10 FEB 2018 by ideonexus

 Computer Models as Play

There is, indeed, an "art" to worldplay in the social sciences that fuses narrative with analytical technique. There is also a kinship with the arts in the relationship between imagined world and reality, a point brought home by political scientist and ellow Robert Axelrod. In the early 1960s the teenage Axelrod won the Westinghouse kience Talent Search for a very simple computer simulation of hypothetical lifeforms behaving in an artificial environment. Ever since, he has worked on the appli...
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24 DEC 2016 by ideonexus

 Vernadsky vs Chardin on the Biosphere-Noosphere

Although the ages of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and Vernadsky (1863-1945) differed, they were at the comparable level of scientific maturity concerning the growth of their biosphere — noosphere theories. Vernadsky first presented his views on the biosphere systematically when he published The Biosphere 2in 1926, although he began using the term biosphere much earlier (1911). In his Essays on Geochemistry ³, lectures written in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1921, Vernadsky used both ...
Folksonomies: noosphere biosphere
Folksonomies: noosphere biosphere
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08 MAY 2015 by ideonexus

 China to Rate Online Behaviour in Social Credit System

Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibi...
Folksonomies: socialism social ratings
Folksonomies: socialism social ratings
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01 SEP 2014 by ideonexus

 Consider Eliminating the Humanities

To stop teaching literature and the other arts on the grounds that they're bad for us would be like refusing to study diseases because they're bad for us. However, maybe there should be a moratorium on requiring those who don't really want to, to take courses in the "humanities." We first have to figure out where we are. Then if we decide that every college student should be exposed to the "humanities," let us also insist that every one of them be exposed to the sciences, social sciences, and...
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Why must all college students study the humanities, but are given a free pass for the sciences?

21 JUN 2014 by ideonexus

 Objective and Subjective Science

There are no better terms available to describe this difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former 'objective' and the latter 'subjective'.
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05 AUG 2013 by ideonexus

 Sociological Metaphors for the Public

Social science and philosophy have generated a vast number of other metaphorical descriptions of the public, rooted in different and often scientific perspectives on systematicity and relation. These are technologies in the broad sense that they enable different kinds of questions to be asked. An account of these would include the public as: A Physical System or Mass: This metaphor underwrites work in mass commu- nications and allows one to ask questions like “What is the impact of a given...
Folksonomies: metaphors modeling
Folksonomies: metaphors modeling
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Metaphors are an important means of understanding abstract concepts.

18 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Human are Predictable

Human behaviour reveals uniformities which constitute natural laws. If these uniformities did not exist, then there would be neither social science nor political economy, and even the study of history would largely be useless. In effect, if the future actions of men having nothing in common with their past actions, our knowledge of them, although possibly satisfying our curiosity by way of an interesting story, would be entirely useless to us as a guide in life.
Folksonomies: social sciences
Folksonomies: social sciences
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To a point. If they were not, then economics and social sciences would not exist.

01 FEB 2012 by ideonexus

 The Origin and Evolution of Scientific Terms

It is interesting to note how many fundamental terms which the social sciences are trying to adopt from physics have as a matter of historical fact originated in the social field. Take, for instance, the notion of cause. The Greek aitia or the Latin causa was originally a purely legal term. It was taken over into physics, developed there, and in the 18th century brought back as a foreign-born kind for the adoration of the social sciences. The same is true of the concept of law of nature. Orig...
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How terms migrate from science to science, changing their meaning as they go.

30 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Philosophy Without Empiricism is Nonsense

Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with it. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true,...
Folksonomies: empiricism
Folksonomies: empiricism
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Empirical science is the only thing capable of determining if a sentence is true.

19 APR 2011 by ideonexus

 Scientists Create and Thrive in a Stable Civilization

I take a different view of science as a method; to me, it enters the human spirit more directly. Therefore I have studied quite another achievement: that of making a human society work. As a set of discoveries and devices, science has mastered nature; but it has been able to do so only because its values, which derive from its method, have formed those who practice it into a living, stable and incorruptible society. Here is a community where everyone has been free to enter, to speak his mind,...
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There's a question of cause and effect in considering Bronowski's observation.