Tag Archives: Historical

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

by Myrna Posted on January 28, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $11.99

Publish Date: June 6, 2011

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

Originally from:  

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, W. W. Norton & Company | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

California Got Soaked—But Don’t Start Your Endless Showers Just Yet

by MaricruzLeatherm Posted on January 15, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s been pouring in rain-starved California for the past few weeks, so is the Golden State’s drought finally over?

The downer answer: Asking if California’s water woes are behind us because it rained is a bit like asking if climate change is over because it’s cold outside—short-term gains don’t mean the long-term problem has gone away.

The slightly more optimistic answer: While we’re not in the clear, the rain has made a huge dent in the short-term.

After years in the red, California’s reservoirs now have 14 percent more water than their historical averages. That’s key, as they transport water from the Sierra Nevada to California farms and cities, from San Francisco to San Diego. Snowpack in the Sierras is also above average, which—in addition to making the mountains into a veritable winter wonderland—will help feed reservoirs and recharge groundwater supply as it melts throughout the year.

As this Los Angeles Times graphic shows, nearly half of the state is no longer in a state of drought, as defined by the US Drought Monitor.

But that’s not to say that the drought is over—or will be any time soon. Groundwater, the supply of water in underground aquifers that serves as a savings account of sorts during dry years, is still low and getting lower due to overpumping, says Peter Gleick, water researcher and president of the Pacific Institute. Because the rain has been concentrated in the northern half of the state, much of the Central Valley, the farmland that dominates the geographical center of California, is still in the midst of extreme drought. About 1500 wells are still dry in the Valley’s Tulare County, home to produce pickers and packers. And because of the warm weather, snow is melting more quickly than usual, leading it to run off into storm drains rather than seep, slowly and steadily, into the groundwater tables.

Perhaps most concerning, though, is that water system improvements that were gaining momentum during the drought will slow down, Gleick says.

During the drought of the past five years, state lawmakers began to put groundwater management policy in place. Cities encouraged homeowners to get rid of their lawns, which often use more water than the homes themselves. Residents started replacing inefficient toilets and shower fixtures. Farmers implemented more efficient irrigation systems. The state’s Water Resources Control Board recently released report on the feasibility of recycling water, which many environmental groups champion as a more efficient use of taxpayer dollars and energy sources than building desalinization plants, which distil seawater to produce more freshwater.

“Those were all steps in the right direction, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done. There just isn’t enough water for everyone anymore, even in a wet year,” says Gleick. “A couple wet years and the pressure disappears for a while.”

Continue reading – 

California Got Soaked—But Don’t Start Your Endless Showers Just Yet

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California Got Soaked—But Don’t Start Your Endless Showers Just Yet

The North Pole Is In Big Trouble. So Is the South Pole.

by HNKStephaine Posted on December 7, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For years, climate deniers have been producing charts that use the El Niño year of 1998 as a starting point. Why? Because it was an unusually hot year, and if you start there it looks like global warming has “paused” for a good long time. Here’s a colorful example of the genre from the Daily Mail a few years ago:

These charts are no longer useful to the deniers thanks to the very high temperatures of the past couple of years, so they’ve gone away. But what will take their place? I was amused to discover the answer a few days ago: 2016 doesn’t mean anything because it was an El Niño year.

Hah! Nobody ever said they didn’t have chutzpah. But it got me curious: what does a global temperature chart look like if you pull out just the El Niño and La Niña years? That seemed like a lot of work to get right, so I put it aside. Today, however, I found out that someone else had already done it for me. Here it is:

This comes from a Weather Channel piece titled “Note to Breitbart: Earth Is Not Cooling, Climate Change Is Real and Please Stop Using Our Video to Mislead Americans.” The chart itself apparently comes from skepticalscience.com, but I can’t figure out exactly where to link to it. UPDATE: Here it is. It’s an animated GIF! However, it shows the historical data clearly: El Niño years (in red) are always hot, but have been getting steadily hotter. La Niña years (in blue) are always cool, but have also been getting steadily hotter. And the years in-between (in black) have been getting steadily hotter too. Long story short, every kind of year has been getting steadily hotter for a long time.

And this year is a real champ. Here’s the latest from the National Snow and Ice Data Center:

Both poles are showing massive ice loss compared to trend. We’ve never seen anything like it. You can draw all the misleading charts you want, but it doesn’t change the facts. Climate change is real, and it’s getting worse.

