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Monday, August 19, 2002
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Howard Gardner speaks: I want people at the end of their education to understand the world in ways that they couldn't have understood it before their education. In speaking of the world I mean the physical world, the biological world, the social world — their own world, their personal world as well as the broader social and cultural terrain. I believe that these are questions that every human being is interested in from a very young age. They're questions which kids ask all the time: who am I, where do I come from, what's this made out of, what's going to happen to me, why do people fight, why do they hate? Is there a higher power? Questions like that — they don't usually ask them in their words, they ask them in their play, in their stories, the myths they like to listen to and so on. These are also the questions that historically have been looked at in religion, philosophy, science. While it's great for people to ask these questions on their own, and to make use of their own experience, it's crazy for people not to take advantage of the other attempts to answer those questions over the millennia. And the disciplines represent to me the most concerted efforts to provide answers to those questions. History tells us where we come from. Biology talks about what it means to be alive. Physics talks about the world of objects, alive or not. It's important to emphasize the role of disciplines when you're talking about precollegiate education. Some people think the disciplines are irrelevant, and some people think all the interesting work is interdisciplinary so you can kind of jump right into that. I reject both of these claims. Disciplines are what separates us from the barbarians; I don't think you can do interdisciplinary work unless you've done disciplinary work. (08/19/02) | |
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From Chaordic Commons: The Constitution is a civil contract among participants in the organization. It spells out their rights and responsibilities, establishes the initial decision-making and governance bodies and provides a framework for self-organizing growth and evolution of the organization to occur. Once the Organizational Concept is reasonably clear, the organizational structure and functioning are expressed in a written Constitution (by-laws) or other binding agreement appropriate to the organizational form. Charter agreements can also be developed for initial participants in the new organization, if necessary. Work during this phase results in a set of documents that refine and incorporate, with precision, the substance of the previous steps. They will embody Purpose, Principles and Concept; specify rights, responsibilities and relationships of all participants; and establish the organization as a legal entity in an appropriate jurisdiction. Involvement of expert legal counsel is required. Developing a Constitution - a carefully articulated agreement that will be legally binding - usually involves refining prior work on Principles, Participants and Organizational Concept. Initial decisions about certain aspects of the Organizational Concept, in particular, are likely to receive intensive scrutiny and to be tested against all other decisions that have been made. The Organizational Concept is often simplified and made more coherent during this phase. The Constitution is the legal foundation for the organization. Once adopted, it is the framework guiding trustees, management, staff and participants in pursuit of the Purpose, and enables self-organization and evolution of the organization. (08/19/02) | |
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Washington Post -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has sent the White House a classified memo warning of the spread of cruise missiles among hostile nations and urging an intensified government-wide effort to defend against them. The memo, delivered last month, reflects heightened concern by Rumsfeld and senior aides about the ready availability around the world of cruise missile technology and the continued vulnerability of U.S. troops and population centers to attack by the low-flying, hard-to-detect weapons, according to officials familiar with the memo. ... At least 81 countries are reported to have cruise missiles of some kind, totaling more than 70,000 weapons, although the vast majority are designed to go against ships at distances of less than 60 miles. Of greatest concern to U.S. officials are "land-attack" cruise missiles, which are produced by only a few major industrialized nations. ... Military planners have spent the summer drafting a broad study on cruise missile defense ordered in May. And a Joint Staff organization chartered six years ago to address the cruise missile threat has been given expanded responsibility to develop a new operational concept for homeland air defense. ... "If we're going to deal with this -- and we are -- it's going to require a government-wide effort," the Rumsfeld aide said. (08/18/02) | |
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KurzweilAI.net -- David Chalmers writes: Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance and a double-aspect view of information. (08/18/02) | |
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Scientific American -- Carol Ezzell writes: Like a jealous chef, the nucleus guards the recipes for making all the proteins a cell needs. It holds tightly to the original recipe book, written in DNA, doling out copies of the instructions in the form of messenger RNA (mRNA) to the cell's cytoplasm only as they are needed. But in cancer cells and in cells infected by viruses, those carefully issued orders are often drowned out. Mutations can cause cancer cells to issue garbled directions that result in aberrant proteins. Similarly, viruses flood cells with their own mRNA, hijacking the cells' protein-making apparatuses to make copies of new viruses that can go on to infect other cells. Researchers are currently attempting to harness a recently discovered natural phenomenon called RNA interference (RNAi) to intercept, or "knock down," such bad messages. ... Several groups of researchers have reported within the past few months that the same phenomenon could have therapeutic benefits in mammalian cells by shutting down viral genes or those linked to tumor formation. (08/19/02) | |
Peace Loving Israel backs Bush's War on Iraq | |
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Guardian of London -- Israel signaled its decision yesterday to put public pressure on President George Bush to go ahead with a military attack on Iraq, even though it believes Saddam Hussein may well retaliate by striking Israel. ... "Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose," Ranaan Gissin, a senior Sharon adviser told the Associated Press yesterday. "It will only give Saddam Hussein more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction." Israeli intelligence officials had new evidence that Iraq was speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, he added. Last night Mr Bush, speaking in Crawford, Texas, said he would consult with others on US policy on Iraq, but would make his decisions based on the "latest intelligence". ... A poll in the newspaper Maariv showed 57% of Israelis supported a US attack on Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. (08/19/02) | |
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CNN -- Concentrations of microscopic plants that comprise the foundation of the ocean's food supply have fallen during the past 20 years as much as 30 percent in northern oceans, according to a satellite checkup of planetary health. ... "The whole marine food chain depends on the health and productivity of the phytoplankton," said researcher Watson Gregg of NASA. ... Phytoplankton accounts for 50 percent of the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere back into the biosphere through photosynthesis, the process through which plants absorb carbon dioxide gas to grow. (08/18/02) | |
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New York Times -- A scientific consensus has formed that greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions released by automobiles, power plants and industrial factories — are causing the average temperature to increase, setting off environmental reactions ranging from rising water levels to droughts. Losses from global warming were in evidence just this past week. A report released last Monday by the United Nations predicted that a two-mile-thick layer of brown haze blanketing Asia, caused in part by greenhouse gases, could severely cut rainfall and reduce India's rice harvest by 10 percent. And abnormally high temperatures in Eastern Europe have been partly blamed for the severe floods ravaging Prague and other beacons of European architecture. Munich Re, a large German insurance company, estimates that global warming could cost $300 billion annually by 2050 in weather damage, pollution, industrial and agricultural losses and other expenses. Companies may also face unexpected expenses because of compliance with future regulations, fines, taxes and caps on products that produce greenhouse gases. The impact of climate change varies by sector. Oil, gas and utilities, of course, are directly affected by changes in energy policy, while real estate is affected by coastal flooding and drought. But environmental activists and a growing number of investors have started to catch the corporate world's attention with their warnings that nearly all industries are exposed to some risk. Of particular concern are the costs of complying with a patchwork of regulations in the United States and abroad and the potential harm to a company's reputation if it is contributing to global warming. (08/18/02) | |
6:23:42 AM 
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© TrustMark
2002
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
9/3/2002; 6:03:27 AM.
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