1.
University of California, Santa Barbara
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The University of California, Santa Barbara is a public research university and one of the 10 campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a 1, 022-acre site near Goleta, California, tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers college, UCSB joined the University of California system in 1944 and is the third-oldest general-education campus in the system. UCSB is one of Americas Public Ivy universities, which recognizes top public universities in the United States. The university is a doctoral university and is organized into five colleges. UCSB was ranked 37th among National Universities, 8th among U. S. public universities, the university was also ranked 48th worldwide for 2016-17 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and 42nd worldwide by the Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2016. UC Santa Barbara is a high activity research university with twelve national research centers. UCSB was the No.3 host on the ARPAnet and was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1995, the UC Santa Barbara Gauchos compete in the Big West Conference of the NCAA Division I. The Gauchos have won NCAA national championships in soccer and mens water polo. UCSB traces its origins back to the Anna Blake School which was founded in 1891 and offered training in home economics and industrial arts. The Anna Blake School was taken over by the state in 1909 and became the Santa Barbara State Normal School, the State College system sued to stop the takeover, but the Governor did not support the suit. A state initiative was passed, however, in 1946 to stop subsequent conversions of State Colleges to University of California campuses, from 1944 to 1958 the school was known as Santa Barbara College of the University of California, before taking on its current name. When the vacated Marine Corps training station in Goleta was purchased for the growing college. Originally, the Regents envisioned a small, several thousand-student liberal arts college, chronologically, UCSB is the third general-education campus of the University of California, after Berkeley and UCLA. The original campus the Regents acquired in Santa Barbara was located on only 100 acres of largely unusable land on a seaside mesa, all of this change was done in accordance with the California Master Plan for Higher Education. In 1959, UCSB professor Douwe Stuurman hosted the English writer Aldous Huxley as the universitys first visiting professor, Huxley delivered a lectures series called The Human Situation. In the late 1960s and early 1970s UCSB became nationally known as a hotbed of anti-Vietnam War activity, a bombing at the schools faculty club in 1969 killed the caretaker, Dover Sharp. UCSBs anti-Vietnam activity impelled then Governor Ronald Reagan to impose a curfew, weapon-carrying guardsmen were a common sight on campus and in Isla Vista during this time. On May 23,2014, a killing spree occurred in Isla Vista, California, all six people killed during the rampage were students at UCSB
2.
Stanford University
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Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, adjacent to Palo Alto and between San Jose and San Francisco. Its 8, 180-acre campus is one of the largest in the United States, Stanford also has land and facilities elsewhere. The university was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Stanford was a former Governor of California and U. S. Senator, he made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students 125 years ago on October 1,1891, Stanford University struggled financially after Leland Stanfords death in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. The university is one of the top fundraising institutions in the country. There are three schools that have both undergraduate and graduate students and another four professional schools. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. Stanford faculty and alumni have founded a number of companies that produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue. It is the alma mater of 30 living billionaires,17 astronauts and it is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress. Sixty Nobel laureates and seven Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanfords previous Palo Alto farm, despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I, the Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which was established in 1962, in 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped. Besides the central campus described below, the university also operates at more remote locations, some elsewhere on the main campus. Stanfords main campus includes a place within unincorporated Santa Clara County. The campus also includes land in unincorporated San Mateo County, as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park, Woodside. The academic central campus is adjacent to Palo Alto, bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard, the United States Postal Service has assigned it two ZIP codes,94305 for campus mail and 94309 for P. O. box mail
3.
Psychology
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Psychology is the science of behavior and mind, embracing all aspects of conscious and unconscious experience as well as thought. It is a discipline and a social science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist and can be classified as a social, behavioral, Psychologists explore behavior and mental processes, including perception, cognition, attention, emotion, intelligence, phenomenology, motivation, brain functioning, and personality. This extends to interaction between people, such as relationships, including psychological resilience, family resilience, and other areas. Psychologists of diverse orientations also consider the unconscious mind, Psychologists employ empirical methods to infer causal and correlational relationships between psychosocial variables. Psychology has been described as a hub science, with psychological findings linking to research and perspectives from the sciences, natural sciences, medicine, humanities. By many accounts psychology ultimately aims to benefit society, the majority of psychologists are involved in some kind of therapeutic role, practicing in clinical, counseling, or school settings. Many do scientific research on a range of topics related to mental processes and behavior. The word psychology derives from Greek roots meaning study of the psyche, the Latin word psychologia was first used by the Croatian humanist and Latinist Marko Marulić in his book, Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae in the late 15th century or early 16th century. In 1890, William James defined psychology as the science of mental life and this definition enjoyed widespread currency for decades. Also since James defined it, the more strongly connotes techniques of scientific experimentation. Folk psychology refers to the understanding of people, as contrasted with that of psychology professionals. The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, historians note that Greek philosophers, including Thales, Plato, and Aristotle, addressed the workings of the mind. As early as the 4th century BC, Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that mental disorders had physical rather than supernatural causes, in China, psychological understanding grew from the philosophical works of Laozi and Confucius, and later from the doctrines of Buddhism. This body of knowledge involves insights drawn from introspection and observation and it frames the universe as a division of, and interaction between, physical reality and mental reality, with an emphasis on purifying the mind in order to increase virtue and power. Chinese scholarship focused on the advanced in the Qing Dynasty with the work of Western-educated Fang Yizhi, Liu Zhi. Distinctions in types of awareness appear in the ancient thought of India, a central idea of the Upanishads is the distinction between a persons transient mundane self and their eternal unchanging soul. Divergent Hindu doctrines, and Buddhism, have challenged this hierarchy of selves, yoga is a range of techniques used in pursuit of this goal
4.