View post: 

The North Pole Is In Big Trouble. So Is the South Pole.

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The North Pole Is In Big Trouble. So Is the South Pole.

Ted Cruz Says Building Trump’s Wall Is Like Fighting Slavery and Jim Crow

by LeslieHides Posted on July 21, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In a primetime address to the Republican National Convention Wednesday, Ted Cruz compared GOP efforts to restrict immigration to the civil rights movement’s fight against Jim Crow laws. But the Texas senator was loudly booed by Donald Trump supporters in the convention hall when it became clear that he was not going to endorse the man who beat him for the Republican presidential nomination. Instead, Cruz encouraged his audience to “vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

“We deserve leaders who stand for principle, unite us all behind shared values, cast aside anger for love,” Cruz said, in what many considered the first campaign speech of his likely 2020 presidential campaign. “That is the standard we should expect, from everybody.”

Rather than directly back Trump—who mocked his wife Heidi’s looks during the primary campaign and once suggested Cruz’s dad was complicit in the Kennedy assassination—Cruz used his prime-time slot to outline his vision of freedom.

“Freedom means free speech, not politically correct safe spaces,” he said, taking a shot at progressive college campus activists. He rattled off a series of other bullet points—religious freedom, the right to bear arms, school vouchers, and repealing Obamacare. Each of those freedoms are typical conservative talking points that the party’s nominee rarely mentions. Although Cruz’s speech focused less on social conservative issues than it might have in years past, he included a call for Washington to stay out of defining issues like marriage.

But Cruz made sure to endorse parts of Trump’s platform as well. He cited the success of the United Kingdom’s recent Brexit vote as indicative of a growing populist wave. “We deserve an immigration system that puts America first and, yes, builds a wall to keep us safe, that stops admitting ISIS terrorists as refugees,” Cruz said. “We deserve trade policies that put the interests of American farmers and manufacturing jobs over the global interests funding the lobbyists.” Cruz had never previously campaigned as an economic protectionist.

Even as he adopted aspects of the current nominee’s most controversial proposals, Cruz was careful to couch his political fight in the context of historical struggles. “Together we passed the Civil Rights Act, and together we fought to eliminate Jim Crow laws,” he said. “Those were fights for freedom, and so is this.”

Source:

Ted Cruz Says Building Trump’s Wall Is Like Fighting Slavery and Jim Crow

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ted Cruz Says Building Trump’s Wall Is Like Fighting Slavery and Jim Crow

California’s Water Cuts Are Ending, But Don’t Hose Down Your Sidewalk Just Yet

by WillianLfr Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In a major policy shift fueled by a wet winter, California officials announced Wednesday they will lift mandatory urban water restrictions starting in June.

The water cuts, which began last summer, required the state’s water districts to slash use by 25 percent, leading many Californians to replace lawns with drought-tolerant vegetation, take shorter showers, and change other water-related habits. The change doesn’t mean Californians are in the clear, however. Under the new policy, water districts can set their own conservation standards and are required to report monthly water use data to the state. And some water-saving restrictions will stick around: Residents can’t hose down driveways with drinkable water, and homeowners can’t punish those with brown lawns during a drought.

State officials said they may reinstitute the restrictions depending on weather and water use in the coming months. “We don’t know if we have a megadrought punctuated by an OK year,” State Water Resources Control Board chair Felicia Marcus told the Wall Street Journal. “This compromise allows us to keep our eyes wide open.”

The change is partly in response to the drought’s geographic variation. The snowpack in Northern California neared historic highs earlier this year, filing the state’s two largest reservoirs nearly to capacity. But with an unseasonably warm spring, the snow quickly melted to 33 percent of historic levels, according to the New York Times. Southern California is feeling the drought’s immediate effects more accutely: Many reservoirs in the south are at levels far below the historical average. According to the US Drought Monitor, large swaths of Central and Southern California remain in “exceptional drought”—the most extreme category.

A number of environmental organizations cautioned against Wednesday’s shift. With the dwindling snowpack, low reservoir levels in the south, and overpumping of groundwater, the policy “sends the wrong message,” says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. Rather than temporary water cuts, Gleick calls for permanent, long-term water use targets. “By making it possible for urban agencies to set their own conservation targets,” he says, “I’m afraid we’re going to see some water agencies doing a good job and others going to back to old wasteful practices.”

