Why our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading & Daydreaming It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things. And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. So I’m biased as a writer. And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. And it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality.
This Is Water: David Foster Wallace on Life On September 12, 2008, David Foster Wallace took his own life, becoming a kind of patron-saint of the “tortured genius” myth of creativity. Just three years prior to his suicide, he stepped onto the podium at Kenyon College and delivered one of the most timeless graduation speeches of all time — the only public talk he ever gave on his views of life. The speech, which includes a remark about suicide by firearms that came to be extensively discussed after DFW’s own eventual suicide, was published as a slim book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (public library). You can hear the original delivery in two parts below, along with the the most poignant passages. On solipsism and compassion, and the choice to see the other: On the double-edged sword of the intellect, which Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Anne Lamott have spoken to: On empathy and kindness, echoing Einstein:
Giorgio Agamben: “El ciudadano es para el Estado un terrorista virtual” Si hay un filósofo característico del presente es Giorgio Agamben. Nació en Roma en 1942, pero su obra globalizada no puede desligarse de sus actividades en Francia, Inglaterra y Alemania, entre otros países en los que ha trabajado. Es fácil detectar en ella la influencia de Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin y Michel Foucault, pero también las de Kafka y el situacionista Guy Debord. Su obra, que nunca pierde de vista la relación del hombre con el lenguaje, no se agota en la filosofía entendida como disciplina, sino que se extiende por todos los ámbitos del saber: de la literatura a las artes plásticas, de la filología a la antropología, pasando por la teología y, por supuesto, por la política. “La filosofía moderna ha fracasado en su tarea política porque ha traicionado su tarea poética” Habla un español fluido, herencia de su amistad con el poeta José Bergamín, a quien, tras su regreso a España, visitaba casi cada año. En realidad, serían actividades destinadas a cruzarse.
I Have an Ethical Dilemma for You - a list by Imdbidia It’s Time to Rethink How We Are Educating Our Children In Brief On the whole, the way we educate students hasn't gotten a major upgrade in more than a century. Technology has both revolutionized what we need to teach to children, but also the capabilities that we have at our disposal to teach. Educating for the Future Elon Musk seems to be making headlines every day with his spaceships and solar panels and gigafactories and colonies on mars and secret tunnels and AI labs and self-driving cars. The school’s name is Ad Astra, meaning ‘to the stars’, and seems to be based around Musk’s belief that schools should “teach to the problem, not to the tools.” Musk’s decision highlights a bigger issue, how we educate people needs to change. Parents should be the most concerned. However for parents today things have gotten even more complicated. It starts by rethinking what a school is. The role of school should no longer be to fill heads with information, rather it should be a place that inspires students to be curious about the world they live in.
Robots Learn the Basic Algorithm that Underpins Human Intelligence? Theory of Connectivity The human brain is the most sophisticated organ in the human body. The things that the brain can do, and how it does them, have even inspired a model of artificial intelligence (AI). Now, a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience shows how human intelligence may be a product of a basic algorithm. This algorithm is found in the Theory of Connectivity, a “relatively simple mathematical logic underlies our complex brain computations,” according to researcher and author Joe Tsien, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, co-director of the Augusta University Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cognitive and Systems Neurobiology. Basically, it’s a theory about how the acquisition of knowledge, as well as our ability to generalize and draw conclusions from them, is a function of billions of neurons assembling and aligning. The brain’s formula
The influential Confucian philosopher you’ve never heard of A man is hiking in the countryside when he suddenly sees a toddler about to fall into an abandoned well. What will he do? Many people will instinctively run toward the toddler to save him. However, some people will simply panic, freezing in the moment of crisis. A handful of people might start to move toward the child, but then stop, because they realise that the crumbling old well could collapse under their weight. The fact is that we cannot be entirely sure what a human in this situation will do. This thought experiment was formulated by the ancient Confucian Mengzi, the most influential philosopher in world history whom you have probably never heard of. Although Mengzi was born long after Confucius died, he is referred to as the ‘Second Sage’ because he shaped the form that Confucianism would take for the next two millennia, not just in China, but also in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. Confucius (551-479 BCE) did not regard himself as founding a school. Syndicate this Essay
Albert Einstein on spirituality, the strongest force to remain true to your purpose The history of being human is, decidedly, the history of human effort. “Everything that the human race has done and thought has been concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1930 in a great article for the New York Times. “One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development,” he states. His article aims not only to explain the development of religions and the social and moral necessity of a God (conceived to satisfy desires and to relieve pain), but also of a third state of religious experience that has nothing to do with dogmas and which belongs to everyone, even if, as he says, “it is rarely found in a pure form.” Einstein considered the cosmic religious feeling to be of the highest sphere of human capabilities. For Einstein, the central problem of this cosmic religious feeling is the difficulty it poses at transmitting it to others.