Cornell University
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Cornell University is an American private Ivy League and land-grant doctoral university located in Ithaca, New York. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornells motto, the university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar. Cornell is one of three private land grant universities in the nation and the one in New York. Of its seven colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the State University of New York system, including its agricultural. Of Cornells graduate schools, only the college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension program in every county of New York. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens are considered. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race, the student body consists of more than 14,000 undergraduate and 7,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and more than 120 countries. Cornell University was founded on April 27,1865, the New York State Senate authorized the university as the land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site, fellow senator and experienced educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty, the university was inaugurated on October 7,1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day. Cornell developed as an innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus as well as to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a dynamo to light the grounds. Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes and it was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses, since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar and it has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the Peoples Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its international profile. On March 9,2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new Bridging the Rift Center to be built, Cornells main campus is on East Hill in Ithaca, New York, overlooking the town and Cayuga Lake
5.
Amos Tversky
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Much of his early work concerned the foundations of measurement. He was co-author of a treatise, Foundations of Measurement. Six years after Tverskys death, Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work he did in collaboration with Amos Tversky, Kahneman told The New York Times in an interview soon after receiving the honor, I feel it is a joint prize. We were twinned for more than a decade, Tversky also collaborated with many leading researchers including Thomas Gilovich, Itamar Simonson, Paul Slovic and Richard Thaler. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Tversky as the 93rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with Edwin Boring, John Dewey, and Wilhelm Wundt. Tversky was born in Haifa, British Palestine, as son of the Polish-born veterinarian Yosef Tversky and Jenia Tversky and he served with distinction in the Israel Defense Forces, rising to the rank of captain and being decorated for bravery. He received his education at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He later taught at Hebrew University before moving to Stanford University, in 1980 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1984 he was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Amos Tversky was married to Barbara Tversky, now a professor in the human development department at Teachers College, Columbia University. Tversky, co-recipient with Daniel Kahneman, earned the 2003 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology and he died of a metastatic melanoma. Tversky and Fox addressed ambiguity aversion, the idea that people do not like ambiguous gambles or choices with ambiguity and their idea was that people are only ambiguity averse when their attention is specifically brought to the ambiguity by comparing an ambiguous option to an unambiguous option. However, when evaluating them separately, people are willing to bet approximately the amount on either urn. Thus, when it is possible to compare the ambiguous gamble to an unambiguous gamble people are averse —, as related to Gladwell by psychologist Adam Alter, the Tversky Intelligence Test was The faster you realized Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were. Memorial Resolution - Amos Tversky Boston Globe, The man who wasnt there Daniel Kahneman – Autobiography
6.
Daniel Kahneman
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His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases. In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers, in the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. He is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton Universitys Woodrow Wilson School, Kahneman is a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman, in 2015 The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world. Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine in 1934 and he spent his childhood years in Paris, France, where his parents had emigrated from Lithuania in the early 1920s. Kahneman and his family were in Paris when it was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940 and his father was picked up in the first major round-up of French Jews, but he was released after six weeks due to the intervention of his employer. The family was on the run for the remainder of the war, Kahneman and his family then moved to British Mandatory Palestine in 1948, just before the creation of the state of Israel. Kahneman has written of his experience in Nazi-occupied France, explaining in part why he entered the field of psychology, Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p. m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late, I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching and he was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others – the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater and he was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right, people were endlessly complicated and interesting. Kahneman received his bachelor of science degree with a major in psychology, after earning his undergraduate degree, he served in the psychology department of the Israeli Defense Forces. One of his responsibilities was to evaluate candidates for training school. In 1958, he went to the United States to study for his PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Kahneman began his academic career as a lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1961. He was promoted to lecturer in 1966
7.