Original link: 

California’s Water Cuts Are Ending, But Don’t Hose Down Your Sidewalk Just Yet

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California’s Water Cuts Are Ending, But Don’t Hose Down Your Sidewalk Just Yet

Can Donald Trump Get Away With Proposing to Destroy the US Government?

by FallonPratten Posted on May 15, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Today the Wall Street Journal asks a vital question:

Donald Trump’s Plans Don’t Add Up. Do Voters Care?

Oh please. Bernie Sanders’ plans don’t add up and his followers couldn’t care less. Paul Ryan’s plans don’t add up. Republicans don’t care. Mitt Romney’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. John McCain’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. George Bush’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. Ronald Reagan’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared.

Now, I admit that Trump is performing a destruction test on this theory. His tax plan blows a $9.5 trillion hole in the deficit and he plans to increase spending on infrastructure and national defense and he promises not to touch Medicare or Social Security. He claims he’ll make up for this by cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and I suppose one could view this as the ultimate test of just how much waste, fraud, and abuse the public thinks the American government is responsible for. Unfortunately, the historical evidence probably doesn’t favor a rational answer.

So what does Trump’s budget look like? Someone must care, after all. At no small effort, I have created the colorful chart below. I used the CBO’s projections as my baseline. Trump says he wants to balance the budget, so that puts a firm cap on overall spending. He says he wants to spend more on defense, so I added a modest $20 billion per year to the baseline projection. He says he won’t touch Social Security or Medicare, so I left those at their baseline projections. The revenue number comes from TPC’s analysis of Trump’s tax plan. Ditto for the interest number. Trump says he wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, so I bumped up the current infrastructure budget by $100 billion and carried it through each year.

As you can see, by the end of eight years, not only are we spending zero dollars on nearly every government program, but infrastructure spending is also wiped out and we can make only a fraction of our interest payments:

So yeah, you could say this doesn’t add up. Or you could say it’s more of Trump’s usual buffoonery. Or that Donald Trump couldn’t care less about the federal budget. So why doesn’t this get more attention? Let’s take a series of guesses:

Most people find numbers confusing and boring. One trillion, ten trillion, whatever.
The press shies away from focusing on stuff like this because their readers find it confusing and boring and don’t read it.
Also because they routinely give Republicans a pass on this stuff. They figure it’s mostly just routine pandering, and all politicians do it.
In any case, the public takes tax and budget plans mostly as statements of values, not as things that will ever actually happen.

So there you have it. Trump is testing whether he can get away with literally proposing a tax and budget plan that would bankrupt the country and destroy nearly the entire federal government within just a few years. What do you think?

Read the article:  

Can Donald Trump Get Away With Proposing to Destroy the US Government?

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can Donald Trump Get Away With Proposing to Destroy the US Government?

Does Obama Still Have That Old-Time Magic?

by VenettaLiw Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In a few minutes President Obama will be back in Springfield making a speech addressed to his supporters. “You’ve taken on the painstaking work of progress,” he says. “You’ve helped us find that middle ground where real change is won….I hope you’ll tune in today at 2:30 p.m. Eastern.” Andrew Sprung figures this is basically going to be an endorsement of Hillary Clinton:

Obama just sent an email to supporters announcing a speech to be delivered this afternoon. I imagine it will be a message “for” Clinton — both to support her and to model a coherent pitch for incremental change.

….Then there’s “the painstaking work of progress” and the ‘middle ground where real change is won.” Those are memes pointed at this moment, in which the frontrunners in both parties are calling for radical, fundamental change…. Incrementalism is a tough sell, but Obama has made it throughout his career, and he does so more effectively than Clinton. He’s more successful because he’s better at articulating the long-term goal and how the incremental steps move toward them, as well as the historical framework in which those steps fit.

But will it work? Personally, I’ve always viewed Obama as a cautious, pragmatic, mainstream liberal. But his strongest supporters never saw him that way. They really believed he was going to revolutionize Washington DC and end all the bickering. He’d pass universal health care, rein in Wall Street once and for all, and stop climate change in its tracks.

But he didn’t. And the conventional wisdom says that his supporters from 2007—when he first went to Springfield to announce his candidacy—are disappointed in him. He turned out to be just another go-along-get-along guy, and now he wants to foist a go-along-get-along gal on us. Sorry. No sale. We’re feeling the Bern these days.

