Sinosphere.blogs.nytimes. Photo Francis Fukuyama’s widely read essay “The End of History?”
— published just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — posited that Western liberal democracy may turn out to be the endpoint of political development. So when Mr. Fukuyama laid out what he considered the weaknesses of the American political system in a new book last year, “Political Order and Political Decay,” the Chinese state news media immediately asserted that he had altered his views and now considered state capacity, like that of China during the last 35 years of rapid economic development under Communist Party rule, as more important for a country’s prosperity than democracy.
But Mr. In an interview last month, he discussed what China’s past and present portend for its future political development: China plays a major role in your last two books, “The Origins of Political Order” and “Political Order and Political Decay.” Eye vs. camera - Michael Mauser. When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic. Whenever a college student asks me, a veteran high-school English educator, about the prospects of becoming a public-school teacher, I never think it’s enough to say that the role is shifting from "content expert" to "curriculum facilitator.
" Instead, I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation’s most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. The "virtual class" will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country’s best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide, and a formal assessment that the computer will immediately score and record.
"So if you want to be a teacher," I tell the college student, "you better be a super-teacher. " Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous. If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country’s education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills.
Every month, it seems, we hear about our children’s bad test scores in math and science — and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities. From President Obama on down, public officials have cautioned against pursuing degrees like art history, which are seen as expensive luxuries in today’s world. Republicans want to go several steps further and defund these kinds of majors. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” Asked Florida’s Gov. Benjamin Bratton: New perspectives: What's Wrong with TED Talks? at TEDxSanDiego 2013 - Re:Think. MAN. Margaret Atwood on Our Robotic Future.
Photo Turning Point: European Union launches the world’s largest civilian robotics program.
Karen Armstrong on Sam Harris and Bill Maher: “It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps” Karen Armstrong has written histories of Buddhism and Islam.
She has written a history of myth. She has written a history of God. Born in Britain, Armstrong studied English at Oxford, spent seven years as a Catholic nun, and then, after leaving the convent, took a brief detour toward hard-line atheism. E.O. Wilson on the Meaning of Human Existence and the Meaning of “Meaning” By Maria Popova.
Share Your Silence. John Cage’s 4'33" is a composition four minutes and thirty-three seconds in length, during which the performer—or performers—does not play a note.
Often described as Cage’s "silent" piece, 4'33" was in fact meant to shift attention away from the performer, to the audience itself, and to the richness and variety of ambient sound. Reflecting years later on the 1952 debut performance, Cage wrote: "What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.
" Use your mobile device to record the "silence" around you. Visit this web site to submit your recordings to MoMA's SoundCloud dropbox. Indicate where you recorded it in the description field. Anthropology Beyond the Human: An Amazon Tribe's Deep Connection With the Rain Forest. Do forests think?
Can a dog's dreams predict the future? Should nature have rights? Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American? Russell Cobb | This Land Press | August 2014 | 16 minutes (3,976 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)
Putting Time In Perspective. Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them.
It’s not our fault—the spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it. If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second. And if human history itself spans 24 hours from one midnight to the next, 14 minutes represents the time since Christ. Denmark in the Holocaust: Bo Lidegaard's "Countrymen," Reviewed. This magnificent book states its central argument in its title.
Danish Jews survived Hitler’s rule in World War II, when other European Jews did not, because Danes regarded their Jewish neighbors as countrymen. Game Theory Makes New Predictions for Evolution. In what appears to be the first study of its kind, computer scientists report that an algorithm discovered more than 50 years ago in game theory and now widely used in machine learning is mathematically identical to the equations used to describe the distribution of genes within a population of organisms. Researchers may be able to use the algorithm, which is surprisingly simple and powerful, to better understand how natural selection works and how populations maintain their genetic diversity. By viewing evolution as a repeated game, in which individual players, in this case genes, try to find a strategy that creates the fittest population, researchers found that evolution values both diversity and fitness.
The Decade Google Made You Stupid. Technology has changed your brain over the past ten years, mostly for the worse. Douglas Rushkoff on Internet-driven ADD, virtual-reality delusions, and how computers changed how you think. Imagine a world without shops or factories. I have come to think that our world is being turned upside down. We probably do not grasp the huge implications because, perhaps, we are still imprisoned by our past. George Packer: Is Amazon Bad for Books? Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post.
What Men Find Behind Female Masks - Luke Malone. Facebook Knows When You're About to Update Your Relationship Status. What Is It Like to Be a Human? Bargain for billionaires: Why philanthropy is more about P.R. than progress. Personal Autonomy Is Evaporating. Should We Care? Personal Identity Is (Mostly) Performance - Jennifer Ouellette. Study: Reading a Novel Changes Your Brain. College students experienced heightened connectivity in their left temporal cortexes after reading fiction. Scientists have proven in the past that reading stimulates many different parts of the brain. 2013: The Year 'the Stream' Crested - Alexis C. Madrigal. Google’s Road Map to Global Domination. What Anesthesia Can Teach Us About Consciousness.
Jonas Mekas. A Student Explains What's Wrong With Our School System And Why We Mistrust Teachers. Nails It. Kiribati: Climate Change Destroys Pacific Island Nation. Kiribati: Climate Change Destroys Pacific Island Nation. Sex Change for Prison Inmate Michelle Kosilek: Should We Pay? The Science of Choice in Addiction - Sally Satel. Are You A Coffee Gentrifier? The Difference Between Porn & Real Sex Explained With Food.
Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? Why Do We Sexualize Chicken? For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov. Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy. Reading at five: Why? Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark. Last Meals - Lapham’s Quarterly. Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit. TEDxObserver - Cory Doctorow. Portraits of Albanian Women Who Have Lived Their Lives As Men. History students will no longer tolerate or believe grand narratives. FORA.tv - Videos from the World's Best Conferences and Events.
The Marineland Dreamland. Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering Freshmen. “Gif-fiti” animated murals by INSA. “Gif-fiti” animated murals by INSA. Blog « insaland. Want to Understand Mortality? Look to the Chimps. 6 Rules for Creative Sanity from Radical Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. The Earth-Shatteringly Amazing Speech That’ll Change The Way You Think About Adulthood.