Cognitive psychology
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Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking. Philosophically, ruminations of the mind and its processes have been around since the times of the ancient Greeks. In 387 BCE, Plato is known to have suggested that the brain was the seat of the mental processes. In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans are born with ideas, and forwarded the idea of mind-body dualism. From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century regarding whether human thought was solely experiential, some of those involved in this debate included George Berkeley and John Locke on the side of empiricism, and Immanuel Kant on the side of nativism. With the philosophical debate continuing, the mid to late 19th century was a time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline. Problems such as how to best train soldiers to use new technology, developments in computer science would lead to parallels being drawn between human thought and the computational functionality of computers, opening entirely new areas of psychological thought. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spent years developing the concept of artificial intelligence and this encouraged a conceptualization of mental functions patterned on the way that computers handled such things as memory storage and retrieval. Noam Chomskys 1959 critique of behaviorism, and empiricism more generally, formal recognition of the field involved the establishment of research institutions such as George Mandlers Center for Human Information Processing in 1964. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images, given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do, that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a mans actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the main focus of cognitive psychologists is on the mental processes that affect behavior. Those processes include, but are not limited to, the following, a key function of attention is to identify irrelevant data and filter it out, enabling significant data to be distributed to the other mental processes. For example, the brain may simultaneously receive auditory, visual, olfactory, taste. The brain is able to only a small subset of this information. Endogenous control works top-down and is the more deliberate attentional system, responsible for attention, divided attention, local and global attention. Attention tends to be visual or auditory
8.
Social psychology
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Social psychology is the scientific study of how peoples thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. In this definition, scientific refers to the method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all psychological variables that are measurable in a human being, Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the interaction of mental states and immediate social situations. Social psychology is a discipline that had traditionally bridged the gap between psychology and sociology, during the years immediately following World War II there was frequent collaboration between psychologists and sociologists. However, the two disciplines have become increasingly specialized and isolated from other in recent years, with sociologists focusing on macro variables to a much greater extent. Nevertheless, sociological approaches to social psychology remain an important counterpart to psychological research in this area, in addition to the split between psychology and sociology, there has been a somewhat less pronounced difference in emphasis between American social psychologists and European social psychologists. As a generalization, American researchers traditionally have focused more on the individual, however, the discipline had already developed a significant foundation. Following the 18th century, those in the field of social psychology were concerned with developing concrete explanations for different aspects of human nature. They desired to discover concrete cause and effect relationships that explained the social interactions in the world around them, in order to do so, they believed that the scientific method, an empirically based scientific measure, could be applied to human behavior. The first published study in this area was an experiment in 1898 by Norman Triplett, during the 1930s, many Gestalt psychologists, most notably Kurt Lewin, fled to the United States from Nazi Germany. Attitudes and small group phenomena were the most commonly studied topics in this era, during World War II, social psychologists studied persuasion and propaganda for the U. S. military. After the war, researchers interested in a variety of social problems, including gender issues. Most notable, revealing, and contentious of these were the Stanley Milgram shock experiments on obedience to authority, in the sixties, there was growing interest in new topics, such as cognitive dissonance, bystander intervention, and aggression. By the 1970s, however, social psychology in America had reached a crisis, there was heated debate over the ethics of laboratory experimentation, whether or not attitudes really predicted behavior, and how much science could be done in a cultural context. This was also the time when a radical situationist approach challenged the relevance of self, throughout the 1980s and 1990s social psychology reached a more mature level. Two of the social psychology matured in were theories and methods. Careful ethical standards now regulate research, pluralistic and multicultural perspectives have emerged. Modern researchers are interested in many phenomena, but attribution, social cognition, Social psychologists have also maintained their applied interests with contributions in health, environmental, and legal psychology
9.
Decision-making
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This article deals with decision-making as analyzed in psychology. In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several alternative possibilities. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, it may or may not prompt action, decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and preferences of the decision-maker. Decision-making can be regarded as a problem-solving activity terminated by a solution deemed to be satisfactory and it is therefore a process which can be more or less rational or irrational and can be based on explicit or tacit knowledge. Cognitive, the decision-making process regarded as a continuous process integrated in the interaction with the environment, normative, the analysis of individual decisions concerned with the logic of decision-making, or communicative rationality, and the invariant choice it leads to. A major part of decision-making involves the analysis of a set of alternatives described in terms of evaluative criteria. Then the task might be to rank these alternatives in terms of how attractive they are to the decision-maker when all the criteria are considered simultaneously. Another task might be to find the best alternative or to determine the relative priority of each alternative when all the criteria are considered simultaneously. Solving such problems is the focus of multiple-criteria decision analysis and this leads to the formulation of a decision-making paradox. Logical decision-making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in an area to make informed decisions. For example, medical decision-making often involves a diagnosis and the selection of appropriate treatment and they may follow a recognition primed decision that fits their experience and arrive at a course of action without weighing alternatives. The decision-makers environment can play a part in the decision-making process, for example, environmental complexity is a factor that influences cognitive function. A complex environment is an environment with a number of different possible states which come. Studies done at the University of Colorado have shown that more complex environments correlate with cognitive function. One experiment measured complexity in a room by the number of objects and appliances present. Cognitive function was greatly affected by the measure of environmental complexity making it easier to think about the situation. Research about decision-making is also published under the label problem solving and it is important to differentiate between problem analysis and decision-making. Traditionally, it is argued that problem analysis must be done first, information overload is a gap between the volume of information and the tools we have to assimilate it
10.