We’ll see. But I will say this: If Obama really wants to help Hillary Clinton, he can’t afford too much subtlety. Any criticism of radical change will be read by liberals as primarily an attack on Donald Trump unless he makes it crystal clear what he’s talking about. Tune in at 2:30 and find out!

View this article:

Does Obama Still Have That Old-Time Magic?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does Obama Still Have That Old-Time Magic?

The Kids Today…Seem Pretty Smart, Actually

by TheodorWashingt Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’m not as cynical about the purpose of universal education as the late Aaron Swartz, but I love this historical retrospective from a piece of his reprinted today in the New Republic:

In 1845, only 45 percent of Boston’s brightest students knew that water expands when it freezes….In 1898, a…Harvard report found only 4 percent of applicants “could write an essay, spell, or properly punctuate a sentence.” But that didn’t stop editorialists from complaining about how things were better in the old days. Back when they went to school, complained the editors of the New York Sun in 1902, children “had to do a little work. … Spelling, writing and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn.”

In 1913…more than half of new recruits to the Army during World War I “were not able to write a simple letter or read a newspaper with ease.” In 1927, the National Association of Manufacturers complained that 40 percent of high school graduates could not perform simple arithmetic or accurately express themselves in English.

….A 1943 test by the New York Times found that only 29 percent of college freshmen knew that St. Louis was on the Mississippi….A 1951 test in LA found that more than half of eighth graders couldn’t calculate 8 percent sales tax on an $8 purchase….In 1958, U.S. News and World Report lamented that “fifty years ago a high-school diploma meant something…. We have simply misled our students and misled the nation by handing out high-school diplomas to those who we well know had none of the intellectual qualifications that a high-school diploma is supposed to represent—and does represent in other countries. It is this dilution of standards which has put us in our present serious plight.”

A 1962 Gallup poll found “just 21 percent looked at books even casually.” In 1974, Reader’s Digest asked, “Are we becoming a nation of illiterates? There is an evident sag in both writing and reading…at a time when the complexity of our institutions calls for ever-higher literacy just to function effectively.”

Education was always better in the old days. Except that it wasn’t. As near as I can tell, virtually all the evidence—both anecdotal and systematic—suggests that every generation of children has left high school knowing as much or more than the previous generation. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But if I am, I sure haven’t seen anyone deliver the proof.

Continue at source: 

The Kids Today…Seem Pretty Smart, Actually

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Kids Today…Seem Pretty Smart, Actually

Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

by KarolynKZFX Posted on November 23, 2015

Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

By on 23 Nov 2015commentsShare

Bioart is weird, pure and simple. It’s DNA engineered to encode messages like “I am the Riddle of Life. Know me and you will know yourself,” paintings made of bacteria, rabbits genetically modified to glow (then don’t actually glow because fluorescent proteins don’t work in fur), living tissue grown to resemble Guatemalan worry dolls or mini leather jackets, and a “biocompatible” ear replica implanted in a human arm.

In short, bioart is what you’ll find at the bottom of the lab-grown, biofluorescent rabbit hole that emerges when scientists and artists get together and turn the building blocks of life into a new kind of creative medium. And according to a group of researchers at MIT and Harvard, it’s also a funky new way to engage the public in the controversial and often frightening world of biotech. Here’s how they put it in the latest issue of the journal Trends in Biotechnology:

Regardless of their potential for health benefits and quality of life, genetic technologies have consequences that are not absolutely foreseeable and this has led to public uncertainty about implications for personal privacy and human rights, eugenics, food and drug safety, replacement of natural systems with bioengineered counterparts, involvement of multinational corporations with genetic propriety, worldwide agricultural monopolies, and prospects for the weaponization of biotechnological accessories for the military and law enforcement. Bioartists find these issues to be compelling subjects for their art.

“Historical and Contemporary Bioart. (A) Germ paintings on paper by Alexander Fleming. Bar, 1 cm. Courtesy of Kevin Brown of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum. (B) Cleared and stained Pacific tree frog gathered from Aptos, CA, USA by Brandon Ballengée (2012) in scientific collaboration with Stanley K. Sessions. DFA 186: Hades, unique digital c-print on watercolor paper. Bar, 9 cm. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York and reproduced with permission. (C) Conceptual drawing of Microvenus. Courtesy of Joe Davis, 1988. (D) Victimless Leather project showing a miniaturized leather jacket using skin cells by SymbioticA. Bar, 2 cm. Courtesy of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr and reproduced with permission. (E) Ear on Arm project. Bar, 3 cm. Courtesy of Nina Sellars and reproduced with permission.”

