A facility outside Seattle, surrounded by pine trees, is a refuge for addicts ”” of technology.
There are chickens, a garden and a big tree house with a zipline. A few guys kick a soccer ball around between therapy appointments in the cottage’s grassy backyard.
The reSTART center was set up in 2009. It treats all sorts of technology addictions, but most of the young men who come through here ”” and they are all young men ”” have the biggest problem with video games.
…while Hauerwas (following Kaye) argues that the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth becomes universalised across the globe in particular and local ways, the new challenge confronting Christians is that these different particular expressions of Christianity now sit right next to each other, thanks to a virtual 24-hour news cycle. As Anthony Giddens observes, the intensification of modern trans-national relationships is such that “local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away.” Social relations are being “lifted out” out their local contexts and restructured across time and space. Thus a bishop is consecrated in New Hampshire, and immediately an Archbishop in Nigeria responds. An Episcopal election is contested in Tanzania, and bloggers across the globe instantly construct conspiracy theories. When Justin Welby announces that he won’t be attending GAFCON II because he must baptise a new heir to the throne, it quickly becomes an object of scrutiny in Florida.
This reality suggests that the calls to return to a focus on the local parish by Hauerwas and Jensen require considerable modification. When Jensen warns against Christians “talking only to each other and becoming increasingly incomprehensible to those on the outside,” we should imagine this issue not simply as being limited to the Diocese of Sydney and its local community, but recognise that it applies to a much more expansive community “on the outside.” Similarly, when Hauerwas suggests that Christians need to “learn to be where we are,” the image that should come to mind is not of some small country village, but the global village.
If the Anglican Communion is to manage – as Hauerwas (following Kaye) puts it – “to maintain catholicity without Leviathan,” it will only do so after coming to terms with the compression of space and time that has been produced by contemporary patterns of communication and travel.
Professor McGrath was originally a scientist, and is a leading authority in the relation of science and religion.
Bishop Nick Dill said, “I am personally very excited to be able to welcome Alister McGrath back to Bermuda. Dr. McGrath was the Principal of my Theological College and brought a tremendous academic vigour to the college, but he has an amazing ability to communicate at a level that everyone can understand. He is a humble man, but you know that what he says is backed up by research, deep thought and prayer.” Alister McGrath has spoken in Bermuda on one occasion previously.
As posted on the TREC website: “The members of the Taskforce want to hear the memories, hopes and dreams that people have for The Church. We are trying to reach as many people as we can over the next few months. We will use what we hear to help us shape recommendations for The Church’s structure, administration and governance.”
TREC member the Rev. Joseph M.C. Chambers pointed out, “The Engagement Kit on the web offers an opportunity for people to participate as individuals, even though it was designed for in-person gatherings. “
Legendary Pictures LLC, the company behind this summer’s monster movie “Pacific Rim” and a coming film adaptation of the hit videogame “Warcraft,” makes anyone authorized to read one of its scripts purchase a special iPad app that allows them to view it for a only few hours before the digital document, like a “Mission Impossible” assignment, self-destructs.
Federal grants of $7 million awarded to this city were meant largely to help thwart terror attacks at its bustling port. But instead, the money is going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from around town ”” from gunshot-detection sensors in the barrios of East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the city’s upscale hills.
The new system, scheduled to begin next summer, is the latest example of how cities are compiling and processing large amounts of information, known as big data, for routine law enforcement. And the system underscores how technology has enabled the tracking of people in many aspects of life.
The police can monitor a fire hose of social media posts to look for evidence of criminal activities; transportation agencies can track commuters’ toll payments when drivers use an electronic pass; and the National Security Agency, as news reports this summer revealed, scooped up telephone records of millions of cellphone customers in the United States.
Virtually all countries still embrace the principles of international trade and investment. They want to enjoy the benefits of globalisation, but as much as possible they now also want to insulate themselves from its downsides, be they volatile capital flows or surging imports.
Globalisation has clearly paused. A simple measure of trade intensity, world exports as a share of world GDP, rose steadily from 1986 to 2008 but has been flat since. Global capital flows, which in 2007 topped $11 trillion, amounted to barely a third of that figure last year. Cross-border direct investment is also well down on its 2007 peak.
Much of this is cyclical. The recent crises and recessions in the rich world have subdued the animal spirits that drive international investment. But much of it is a matter of deliberate policy.