Behavioral economics
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Risk tolerance is a crucial factor in personal financial decision making. Risk tolerance is defined as individuals willingness to engage in a financial activity whose outcome is uncertain, Behavioral economics is primarily concerned with the bounds of rationality of economic agents. Behavioral models typically integrate insights from psychology, neuroscience and microeconomic theory, in so doing, these behavioral models cover a range of concepts, methods, the study of behavioral economics includes how market decisions are made and the mechanisms that drive public choice. The use of the term behavioral economics in U. S. scholarly papers has increased in the past few years, there are three prevalent themes in behavioral finances, Heuristics, People often make decisions based on approximate rules of thumb and not strict logic. Framing, The collection of anecdotes and stereotypes that make up the mental emotional filters individuals rely on to understand and respond to events, Market inefficiencies, These include mis-pricings and non-rational decision making. During the classical period of economics, microeconomics was closely linked to psychology and they developed the concept of homo economicus, whose psychology was fundamentally rational. However, many important neo-classical economists employed more sophisticated psychological explanations, including Francis Edgeworth, Vilfredo Pareto, Economic psychology emerged in the 20th century in the works of Gabriel Tarde, George Katona, and Laszlo Garai. Expected utility and discounted utility models began to gain acceptance, generating testable hypotheses about decision-making given uncertainty and intertemporal consumption, in the 1960s cognitive psychology began to shed more light on the brain as an information processing device. In mathematical psychology, there is a longstanding interest in the transitivity of preference, prospect theory has two stages, an editing stage and an evaluation stage. In the editing stage, risky situations are simplified using various heuristics of choice, outcomes are then compared to the reference point and classified as gains if greater than the reference point and losses if less than the reference point. Loss aversion, Losses bite more than equivalent gains, in their 1979 paper published in Econometrica, Kahneman and Tversky found the median coefficient of loss aversion to be about 2.25, i. e. losses bite about 2.25 times more than equivalent gains. Prospect theory is able to explain everything that the two main existing decision theories—expected utility theory and rank dependent utility theory—can explain, prospect theory has been used to explain a range of phenomena that existing decision theories have great difficulty in explaining. These include backward bending labor supply curves, asymmetric price elasticities, tax evasion, co-movement of stock prices and consumption, in 1992, in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Kahneman and Tversky gave their revised account of prospect theory that they called cumulative prospect theory. The new theory eliminated the editing phase in prospect theory and focused just on the evaluation phase and its main feature was that it allowed for non-linear probability weighting in a cumulative manner, which was originally suggested in John Quiggins rank dependent utility theory. Psychological traits such as overconfidence, projection bias, and the effects of limited attention are now part of the theory, Behavioral economics has also been applied to intertemporal choice. Intertemporal choice is defined as making a decision and having the effects of such decision happening in a different time, hyperbolic discounting describes the tendency to discount outcomes in the near future more than for outcomes in the far future. Other branches of behavioral economics enrich the model of the utility function without implying inconsistency in preferences, ernst Fehr, Armin Falk, and Matthew Rabin studied fairness, inequity aversion, and reciprocal altruism, weakening the neoclassical assumption of perfect selfishness. This work is particularly applicable to wage setting, Behavioral economics caught on among the general public with the success of books such as Dan Arielys Predictably Irrational
11.
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
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Its philosophical position is one of scientific skepticism. CSIs fellows have included notable scientists, Nobel laureates, philosophers, psychologists and it is headquartered in Amherst, New York. In the early 1970s, there was an upsurge of interest in the paranormal in the United States and this generated concern in some quarters, where it was seen as part of a growing tide of irrationalism. According to Kurtz, the statement was sent to every newspaper in the United States, Kurtz, Randi, Gardner and Hyman took seats on the executive board. CSICOP was officially launched at a specially convened conference of the AHA on April 30, CSICOP would be funded with donations and sales of their magazine, Skeptical Inquirer. The formal mission statement, approved in 2006 and still current, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry promotes science and scientific inquiry, critical thinking, science education, and the use of reason in examining important issues. A shorter version of the statement appears in every issue. Promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial, a history of the first two decades is available in The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal published in 1998 by S. I. editor Kendrick Frazier. Paul Kurtz was inspired by the 1949 Belgian organization Comité Para, the initial acronym, CSICP was difficult to pronounce and so was changed to CSICOP. According to James Alcock, it was never intended to be Psi Cop, in November 2006, CSICOP further shortened its name to Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, pronounced C-S-I. An axiom often repeated among CSI members is the quote from Carl Sagan. Based on a quote by Marcello Truzzi An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope calls Skeptical Inquirer one of the nations leading antifruitcake journals, in addition, it publishes Skeptical Briefs, a quarterly newsletter published for associate members. CSI conducts and publishes investigations into Bigfoot and UFO sightings, psychics, astrologers, alternative medicine, religious cults, CSICOP has held dozens of conferences between 1983 and 2005, two of them in Europe, and all six World Skeptics Congresses so far were sponsored by it. Since 2011, the conference is known as CSICon, two conventions have been held in conjunction with its sister and parent organizations, CSH and CFI, in 2013 and 2015. CSI has also supported local efforts, such as SkeptiCamp community-organized conferences. Many CSI activities are oriented towards the media, the strategy was twofold, First, to strengthen the hand of skeptics in the media by providing information that debunked paranormal wonders. Second, to serve as a group which would direct public
12.
