Iceland’s citizens were given a chance to help forge a new constitution for their country through Facebook and Twitter, so it’s not surprising that they backed the resulting draft. Now it’s over to the politicians.
A constitution is a deeply serious thing: the bedrock of a country’s identity. So Iceland’s decision to let the general populace participate in the drafting of its new constitution – via social media such as Facebook and Twitter – was a bold move.
A startup called Duolingo taps the power of crowds to make learning a language free.
A startup called Duolingo taps the power of crowds to make learning a language free.
Tom Simonite
MIT Technology Review, 29 November 2012
Learning a new language is tedious and demands a lot of practice. Luis von Ahn doesn’t want all that effort to be wasted. In fact, it might be a gold mine.
Von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is the co-creator of Duolingo, a free language-learning site that turns students into an online workforce. His software uses their answers to simple exercises in a translation service that he expects to charge money for.
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It’s clever stuff: an education that pays for itself. That achievement is important as education moves toward being given away online (see “The Most Important Educational Technology in 200 Years”). Teachers and universities are now running into the same problem journalists and movie studios have faced: how will they make any money if the content is free? No matter how cheap it is to pipe information across the Web, producing lessons and coursework is still demanding and expensive.
Duolingo, which launched in June, has raised $18.3 million in venture funding (see “Startup Has Language Learners Translating the Web”). It offers English lessons for Spanish and Portuguese speakers and lessons in Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese for English speakers. Around 300,000 people now use it each week.
A seismic shift is occurring in the field of evidence-based medicine that a rare few are aware of, but which will (and likely already does) affect everyone, as the standard of medical care today largely follows from this model.
The very life’s blood of ‘evidence-based’ medicine — peer-reviewed and published clinical research results – which legitimizes the entire infrastructure and superstructure upon which conventional medical knowledge and practice is erected, has been revealed as mostly and patently false.
Case in point: in a 2005 essay, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False,” and which is the most downloaded document of all time on PLoS, the Public Library of Medicine’s peer-reviewed, open access journal, John P. A Ioannidis explains in detail how “It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.” And that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”
The Atlantic published a piece on Ioannidis’ work, back in 2010, titled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” well worth reading, and which opened with “Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors – to a striking extent – still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice?“
US coastal cities in danger as sea levels rise faster than expected, study warns
Satellite measurements show flooding from storms like Sandy will put low-lying population centres at risk sooner than projected
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 November 2012
Sea-level rise is occurring much faster than scientists expected – exposing millions more Americans to the destructive floods produced by future Sandy-like storms, new research suggests.
Satellite measurements over the last two decades found global sea levels rising 60% faster than the computer projections issued only a few years ago by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The faster sea-level rise means the authorities will have to take even more ambitious measures to protect low-lying population centres – such as New York City, Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida – or risk exposing millions more people to a destructive combination of storm surges on top of sea-level rise, scientists said.
Scientists earlier this year found sea-level rise had already doubled the annual risk of historic flooding across a widespread area of the United States.
MARGUERITE GUZMÁN BOUVARD: That’s right. And before I—after I finished that book, finally the Department of Defense was letting out these statistics. They were not letting them out before. I tried to get them. I called Veterans for Common Sense, Veterans United for Truth. They have 50,000 members. They said, “Sorry, the numbers are not coming out.” And what I did get was that, in every 36 hours, one veteran from the Iraqi or Afghanistani war are committing suicide, and 18 veterans of all wars commit suicide a day. Also—
Phi Beta Iota: “Cognitive Dissonance” is a very important concept when one has integrity and desires to do a self-evaluation of one's priorities, policies, acquisition, and operations.
“I am absolutely delighted that nuclear weapons were invented…” he professed in his speech.
AlterNet, November 28, 2012
Britain's ex-minister of Defense Lord Gilbert, has suggested dropping neutron bombs along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the name of deterring terrorism.
Specifically, he was suggesting using Enhanced Radiation Reduced Blast (ERRB) warheads, which is a type of nuclear weapon that is able to kill people without decimating all standing structures in the area.
Obama is urged to declare emergency so Army Corps can take steps to keep 200-mile stretch open.
8:27PM EST November 28. 2012 – A key stretch of the drought-ravaged Mississippi River may fall to a record low by mid-December, halting barge traffic and disrupting billions in commerce on the nation's busiest inland waterway.
President Obama on Tuesday was urged to declare an emergency so the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can take steps to boost the river's flow and deepen the channel along the 200-mile segment between St. Louis and Cairo, Ill.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., plans to meet Thursday with the Pentagon official who oversees the corps to ask that it quickly dynamite exposed rock pinnacles and increase Missouri River reservoir flows to keep the river open, the St. Louis Beacon reported Wednesday.
Phi Beta Iota: We have not done the math, but we are beginning to see some convergence among various challenges (mostly not enough fresh water) and various solutions (mostly solar and wind power, but decentralizes). We connect dots. So connect the above dot with the below dot. Anyone who has the math, please share it. We strongly suspect that if a viable solution can be found for desalinating ocean water to stop the drught shallows now and fill the aquifers later, that those who stand to lose close to $4 billion a month from use of this public waterway just might find a way to earmark $100 million and up for a novel persistent solutioin.