Millibeth Currie, a nationally board-certified teacher who chairs the science department at Moultrie Middle School, was involved in the first phase of the standards review this go-round.
“Science is everywhere. It’s explaining our system of our universe that exists right now,” which means a student’s family background or philosophy or religion doesn’t even factor into the equation.
When religious concerns are raised, “I kind of neutralize it. There’s no way of being able to answer who’s right or who’s wrong” among different religions, she said. “The focus should be on discovering the commonalities in our universe.”
The discovery of the first chemical to prevent the death of brain tissue in a neurodegenerative disease has been hailed as the “turning point” in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease.
More work is needed to develop a drug that could be taken by patients.
But scientists say a resulting medicine could treat Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and other diseases.
In tests on mice, the Medical Research Council showed all brain cell death from prion disease could be prevented.
It was well worth the time–visually just stunning.
Reader question from John Blaxland: Given how little we know about the universe, how can we possibly be sure there is no God?
There are all sorts of things we can’t be sure of–we can’t be sure there are no leprechauns and fairies. Science in the future is going to be revealing all sorts of things which we have no idea of at present, but it’s extremely unlikely that it would happen to home in on an idea from a Bronze Age tribe in the desert.
Before Tom Clancy became an international publishing phenomenon, he was just another insurance salesman, working out of Baltimore and dreaming of a life as an author. With the arrival of his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October, in 1984, that dream suddenly became a reality, establishing the man with the aviator sunglasses and the Navy baseball hats as a perpetual presence on bestseller lists.
Drawing on his vast trove of technical military information, Clancy created a new genre: the techno-thriller. In Clancy’s novels, the reader becomes acquainted with such things as forward-looking infrared scanners and magnetic anomaly detectors (good for finding submarines), vertical temperature gradients and downwind toxic vapour hazards (for studying the effect of chemical weapons), and Russian T-80Us (a type of tank).
Clancy’s enthusiasm for the endless advance of technology in warfare was only matched (or nearly matched) by the outrageous plots he dreamt up. But as Clancy’s novels have receded in the rear-view mirror of publishing history, those same plots have taken on an eerie quality, providing yet another spin on that old cliche: sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
N 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a paper to Social Text, a leading scholarly journal of postmodernist cultural studies. The journal’s peer reviewers, whose job it is to ensure that published research is up to snuff, gave it a resounding thumbs-up. But when the editors duly published the paper, Dr Sokal revealed that it had been liberally, and deliberately, “salted with nonsense”. The Sokal hoax, as it came to be known, demonstrated how easy it was for any old drivel to pass academic quality control in highbrow humanities journals, so long as it contained lots of fancy words and pandered to referees’ and editors’ ideological preconceptions. Hard scientists gloated. That could never happen in proper science, they sniffed. Or could it?
Alas, as a report in this week’s Science shows, the answer is yes, it could. John Bohannon, a biologist at Harvard with a side gig as a science journalist, wrote his own Sokalesque paper describing how a chemical extracted from lichen apparently slowed the growth of cancer cells. He then submitted the study, under a made-up name from a fictitious academic institution, to 304 peer-reviewed journals around the world.
Despite bursting with clangers in experimental design, analysis and interpretation of results, the study passed muster at 157 of them. Only 98 rejected it.
Whenever I criticize the Wild West ethics of the in vitro fertilization industry, I hear from heartbroken people who tell me they would do “anything” to have a baby. I sympathize with the heartache of childlessness. But the willingness of many to do””and of the IVF industrial complex to sell””anything leads to a “me first” sense of reproductive entitlement.
We already know that IVF is no longer limited to infertile married couples””with women in their sixties even using the technique to get pregnant. Now, the universal condition of having two biological parents is about to be shattered.
The United Kindom’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has approved the use of “three-parent IVF” by which eggs from two women are combined and fertilized, creating an embryo with two biological mothers and one father. The point (for now) is to allow parents with mitochondrial disease to have a biologically related child without passing on their condition.
The Internet of things and the technology ecosystem surrounding it are expected to be a $8.9 trillion market in 2020, according to IDC.
In a nutshell, the Internet of things is the product of sensors, technology and networking all coming together to allow buildings, infrastructure and other resources to swap information. Today, the Internet of things and machine-to-machine data falls under the big data umbrella with projects just beginning.