Bachelor of Arts
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A Bachelor of Arts is a bachelors degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both. Bachelor of Arts degree programs take three to four years depending on the country, academic institution, and specific specializations, majors or minors. The word baccalaureus or baccalarium should not be confused with baccalaureatus, degree diplomas generally are printed on high-quality paper or parchment, individual institutions set the preferred abbreviation for their degrees. In Pakistan, the Bachelor of Arts degree can also be attained within two years as an external degree, in colleges and universities in Australia, New Zealand, Nepal and South Africa, the BA degree can be taken over three years of full-time study. Unlike in other countries, students do not receive a grade for their Bachelor of Arts degree with varying levels of honours. Qualified students may be admitted, after they have achieved their Bachelors program with an overall grade point average. Thus, to achieve a Bachelor Honours degree, a postgraduate year. A student who holds a Honours degree is eligible for entry to either a Doctorate or a very high research Master´s degree program. Education in Canada is controlled by the Provinces and can be different depending on the province in Canada. Canadian universities typically offer a 3-year Bachelor of Arts degrees, in many universities and colleges, Bachelor of Arts degrees are differentiated either as Bachelors of Arts or as honours Bachelor of Arts degree. The honours degrees are designated with the abbreviation in brackets of. It should not be confused with the consecutive Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours, Latin Baccalaureatus in Artibus Cum Honore, BA hon. de jure without brackets and with a dot. It is a degree, which is considered to be the equivalent of a corresponding maîtrise degree under the French influenced system. Going back in history, a three-year Bachelor of Arts degree was called a pass degree or general degree. Students may be required to undertake a long high-quality research empirical thesis combined with a selection of courses from the relevant field of studies. The consecutive B. cum Honore degree is essential if students ultimate goal is to study towards a two- or three-year very high research masters´ degree qualification. A student holding a Baccalaureatus Cum Honore degree also may choose to complete a Doctor of Philosophy program without the requirement to first complete a masters degree, over the years, in some universities certain Baccalaureatus cum Honore programs have been changed to corresponding master´s degrees. In general, in all four countries, the B. A. degree is the standard required for entry into a masters programme, in science, a BA hons degree is generally a prerequisite for entrance to a Ph. D program or a very-high-research-activity master´s programme
13.
Doctor of Philosophy
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A Doctor of Philosophy is a type of doctoral degree awarded by universities in many countries. Ph. D. s are awarded for a range of programs in the sciences, engineering. The Ph. D. is a degree in many fields. The completion of a Ph. D. is often a requirement for employment as a university professor, researcher, individuals with an earned doctorate can use the title of Doctor with their name and use the post-nominal letters Ph. D. The requirements to earn a Ph. D. degree vary considerably according to the country, institution, a person who attains a doctorate of philosophy is automatically awarded the academic title of doctor. A student attaining this level may be granted a Candidate of Philosophy degree at some institutions. A Ph. D. candidate must submit a project, thesis or dissertation often consisting of a body of academic research. In many countries, a candidate must defend this work before a panel of examiners appointed by the university. Universities award other types of doctorates besides the Ph. D. such as the Doctor of Musical Arts, a degree for music performers and the Doctor of Education, in 2016, ELIA launched The Florence Principles on the Doctorate in the Arts. The Florence Principles have been endorsed are supported also by AEC, CILECT, CUMULUS, the degree is abbreviated PhD, from the Latin Philosophiae Doctor, pronounced as three separate letters. In the universities of Medieval Europe, study was organized in four faculties, the faculty of arts. All of these faculties awarded intermediate degrees and final degrees, the doctorates in the higher faculties were quite different from the current Ph. D. degree in that they were awarded for advanced scholarship, not original research. No dissertation or original work was required, only lengthy residency requirements, besides these degrees, there was the licentiate. According to Keith Allan Noble, the first doctoral degree was awarded in medieval Paris around 1150, the doctorate of philosophy developed in Germany as the terminal Teachers credential in the 17th century. Typically, upon completion, the candidate undergoes an oral examination, always public, starting in 2016, in Ukraine Doctor of Philosophy is the highest education level and the first science degree. PhD is awarded in recognition of a contribution to scientific knowledge. A PhD degree is a prerequisite for heading a university department in Ukraine, upon completion of a PhD, a PhD holder can elect to continue his studies and get a post-doctoral degree called Doctor of Sciences, which is the second and the highest science degree in Ukraine. Scandinavian countries were among the early adopters of a known as a doctorate of philosophy
14.
