development, socially and professionally. Restricting syntax to that of your profession provides transitional barriers as well. To be successful in an upwardly mobile lifestyle, you will need the use of words and phrases that relate your experiences, feelings and intentions to others. It should also be noted that those "others" who lead us and set policies may not be chemists. For many, our futures lie in the hands of MBA’s or, shall I say it, marketing specialists. These creatures of the outside world seldom care about thermodynamic equations, even though they may someday face entropic death. They speak of real cats, not those trapped in theoretical boxes, and the only retro-synthesis they have experienced is the post-modern fashion flashback to the 70’s. The most common relational denominators typically deal with societal trends and fads. Places to look for help include sports, movies, or if you’re really desperate, "American Idol." Even if you don’t watch the TV show, knowing that Sanjaya’s hairstyle weekly evolves into gravity defying configurations can give you an entrée into a conversation. Knowing the language of other professions is also helpful. In addition to speaking English, Spanglish and broken German, I have training in finance, project management and IT. Coming from a background in the "central science', learning how to speak like others seems old hat. Goodness knows I’ve already had to learn the lingo of biology, physics and medicine just to ensure that my research projects went smoothly. Ultimately, the best tool for the expansion of your vocabulary is reading, and although it may sound like a foreign phrase, "reading for pleasure' will yield the best results. Certainly, you should be reading technical articles and books for your professional development, but they are unlikely to incorporate the plethora of vernacular used in common language. In closing, I challenge you to flex your linguistic tongue, by learning the 40 words used by professionals. If the lady in front of me would move her thumb, I would read them to you. As it stands, I guess you’ll have to search them out yourselves.
This article was written by David Harwell, Ph.D., Assistant Director of the ACS Department of Career Management and Development. Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS. Published April 30, 2007
American playwright Ben Hecht once said, “He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass”. If only Ben knew about the nanoscale war within. I’m talking about one (actually two) of the most fascinating phenomenon ever discovered.
It all starts with the lancet fluke—which instead of calling it by its scientific name (dicrocoelium dedriticum), we’ll call it “Flukey the Parasite”. It lives inside a cows’ liver, mates with others and then sends its eggs out with the cow’s waste. Now here’s where evolution (or co-evolution) and biological networks get fascinating. First—gross as it is (especially for Frenchmen), snails come along and eat the cow waste (with Flukey’s eggs in it). The eggs hatch, infect the snail and drill into the snail’s digestive tract—like a Trojan horse. Next, the snail fights back. It internally douses the mini-Flukeys in slime, and excretes them, leaving them in its slimy trails.
Along comes an ant—to whom the slime is like a fresh swimming pool on a scorching summer day. It dives in, gets a mouthful of slime and a gut full of lancet flukes. The mini-Flukes then move around and—get this—eventually take over its nerve cells. These little buggers are actually controlling the ants’ behavior now. Night falls, the air is cooler and the ant climbs a blade of grass, digs its teeth in and hangs there all night. Hot temperatures toast the parasites, so they steer the ant to cooler areas. It keeps doing this every night, until eventually a cow comes and eats the grass it clings to. And tada! Flukey the Parasite has reproduced and ended up back inside a new host. Wash, rinse, repeat. Except for one thing: the cows don’t want the parasites—so they avoid patches of land with the greenest colored grass. Green grass signals it’s been fertilized by other cows. The risk isn’t eating another’s waste—the real risk is eating these kamikaze suicide bomber ants. The greener pastures grow while the other grass gets eaten up. The cow population grows, until it’s eventually forced to go to the greener grass. Boom: they get infected, eat less, reproduce less and die. Rinse wash, repeat. So these little buggers actually regulate the grasslands!
Remind you of anything in modern life? I’ll spell it out in a moment. But first there’s a Persian proverb that says, “when the cat and the mouse agree—the grocer is ruined.”
Turns out—an even more recent version of this parasite taking over the minds of a host has been found: in mice. The bug infects the mouse’s brain and instead of feeling fear when it encounters (or smells) a cat—it is attracted to it. It nearly runs right into its mouth. The parasite called “toxoplasma” needs to end up in the cat’s stomach to reproduce. It hijacks the mouse’s brain to do its bidding by making the mice less fearful.
Some scientists have suggested—to much controversy and political in-correctness—that certain religious ideas (“memes” instead of “genes”) might be viruses of the mind. Think: suicide bombers. The so-called “meme” gets passed on; the host gets sacrificed.
Speaking of unpopular and controversial ideas, I must share a few provocative excerpts from author Michael Crichton. He’s made a fortune selling alarmist fiction. Now he is out publicly fighting what he sees as alarmist non-fiction—advocating rationality and science.
The topic on which he speaks will see a big announcement next week—especially from the all-star team at Lux Research. Stay tuned. Here’s straight from Crichton:
“I want to pause here and talk about the notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agree on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
[JW: remember there was once a book published called, “100 Scientists Against Einstein”, refuting relativity. Einstein’s retort? “If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”]
“I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won’t get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and “skeptics” in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases. In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done. When did “skeptic” become a dirty word in science?”
“To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.
“Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?
Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horse [waste]? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?
But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS…None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about.”
Contrarian thinking that creates a richer discussion. Thanks to Michael Critchton for that.
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