Yetisen, et al. Trends in Biotechnology

George Church, a Harvard geneticist and synthetic biologist famous for trying to bring back the woolly mammoth by splicing mammoth DNA into an elephant, was one of the co-authors on the paper. His lab at Harvard is currently hosting the artist Joe Davis, another co-author, who in the ’80s worked with a geneticist to encode a message into the DNA of E. coli. The project, called Microvenus, was meant to explore the possibility of one day sending such messenger organisms into space as a way to communicate with extraterrestrials. In a press release about the new paper, Davis and Church spoke with Cell Press about their collaboration:

“It’s Oz, pure and simple,” Davis says. “The total amount of resources in this environment and the minds that are accessible, it’s like I come to the city of Oz every day.”

But it’s not a one-way street. “My particular lab depends on thinking outside the box and not dismissing things because they sound like science fiction,” says Church, who is also part of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. “Joe is terrific at keeping us flexible and nimble in that regard.”

For example, Davis is working with several members of the Church lab to perform metagenomics analyses of the dust that accumulates at the bottom of money-counting machines. Another project involves genetically engineering silk worms to spin metallic gold — an homage to the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin.

Bioart isn’t entirely new. It goes all the way back to the 1920s, when one Alexander Fleming was making stick figure paintings with bacteria and discovered that a fungus called penicillin was killing some of his work. It also hasn’t always been successful. There was one time, for example, in 1970, when German artist Hans Haacke tried to draw attention to the destructiveness of the pet trade by buying and releasing ten endangered Hermann’s tortoises in a part of France where the tortoises roam free. Turned out, a few of Haacke’s purchases belonged to the wrong subspecies of tortoise and ended up messing with the local gene pool, ultimately compromising the distinct genetic lineages of both subspecies.

And then there was the controversial environmental art of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s — hillsides paved with asphalt, islands covered in plastic, craters carved with tunnels and chambers. Davis, Church, and their co-authors note that environmental art eventually became more about restoring nature, and together with advances in biological sciences, paved the way for today’s bioart.

With the rise of Romanticism several centuries ago, artists seemed to shed longstanding commitments to scientific and technical literacy while, at the same time, science started its long march toward secularization [68]. In this century, art and science are in the process of disengaging from this legacy of separation. The interdisciplinary landscape of life sciences has come to include chemists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. Partnerships with bioartists can contribute cultural and aesthetic contexts essential to translating basic research into useful applications. While the role of bioart in both the criticism and application of science will undoubtedly continue, perhaps a more profoundly important and yet less recognized contribution may be the ability of bioart to help science understand itself.

That’s deep, man. Call it Oz, call it Wonderland, call it whatever you want — all I know is, this is one glowing white rabbit that I intend to follow.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Advertisement

Original post:

Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

Posted in Anchor, Eureka, FF, GE, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Smith's, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

Jeffrey Lacker Says Real Wages are Going Up. Is He Right?

by Daniela75Q Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Binyamin Applebaum asks inflation hawk Jeffrey Lacker why inflation hasn’t risen if labor markets are tight, as he believes:

….There’s this confusion about real and nominal that I think infects the discussion, particularly of wages and slack. Real wages have accelerated over the last year because inflation has fallen and the rate of gain in nominal wages hasn’t changed much. The wage pressures we’ve been hearing about, they show up in the macro data as real wage pressures.

And the historical evidence suggests that there’s some lag before things accelerate as you reduce slack significantly. In 1966-67, we had unemployment at 5 percent, we pushed it to 4, and it was 1967 and 1968 when inflation took off. So there was a significant lag in the way that relationship seems to have worked in the past.

That got me curious: have real wages risen over the past couple of years? My preferred measure is production and nonsupervisory wages, and it looks like Lacker is right. Compared to CPI, the general trend is upward. It doesn’t look to me like it’s accelerating, but it does seem to be going up.

Continued – 

Jeffrey Lacker Says Real Wages are Going Up. Is He Right?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jeffrey Lacker Says Real Wages are Going Up. Is He Right?