Heuristics in judgment and decision-making
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In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and these rules work well under most circumstances, but they can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability or rational choice theory. The resulting errors are called cognitive biases and many different types have been documented and these have been shown to affect peoples choices in situations like valuing a house, deciding the outcome of a legal case, or making an investment decision. Heuristics usually govern automatic, intuitive judgments but can also be used as deliberate mental strategies when working from limited information, Cognitive scientist Herbert A. Simon originally proposed that human judgments are limited by available information, time contraints, and cognitive limitations, calling this bounded rationality. In the early 1970s, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman demonstrated three heuristics that underlie a range of intuitive judgments. These findings set in motion the heuristics and biases research program, which studies how people make real-world judgments and this research challenged the idea that human beings are rational actors, but provided a theory of information processing to explain how people make estimates or choices. This heuristics-and-biases tradition has been criticised by Gerd Gigerenzer and others for being too focused on how heuristics lead to errors, the critics argue that heuristics can be seen as rational in an underlying sense. According to this perspective, heuristics are good enough for most purposes without being too demanding on the brains resources, another theoretical perspective sees heuristics as fully rational in that they are rapid, can be made without full information and can be as accurate as more complicated procedures. By understanding the role of heuristics in human psychology, marketers and other persuaders can influence decisions, in their initial research, Tversky and Kahneman proposed three heuristics—availability, representativeness, and anchoring and adjustment. Subsequent work has identified many more, Heuristics that underlie judgment are called judgment heuristics. Another type, called heuristics, are used to judge the desirability of possible choices. In psychology, availability is the ease with which an idea can be brought to mind. When people estimate how likely or how frequent an event is on the basis of its availability, when an infrequent event can be brought easily and vividly to mind, people tend to overestimate its likelihood. For example, people overestimate their likelihood of dying in an event such as a tornado or terrorism. Dramatic, violent deaths are more highly publicised and therefore have a higher availability. On the other hand, common but mundane events are hard to bring to mind and these include deaths from suicides, strokes, and diabetes. This heuristic is one of the reasons why people are easily swayed by a single. It may also play a role in the appeal of lotteries, to buying a ticket
15.
Bias
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Bias is an inclination or outlook to present or hold a partial perspective, often accompanied by a refusal to consider the possible merits of alternative points of view. Biases can be learned implicitly within cultural contexts, biased means one-sided, lacking a neutral viewpoint, or not having an open mind. Bias can come in forms and is related to prejudice. In science and engineering, a bias is a systematic error, statistical bias results from an unfair sampling of a population, or from an estimation process that does not give accurate results on average. A cognitive bias is a repeating or basic misstep in thinking, assessing, recollecting and that is, a pattern of deviation from standards in judgment, whereby inferences may be created unreasonably. People create their own subjective social reality from their own perceptions, thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. However some cognitive biases are taken to be adaptive, and thus may lead to success in the appropriate situation, furthermore, cognitive biases may allow speedier choices when speed is more valuable than precision. Other cognitive biases are a by-product of human processing limitations, coming about because of an absence of appropriate mental mechanisms, anchoring is a psychological heuristic that describes the propensity to rely on the first piece of information encountered when making decisions. According to this heuristic, individuals begin with an implicitly suggested reference point, apophenia, also known as patternicity, or agenticity, is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data. Apophenia is well documented as a rationalization for gambling, gamblers may imagine that they see patterns in the numbers which appear in lotteries, card games, or roulette wheels. One manifestation of this is known as the gamblers fallacy, pareidolia is the visual or auditory form of apophenia. It has been suggested that combined with hierophany may have helped ancient societies organize chaos. An attribution bias can happen when individuals assess or attempt to discover explanations behind their own, people make attributions about the causes of their own and others’ behaviors, but these attributions dont necessarily precisely reflect reality. Rather than operating as objective perceivers, individuals are inclined to perceptual slips that prompt biased understandings of their social world, there are a wide range of sorts of attribution biases, such as the ultimate attribution error, fundamental attribution error, actor-observer bias, and self-serving bias. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs, people also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization, belief perseverance, confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts, framing involves the social construction of social phenomena by mass media sources, political or social movements, political leaders, and so on. It is an influence over how people organize, perceive, and it can be positive or negative - depending on the audience and what kind of information is being presented
16.
