30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus

 Intellectual Leaders Have Fewer Deaths in War

Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is over, the theory that we are better off with unintellectual leaders is just embarrassing, and the reasons for the embarrassment may be quantified. Measuring the psychological traits of public figures, to be sure, has a sketchy history, but the psychologist Dean Simonton has developed several historiometric measures that are reliable and valid (in the psychometrician’s technical sense) and politically nonpartisan.208 He analyzed a dataset of 42 pr...
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21 JUN 2014 by ideonexus

 There is a mass exodus into the virtual world

The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy. And so, there is a growing perception in the gaming community: Reality, compared to games, is broken. In fact, it is more than a perception. It’s a phenom...
Folksonomies: education gamification
Folksonomies: education gamification
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26 FEB 2014 by ideonexus

 MarsOne Response to Muslim Fatwa

And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the variations in your languages and your colors: verily in that are Signs for those who know. (Quran 30: 22) The Muslim world has a rich tradition of exploration. The verse from the Quran above encourages Muslims to go out and see the signs of God’s creation in the ‘heavens and the earth’. The most influential example of this was the Moroccan Muslim traveller, Ibn Battuta, who from 1325 to 1355 travelled 73,000 mile...
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...against voyaging to Mars because it constitutes "suicide."

10 OCT 2013 by mxplx

 Reflective equilibrium

No moral position is universal and that each society makes its own moral rules unfettered, so that even acts we would view as unequivocally immoral could be morally unobjectionable in some other culture. kayan people in vietnam put rings around their neck   general conformity to values, especially if it is cited in mainstream media as opposed to those who thought independently
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Reflective equilibrium is a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgments

23 APR 2011 by ideonexus

 LBJ Counting the Dead

Lyndon B. couldn't figure it out. Every day the advisers came to him with their facts and figures and laid them down on his desk. Army dead. Navy dead. Marine dead. Civilian dead. Diplomatic dead. MASH dead. Delta dead. Seabee dead. National Guard dead. But the numbers didn't compute. Someone was messing up somewhere. All the reporters and TV channels were breathing down LBJ's neck and he needed the proper information. He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn't count the body bags. ...
Folksonomies: casualties vietnam lbj
Folksonomies: casualties vietnam lbj
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The problem of counting the dead from Vietnam and needing computer scientists for the job.