Why Management Needs Philosophers Underlying the practice and study of business is the belief that management is a science and that business decisions must be driven by rigorous analysis of data. The explosion of big data has reinforced this idea. In a recent EY survey, 81% of executives said they believed that “data should be at the heart of all decision-making,” leading EY to enthusiastically proclaim that “big data can eliminate reliance on ‘gut feel’ decision-making.” Managers find this notion appealing. MBA programs now flood the business world with graduates—more than 150,000 a year in the United States alone. But is it true that management is a science? But first let’s take a look back at where—or rather with whom—science started. Is Business a Science? What we think of as science began with Aristotle, who as a student of Plato was the first to write about cause and effect and the methodology for demonstrating it. It’s hard to overestimate the impact of science on society. Can or Cannot? Data is not logic.
The Job Outlook: In 2030, Librarians Will Be in Demand | Editorial A fascinating new report takes a fresh look at what the workforce is going to look like in the future and which skills will be highly sought after. According to “The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030”, there will be an increased call for librarians, curators, and archivists, among other occupations. That’s just the start of the finds in this exploration of where humans will fit in the future, complementing rather than being completely supplanted by automation. The report—released on September 28 by Pearson, Nesta, and Oxford University—asks how work will be impacted by the intersection of seven “megatrends.” Change driven by new technology, including the rise of automation, is right up top. The report considers globalization but focuses solely on the impact on the UK and the United States. According to the report, we will all also need to learn new things and develop new skills throughout our lifetimes.
Using AI to Detect Cancer, Not Just Cats Shaokang Wang and his startup, Infervision, build algorithms that read X-ray images and identify early signs of lung cancer. The company’s technology, Wang says, is already running inside four of the largest hospitals in China. Two are merely running tests, but according to Wang, the two others—Shanghai Changzheng and Tongji, both in Shanghai—are installing the technology across their operations. To what extent these doctors are actually using the technology is another question. At two hospitals in India, Google is now testing technology that can identify signs of diabetic blindness in eye scans. Deploying such AI on a large scale—across hospitals, for instance—is still enormously difficult, says Dr. The rise of these systems is powered by the rise of deep neural networks, complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks on their own by analyzing vast amounts of data. Physician’s Assistant Still, these AI technologies won’t completely replace trained doctors. Go Back to Top.
Introduction to Philosophy/The Branches of Philosophy The Branches of Philosophy[edit] Western philosophy can be divided into six branches that have assumed various importance over time. Traditionally metaphysics sets the questions for philosophy. Understanding philosophy in the 6th century b.c. involves taking into account different priorities than those of the 19th century a.d. Epistemology[edit] The theory of knowledge, from the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (word/speech), is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, origin, scope and possibility of knowledge. [edit] Metaphysics however (derived from the Greek words " meta & physika ") - meaning 'after physics'. Logic[edit] Logic (from Classical Greek λόγος (logos), originally meaning the word, or what is spoken, but coming to mean thought or reason) is most often said to be the study of arguments. Ethics[edit] Ethics is a general term for what is often described as the "science (study) of morality". Aesthetics[edit] Other Branches[edit]