H-index
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The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientists most cited papers, the index can also be applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, the definition of the index is that a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least h times. Thus, the h-index reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication, the index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications. The index works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field, formally, if f is the function that corresponds to the number of citations for each publication, we compute the h index as follows. First we order the values of f from the largest to the lowest value, then, we look for the last position in which f is greater than or equal to the position. In contrast, if the same publications have 25,8,5,3, then, the most common index of number of citations of an author can be seen as a Choquet integral of the same function f. The Hirsch index is equivalent to the Eddington number, a metric used for evaluating cyclists. The h-index serves as an alternative to more traditional journal impact factor metrics in the evaluation of the impact of the work of a particular researcher, because only the most highly cited articles contribute to the h-index, its determination is a simpler process. Hirsch has demonstrated that h has high value for whether a scientist has won honors like National Academy membership or the Nobel Prize. The h-index grows as citations accumulate and thus it depends on the age of a researcher. The h-index can be determined using citation databases or using automatic tools. Subscription-based databases such as Scopus and the Web of Knowledge provide automated calculators, harzings Publish or Perish program calculates the h-index based on Google Scholar entries. From July 2011 Google have provided an automatically-calculated h-index and i10-index within their own Google Scholar profile, in addition, specific databases, such as the INSPIRE-HEP database can automatically calculate the h-index for researchers working in high energy physics. Each database is likely to produce a different h for the same scholar, a detailed study showed that the Web of Knowledge has strong coverage of journal publications, but poor coverage of high impact conferences. The exclusion of conference papers is a particular problem for scholars in computer science. Google Scholar has been criticized for producing phantom citations, including gray literature in its citation counts, Hirsch suggested that, for physicists, a value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure at major research universities. The London School of Economics found that professors in the social sciences had average h-indices ranging from 2.8
17.
Skeptical Inquirer
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Skeptical Inquirer is a bimonthly American magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry with the subtitle, The Magazine for Science and Reason. In 2016 it celebrated its fortieth anniversary, for most of its existence, the Skeptical Inquirer was published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, widely known by its acronym CSICOP. In 2006 the CSICOP Executive Council shortened CSICOP’s name to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the formal mission statement, approved in 2006 and still current, states that. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry promotes science and scientific inquiry, critical thinking, science education, a shorter version of the mission statement appears in every issue, “. Promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial, a history of the first two decades is available in The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal published in 1998 by S. I. editor Kendrick Frazier. The magazine was originally titled The Zetetic and was edited by Marcello Truzzi. The first issue was dated Fall/Winter 1976, soon after its inception a schism developed between the editor Truzzi and the rest of CSICOP. One side was more opposed to nonsense, more willing to go on the offensive and to attack supernatural claims. Truzzi left to start The Zetetic Scholar and CSICOP changed the name to Skeptical Inquirer. In 1977 Kendrick Frazier was appointed editor and he had previously been editor of Science News for six years. Kurtz noted that there had been “tremendous public fascination with the paranormal” and it was promoted and sensationalized by an irresponsible media. ”He stressed that “Our interest was not simply in the paranormal curiosity shop but to increase an understanding of how science works. ”Historian Daniel Loxton speculates on the answer to the question that if CSICOP was not the first skeptical publication. Loxton writes that it was because CSICOP organized this scholarship collectively comprised a field of study. The organization was the first to establish best practices, periodicals and professional writers and researchers. In the 1978 Spring and Summer edition, it was announced that the next issue publication would move from semi-annual to quarterly. From 1976 to 1995 the magazine had a digest-sized format, the U. K. magazine The Skeptic was first published in close association with SI. In 2014 the British version was handed back to the U. K. Skeptics, according to Kurtz, in the first twenty years, the magazine attempted to focus on the paranormal. Solving mysteries that were outside the range of normal, frogs dropping from the sky, UFO abductions, cattle mutilations, readers expected the magazine to have explanations. Kurtz states that these were exciting years, especially working with magicians who would often replicate the paranormal claim, the magazine often received criticism from the paranormal community, that they were being made fun of
18.
Carl Sagan
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Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known for his work as a science popularizer and his best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan argued the now accepted hypothesis that the surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to. Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He wrote many science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Brocas Brain and Pale Blue Dot. The most widely watched series in the history of American public television, the book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name and his papers, containing 595,000 items, are archived at The Library of Congress. Sagan always advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the method, pioneered exobiology. He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University and he married three times and had five children. After suffering from myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then Russian Empire and his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. Carl was named in honor of Rachels biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagans words and he had a sister, Carol, and the family lived in a modest apartment near the Atlantic Ocean, in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood. According to Sagan, they were Reform Jews, the most liberal of North American Judaisms four main groups, both Sagan and his sister agreed that their father was not especially religious, but that their mother definitely believed in God, and was active in the temple. During the depths of the Depression, his father worked as a theater usher, according to biographer Keay Davidson, Sagans inner war was a result of his close relationship with both of his parents, who were in many ways opposites. Sagan traced his later analytical urges to his mother, a woman who had extremely poor as a child in New York City during World War I. As a young woman she had held her own ambitions, but they were frustrated by social restrictions, her poverty, her status as a woman and a wife. Davidson notes that she therefore worshipped her only son, Carl and he would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams. However, he claimed that his sense of wonder came from his father, in his free time he gave apples to the poor or helped soothe labor-management tensions within New Yorks garment industry
19.
