Monday, February 17th, 2014
BARNEY HENDERSON, - The Telegraph (U.K.)
Stephan: Here we see the dark cloud of the New Dark Ages Trend. What is the future of a country whose citizens have reverted to medieval thinking?
One in four Americans are completely unfamiliar with Nicolaus Copernicus’s 1543 theory that the Earth circles the Sun, according to a study by the National Science Foundation.
The survey, released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, asked 2,200 people nine factual questions about physical and biological science, with the average score being just 5.8 correct answers.
The question – “Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth” – was answered incorrectly by 26 per cent of respondents.
Fewer than half of the respondents – 48 per cent – are aware that humans evolved from earlier species of animals and just 39 percent answered correctly that “the universe began with a huge explosion”.
A total of 42 per cent of Americans said that astrology is either “very scientific” or “sort of scientific”.
Belief in astrology over science seems to be growing. In 2004, 66 per cent of Americans thought astrology was nonsense. “Fewer Americans rejected astrology in 2012 than in recent years,” the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators report said.
“The comparable percentage has not been this low since 1983.”
In contrast, a study in China has shown that 92 per cent […]
No Comments
Monday, February 17th, 2014
Matthew Paul Turner, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S. is a pastiche of myths having virtually nothing to do with the teachings of the man it purports to revere -- Jesus. One of the most prevalent of its myths is the business about Satan. For starters -- and I refer you to Elaine Paigel's book The Origins of Satan for a single source that expands on this -- Satan started out as a kind of Jewish oral tradition device. Like the Greek Chorus Satan's function was to teach the moral of the story. When the Jews were undergoing a schism that would produce the original Christianity, and brother turned against brother, the Jews needed something to explain why some of their family were falling away. Enter Satan, transformed from a metaphor or an inimical force. Christianity's Satan comes centuries later.
Just like their historical forbears, American believers like to blame bad things on the devil. But what if he’s just a convenient way to hide from the truth?
In America, much like God, Satan works in mysterious ways. Just how mysterious depends on who you talk to.
For instance, a good number of Christians became convinced that Satan made an appearance at last month’s Grammy Awards. While Christians detecting Satan’s presence at large music gatherings is hardly novel, the fact that Satan showed up right smack in the middle of a performance by Katy Perry and Juicy J. caused this particular sighting to be deemed more buzzworthy than most. Some evangelicals even speculated about whether or not Perry, while singing ‘Dark Horse,” had enacted an ancient satanic ritual, one that had actually summoned the Prince of Darkness to join her on the Grammy stage.
So, did Perry & Co. really usher in forces of demonic destruction? Nobody knows for certain. The presence of Satan is difficult to confirm. Besides, among most Satan-fearing Christians, things like confirmation and proof are overrated.
That said, not only did Perry’s alleged invite to Satan cause a gnashing of tweets, but the spectacle was demonic enough to send one […]
No Comments
Monday, February 17th, 2014
IAN SAMPLE, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The simplest things can produce the biggest and most life-affirming outcomes.
Reading bedtime stories to babies and talking to them from birth boosts their brain power and sets them up for success at school, researchers say.
Studies on babies and toddlers found that striking differences emerged in their vocabularies and language processing skills as early as 18 months old.
Children whose parents spoke to them least came out worst in language tests, and at 24 months old some lagged behind their contemporaries by up to six months. The handicap often stayed with the children and influenced how well they did at school over the next six years.
Prof Anne Fernald, a developmental psychologist at Stanford University, said chatting with infants helped them grasp the rules and rhythms of language at an early age and provided them with a foundation to build up an understanding of how the world worked.
Repetition helped children to remember words, while learning relationships between words, such as “the horse pulls the cart”, helped them to construct a picture of the world that paid dividends when they reached school age.
“You need to start talking to them from day one,” Fernald said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago. “You are building a mind, a mind […]
No Comments
Monday, February 17th, 2014
Stephan: Elizabeth Kolber has been doing the heavy lifting research concerning climate change for several decades now. She has a track record of fairness and excellence and I take what she writes very seriously. I suggest you do so as well.
What with everything else going on, you might not have realized that Earth’s currently undergoing a mass loss of life – the so-called Sixth Extinction. The Fifth Extinction was the asteroid that collided with Earth some 66 million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs. This newest extinction is far less dramatic, at least in the fire-and-brimstone sort of way – which explains how it’s been happening right under our noses.
Nonetheless, by the end of this century, scientists believe, up to 20 to 50 percent of the plant and animal species on Earth could be gone forever. Only there will be no giant asteroid to blame for the loss. This time – in a ‘Twilight Zone”-worthy twist of fate – the giant asteroid is us.
Ever since we first began to migrate and multiply, we humans have been crowding out everything else living on Earth, leading for thousands of years a (largely) unintentional campaign against other species that, in more recent times, has gotten much, much worse.
‘Right now,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes, ‘we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, […]
No Comments
Sunday, February 16th, 2014
PAUL ARMENTANO, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This lunatic drug testing pushed by the Theocratic Right is enormously profitable for a few companies that live on your tax dollars, but of no actual social utility.
Nearly one in three high school students are exposed to student drug-testing programs. Yet, over a decade of scientific scrutiny of the practice has consistently found that these programs do far more harm than good.
The latest finding appears in the January issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Investigators from Israel and the United States assessed whether students’ awareness of drug-testing programs in their schools was associated with a reduction in the frequency of their use of alcohol, cigarettes or cannabis. It wasn’t.
Authors wrote [3], “Consistent with previous research, results of the current study show that perceived SDT (student drug testing) is not associated with a reduction in initiation or escalation of substance use in the general student population.” They concluded, “The current research reinforces previous conclusions that SDT is a relatively ineffective drug-prevention policy.”
Ineffective is putting it mildly. In fact, no peer-reviewed study has ever praised the program as effectual. By contrast, numerous studies, including those sponsored by the US government, have reported that student drug-testing programs fail to deter adolescent substance use, and in some cases may even encourage it.
A 2011 study [4] in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence assessed the impact of school […]
No Comments