IDC said the installed base of things connected will be 212 billion by the end of 2020, including 30.1 billion connected autonomous things. Intelligent systems will be installed and collecting data by this point.
Read it all from ZDnet.
Young Christians need encouragement to see their calling as scientists as a valuable Christian vocation. Though there are painful exceptions, the work environment for most Christian students in science today is not hostile. In fact, there are many young Christians in training in the sciences. Christian fellowship groups for graduate students are beginning to form and flourish on many campuses, and a large percentage of these Christian graduate students and postdocs are scientists.
It is during these formative years that young scientists are faced with some weighty decisions. For example: What kind of thesis research should I pursue? My advisor has asked me to do fetal tissue experiments; should I refuse and risk my position in graduate school? (This really happened to one student.) How do I explain my faith to my advisor and my fellow graduate students? Wouldn’t it be more valuable to God for me to join some of my Christian friends who are planning careers as evangelists or in direct ministry to the poor rather than to spend my life, for example, evaluating molecular spectra? Traditional Christian churches and circles do not always recognize the unique environment that the young Christian scientist faces. Science is sometimes viewed with misunderstanding and suspicion or ignored as unspiritual. These reactions are discouraging to young people who want to choose a career path that glorifies God. Hearing encouraging talks from older Christian scientists can be a great encouragement to younger people seeking guidance.
Biologist Louis Burnett had to move his lab students to a conference room across the parking lot at Fort Johnson. His federal lab, animals and cell cultures are under lock and key.
Burnett’s dilemma is a case example of the ripple effect of the ongoing federal shutdown. As the shutdown enters its third day, the clock keeps ticking insistently for any number of people who don’t work for the federal government but find themselves on the outs because of the political standoff.
Burnett is a research professor at the College of Charleston. But like others in a cadre of college and state researchers, he collaborates on studies, shares office space and makes use of the equipment at the Hollings Marine Lab and the Center for Coastal Environmental Health and Biomolecular Research.
Consumers seeking more information on their new options under the Affordable Care Act were met with long delays, error messages and a largely non-working federal insurance exchange and call center Tuesday morning.
Heavy Internet traffic and system problems plagued the launch of the health insurance exchanges, a key pillar of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Some of the issues appeared to subside just after 12 p.m. Central time, with some users reporting success in viewing new insurance products offered in Illinois as part of the law.
But others continued to have problems into Tuesday afternoon. For most of Tuesday, attempts to log on to the system were met with error messages: “We have a lot of visitors on our site right now, and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the log-in page. Thank you for your patience.”
The dawn chorus always used to be accompanied by the distinctive chink of bottles being collected from doorsteps.
Now most of us buy our milk from supermarkets, so deliveries are fast becoming a thing of the past.
The number of glass bottles of milk delivered annually has fallen from 40 million in the early 90s to just two million today.
Going to church
Only 15% of us go to church more than once a month. In 1968 around 1.8 million people attended, but by 2007 that figure had almost halved.
The series… [for example] looks at your commute to and from work:
Surveillance cameras in subway stations and on city buses watch you board and depart.
To automatically identify celebrities and regular customers when they enter a store, some retailers reportedly are using another facial recognition technology originally developed in the U.K. for spotting terrorists and criminals.
Meanwhile, smart cards log when and where you travel using public transportation
Now, even if you are the most technophobic parent in the world, surely it is not beyond your capabilities to sit down and have a little chat with the kids about hard cash. Start with just how hard it is to earn it. Don’t pull any punches. Show them the money. Literally show them. If children grow up thinking that money only comes in plastic form, they will never, ever understand its true value.
Next time you drag them along to the supermarket, pay with cash. That will teach them what £100 really looks like.
That’s the easy bit. It’s the technology that is likely to faze us most. When I say technology, I mean the inner workings of whatever game it is your child is playing….
A few months ago Barack Obama declared that al-Qaeda was “on the path to defeat”. Its surviving members, he said, were more concerned for their own safety than with plotting attacks on the West. Terrorist attacks of the future, he claimed, would resemble those of the 1990s””local rather than transnational and focused on “soft targets”. His overall message was that it was time to start winding down George Bush’s war against global terrorism.
