Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Erasmus Prize 2012 Awarded to Daniel C. Dennett.
The Erasmus Prize is an annual award for a person who has made an exceptional contribution to culture, society or social science.
via sacbee.com
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Great new podcast from the guys behind the old ColdFusion Weekly
Welcome to the premiere episode of Deductive Developers, a new podcast by Peter J. Farrell and Matt Woodward, formerly of ColdFusion Weekly fame.
In this episode we talk a bit about why we're starting a new podcast and what we're going to cover, and we talk a bit about OpenCF Summit which is coming up on February 24 - 26 in Dallas, TX.
Some differences between this and CF Weekly:
- We aren't committing to doing this weekly necessarily
- Shorter episodes (15 - 30 minutes)
- Not focused exclusively on CFML-related topics
- More conversational, less strict format
Obligatory first episode quality excuses -- my aging Logitech headset was making a small banging noise as the cord moved but hopefully it's not too distracting. I'll use a different setup for the next episode.
Feedback is very welcomed! You can reach us in the following ways:
- email deductivedevelopers@maepub.com
- @deductivedevs on Twitter and identi.ca
- Deductive Developers page on Google+
We'll get the podcast added to the iTunes directory soon but in the mean time you can use the FeedBurner RSS URL to subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/deductivedevelopers/kHbZ
Let us know what you think!
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Search, Plus Your World, As Long As It’s Our World | John Battelle's Search Blog
The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social is corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture.
Is climate change education the new evolution?
NCSE expects this task to be much harder than fighting creationism. "The forces arrayed against climate science are more numerous and much better funded," Scott says, and are better able to get their message across in the mainstream media than creationism supporters. Organizations such as the Heartland Institute, which questions whether humans cause climate change, send out free educational materials to teachers and school boards. As Science reported in September, teachers who already struggle with small science budgets and little time for teaching have no time to fend off ideological attacks from students, parents, and administrators.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
No! Bush tax cuts helped the rich get richer - The Washington Post
The 1986 tax reform eliminated the gap between the ordinary and capital gains rates. The gap began to widen again during President Bill Clinton’s second term, but the Bush tax cuts of 2003 blew it wide open by slicing the top rate on dividends and long-term capital gains from 28 percent to 15 percent.
I may move just so my kids can go to NYC's new Software Engineering High School
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.
Dennett's favorite deep, elegant and beautiful explanation | Edge
Why Some Sea Turtles Migrate
My choice is an explanation that delights me. It may be true and may be false—I don't know, but probably somebody who reads Edge will be able to say, authoritatively, with suitable references. I am eager to find out. I was told some years ago that the reason why some species of sea turtles migrate all the way across the South Atlantic to lay their eggs on the east coast of South America after mating on the west coast of Africa is that when the behavior started, Gondwanaland was just beginning to break apart (that would be between 130 and 110 million years ago), and these turtles were just swimming across the narrow strait to lay their eggs. Each year the swim was a little longer—maybe an inch or so—but who could notice that? Eventually they were crossing the ocean to lay their eggs, having no idea, of course, why they would do such an extravagant thing.
What is delicious about this example is that it vividly illustrates several important evolutionary themes: the staggering power over millions of years of change so gradual it is essentially unnoticeable, the cluelessness of much animal behavior, even when it is adaptive, and of course the eye-opening perspective that evolution by natural selection can offer to the imagination of the curious naturalist. It also demonstrates either the way evolutionary hypotheses can be roundly refuted by discoverable facts (if it is refuted) or the way those hypotheses can be supported by further evidence (if in fact it is so supported).
An attractive hypothesis, such as this, is the beginning, not the end, of the inquiry. Critics often deride evolutionary hypotheses about prehistoric events as "just-so stories," but as a blanket condemnation this charge should be rejected out of hand. Thousands of such hypotheses—first dreamt up on slender evidence—have been tested and confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt. Thousands of others have been tested and disconfirmed. They were just-so stories until they weren't, in other words. That's the way science advances.
I have noticed that there is a pattern in the use of the "just-so story" charge: with almost no exceptions it is applied to hypotheses about human evolution. Nobody seems to object that we can't know enough about the selective environment leading to whales or flowers for us to hold forth so confidently about how and why whales and flowers evolved as they did. So my rule of thumb is: if you see the "just-so story" epithet hurled, look for a political motive. You'll almost always find one. While it is no doubt true that some evolutionary psychologists have advanced hypotheses about human evolution for which there is still only slender supporting evidence, and while it is also no doubt true that some evolutionary psychologists have been less than diligent in seeking further evidence to confirm or disconfirm their favorite hypotheses, this is at most a criticism of the thoroughness of some researchers in the field, not a condemnation of their method or their hypotheses. The same could be said about many other topics in evolutionary biology.
via edge.org
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