10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Argonauts: Charter on Scientific Responsibility
CHARTER ON SCIENTIFIC RESPONSIBILITY
Abuse of science and technology is a major threat to the existence of humankind. Our era has seen destructive climate change, tactical use of nuclear weapons, famine, public health crises, and now, the militarization of space. Our corporate stakeholders and the governments representing them have made inhuman, unwise decisions, and show little sign of changing their behavior.
Scientists, technologists, and mathematicians can be an effective voice for resp...
1 30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Violence and the Concept of Social Justice
The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.” This has nothing to do with Women Who Love Too Much or Chicken Soup for the Soul; it is another name for vigilantism, frontier justice, taking the law into your own hands, and other forms of violent retaliation by which people secured justice in the absence of ...Folksonomies: violence social status
Folksonomies: violence social status
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notes
notes24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Partially Diminished Fraction of Ecosystems
Do you know the PDF of your shampoo? A PDF refers to a “partially diminished fraction” of an ecosystem, and if your shampoo contains palm oil cultivated on clear-cut jungle in Borneo, say, that value will be high. How about your shampoo’s DALY? This measure comes from public health: “disability-adjusted life years,” or the amount of one’s life that will be lost to a disabling disease because of, say, a lifetime’s cumulative exposure to a given industrial chemical. So if your fav...Folksonomies: environmentalism entropy
Folksonomies: environmentalism entropy
1 notes
notesDaniel Goleman explains a concept for thinking about how our lives contribute to the increase of entropy in our biosphere.
30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
The Epoch of Potential Memory
One can see Manovich’s argument becoming true in the development
of database technology the 20th century. The first commercially available
computer databases were organized hierarchically. If you wanted to get to
a particular piece of information, you went to the overarching category and
made a series of choices as this category broke down into groups then subgroups
until you got to the specific piece of information that you required.
This mode of traveling through a database was called “...Folksonomies: information technology history
Folksonomies: information technology history
1 notes
notesWe live in a world where we can pull any aggregation of facts out of historical references to produce the aspects of history we wish to explore. It is dynamic and full of potential.
25 DEC 2012 by ideonexus
Should Smallpox be Made Extinct?
A few decades from now, we may make a brutal,calculated decision to totally eradicate a particular form of life. We already are 99 percent of the way along that path.
Even conservationists, who publicly deplore the extinction of innumerable species of animals and plants through neglect, ignorance, or financial greed, have applauded this conscious, murderous act to be carried out by a UN agency.
I speak of smallpox virus. Since 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been systematica... 1 notes
notes1978 article on the state of the smallpox virus, driven to extinction by the United Nations, asks whether it should be preserved in deep freeze for science?
09 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Wonders of Science
The steam-engine in its manifold applications, the crime-decreasing gas-lamp, the lightning conductor, the electric telegraph, the law of storms and rules for the mariner's guidance in them, the power of rendering surgical operations painless, the measures for preserving public health, and for preventing or mitigating epidemics,—such are among the more important practical results of pure scientific research, with which mankind have been blessed and States enriched. A survey of them and how the improve the quality of life in the 1850s.
14 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
A Early Definition of Human Social Progress
Disease is largely a removable evil. It continues to afflict humanity, not only because of incomplete knowledge of its causes and lack of individual and public hygiene, but also because it is extensively fostered by harsh economic and industrial conditions and by wretched housing in congested communities. ... The reduction of the death rate is the principal statistical expression and index of human social progress. It means the saving and lengthening of lives of thousands of citizens, the ext...That emphasizes a reduction in the death rate and argues that this is something we can do through education and improving the quality of life.
19 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Fetal Alcohol Syndrom
It is from a public health standpoint, rather than from knowledge of indipercent of pregnant wompr. i^ percent of pregnant women in the United States reported drinking alcohol in the month preceding the survey, and 3 percent admitted to at least one binge. (Alcohol consumption is notoriously underreported in this kind of survey.) Prenatal alcohol use is thought to be responsible for at least 4,000 cases of mental retardation in the United States each year and perhaps ten times that number of ... 1 notes
notesThe effects of alcohol abuse on the developing child has lifelong impact on them as they grow older.
04 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Science Saves Lives
Even at its best, pre-modern medical practice did not save many. Queen Anne was the last Stuart monarch of Great Britain. In the last seventeen years of the seventeenth century, she was pregnant eighteen times. Only five children were born alive. Only one of them survived infancy. He died before reaching adulthood, and before her coronation in 1702. There seems to be no evidence of some genetic disorder. She had the best medical care money could buy.
Diseases that once tragically carried off...You can pray over a sick person, or give them medicine. All the ways medical science has reduced mortality.