Mr Obama might argue that the assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi by al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, the Shabab, was just the kind of thing he was talking about: lethal, shocking, but a long way from the United States. Yet the inconvenient truth is that, in the past 18 months, despite the relentless pummelling it has received and the defeats it has suffered, al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies have staged an extraordinary comeback. The terrorist network now holds sway over more territory and is recruiting more fighters than at any time in its 25-year history (see article). Mr Obama must reconsider.
U.S. officials said Iran hacked unclassified Navy computers in recent weeks in an escalation of Iranian cyberintrusions targeting the U.S. military.
The allegations, coming as the Obama administration ramps up talks with Iran over its nuclear program, show the depth and complexity of long-standing tensions between Washington and Tehran.
The U.S. officials said the attacks were carried out by hackers working for Iran’s government or by a group acting with the approval of Iranian leaders.
Given a trajectory that seems straight out of sci-fi, I’m worried about the future””specifically what technological advancements mean for our embodied, thinking, knowing, feeling human minds.
These days, we still say things like “I don’t know how” and “I can’t remember it,” but our ignorance rarely lasts long. Seconds later, it gets pulled up on Google or YouTube. The information we don’t know is so close””quite literally at our fingertips””that we forget we don’t know it. The dozens of phone numbers saved in my address book. The recipes saved on my Pinterest board. Google Maps to the nearest whatever. That Bible verse I’m trying to think of.
We instinctually ask our laptops and smartphones to tell us and teach us, things we once relied on other people to do.
Leading climate scientists said today they were more certain than ever before that mankind was the main culprit for global warming and warned the impact of greenhouse gas emissions would linger for centuries.
A report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), played down the fact temperatures have risen more slowly in the past 15 years, saying there were substantial natural variations that masked a long-term warming trend.
It said the Earth was set for further warming and more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels as greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere. The oceans would become more acidic in a threat to some marine life.
As some of you may remember, that ad brought to light President Obama’s voting record on infants born alive and the reality of my life as a survivor. As some of you may also remember, that fact check was more like a bias un-check, and although the writer questioned the credibility of my use of the word “discarded” in the ad when describing what it was like for me to survive an abortion and be left to die and was blatantly out to attack that ad and me, scores of people and political commentators from across the nation responded to the Post’s article pointing out the bias of the article and the negative treatment of such a painful experience that my family and I have lived through.
What a difference a year makes.
If Josh Hicks, the fact check writer from the Washington Post, was doing that article now, not only would I have all of the damning evidence about the abortion that I survived that was provided to him last year, including copies of my medical records that reflect the abortion that I survived and the statements by my adoptive parents about what they were told about everything that occurred, but I now also have additional information from a medical professional about the circumstances that surrounded my survival and information from my biological family, whom I’ve been blessed to have enter into my life this year, that further solidifies all that happened thirty-six years ago.
Professor Stephen Hawking has predicted that it could be possible to preserve a mind as powerful as his on a computer – but not with technology existing today….
Prof Hawking was speaking after the premiere of a new biopic about his life, which he narrates himself, at the Cambridge Film Festival.
Asked about whether a person’s consciousness can live on after they die, he said: “I think the brain is like a programme in the mind, which is like a computer, so it’s theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death.
“However, this is way beyond out present capabilities. I think the conventional afterlife is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark.”
The five permanent members of the often-divided U.N. Security Council reached agreement Thursday on a resolution to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, British and U.S. diplomats said, and the council was meeting to discuss it Thursday night.
The agreement by the permanent members, whose differences have paralyzed council action on Syria, represents a major breakthrough in addressing the 2 1/2-year conflict, which has killed more than 100,000 people.
Britain’s U.N. ambassador, Mark Lyall Grant, tweeted that Britain, France, the U.S., Russia and China had agreed on a “binding and enforceable draft ”¦ resolution.”
Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/09/26/deal-reached-on-un-resolution-on-syria-weapons/#ixzz2g2ht7FGG
Watch and listen to it all and then you may Read all about it there (via Robert Krulwich) in which among other things is said: “With no apologies to Queen, this is Tim’s “A Capella Science” take on String Theory set to Bohemian Rhapsody. He calls it “Bohemian Gravity.” He’s 23. He wrote this. He sang this. He designed this. He’s amazing.”
WOWOW.