The New York Times
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The New York Times is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since September 18,1851, by The New York Times Company. The New York Times has won 119 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper, the papers print version in 2013 had the second-largest circulation, behind The Wall Street Journal, and the largest circulation among the metropolitan newspapers in the US. The New York Times is ranked 18th in the world by circulation, following industry trends, its weekday circulation had fallen in 2009 to fewer than one million. Nicknamed The Gray Lady, The New York Times has long been regarded within the industry as a newspaper of record. The New York Times international version, formerly the International Herald Tribune, is now called the New York Times International Edition, the papers motto, All the News Thats Fit to Print, appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page. On Sunday, The New York Times is supplemented by the Sunday Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine and T, some other early investors of the company were Edwin B. Morgan and Edward B. We do not believe that everything in Society is either right or exactly wrong, —what is good we desire to preserve and improve, —what is evil, to exterminate. In 1852, the started a western division, The Times of California that arrived whenever a mail boat got to California. However, when local California newspapers came into prominence, the effort failed, the newspaper shortened its name to The New-York Times in 1857. It dropped the hyphen in the city name in the 1890s, One of the earliest public controversies it was involved with was the Mortara Affair, the subject of twenty editorials it published alone. At Newspaper Row, across from City Hall, Henry Raymond, owner and editor of The New York Times, averted the rioters with Gatling guns, in 1869, Raymond died, and George Jones took over as publisher. Tweed offered The New York Times five million dollars to not publish the story, in the 1880s, The New York Times transitioned gradually from editorially supporting Republican Party candidates to becoming more politically independent and analytical. In 1884, the paper supported Democrat Grover Cleveland in his first presidential campaign, while this move cost The New York Times readership among its more progressive and Republican readers, the paper eventually regained most of its lost ground within a few years. However, the newspaper was financially crippled by the Panic of 1893, the paper slowly acquired a reputation for even-handedness and accurate modern reporting, especially by the 1890s under the guidance of Ochs. Under Ochs guidance, continuing and expanding upon the Henry Raymond tradition, The New York Times achieved international scope, circulation, in 1910, the first air delivery of The New York Times to Philadelphia began. The New York Times first trans-Atlantic delivery by air to London occurred in 1919 by dirigible, airplane Edition was sent by plane to Chicago so it could be in the hands of Republican convention delegates by evening. In the 1940s, the extended its breadth and reach. The crossword began appearing regularly in 1942, and the section in 1946
20.
George Johnson (writer)
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George Johnson is an American journalist and science writer. He is a winner of the science journalism award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His books have been short-listed three times for the Royal Society science book prize and his column, Raw Data, appears in The New York Times. Johnson is one of the co-hosts of Science Faction, a discussion on the website Bloggingheads. tv. Several prominent scientists, philosophers, and bloggers have been interviewed for the site, on Thursday, May 7,2008, Johnson appeared on the Stephen Colbert show to promote his new book, entitled The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. During his appearance, Johnson convinced Colbert to touch the spark produced by one of the electricity experiments, Colbert shocked his hand yelling obscenities that were bleeped out but appeared to be fine after the incident. The Cancer Chronicles, Unlocking Medicines Deepest Mystery, miss Leavitts Stars, The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. James Atlas Books/Norton,2005, about Henrietta Leavitt A Shortcut Through Time, Strange Beauty, Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics. Vintage paperback,2000, about Murray Gell-Mann Fire in the Mind, Science, Faith, in the Palaces of Memory, How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads. Machinery of the Mind, Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence, architects of Fear, Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. His ninth book The Cancer Chronicles, Unlocking Medicines Deepest Mystery was on the shortlist for the 2014 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Previously shortlisted for the prize were Strange Beauty, Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics and Fire in the Mind, Science, Faith, in 2014 three of his pieces for The New York Times about the science of cancer won the AAAS Science Journalism Award. He won the award in 2000 for three articles about complexity and high-energy physics, george Johnsons home page Interviews/Discussions on Bloggingheads. tv New York Times author index page
21.
Confirmation bias
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Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms ones preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, the effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position, biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization, belief perseverance, the irrational primacy effect and illusory correlation. A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs, later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias peoples conclusions, explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts, confirmation biases are effects in information processing. Others apply the more broadly to the tendency to preserve ones existing beliefs when searching for evidence, interpreting it. Experiments have found repeatedly that people tend to test hypotheses in a one-sided way, rather than searching through all the relevant evidence, they phrase questions to receive an affirmative answer that supports their theory. They look for the consequences that they would expect if their hypothesis were true, for example, someone using yes/no questions to find a number he or she suspects to be the number 3 might ask, Is it an odd number. People prefer this type of question, called a positive test, would yield exactly the same information. However, this does not mean that people seek tests that guarantee a positive answer, in studies where subjects could select either such pseudo-tests or genuinely diagnostic ones, they favored the genuinely diagnostic. The preference for positive tests in itself is not a bias, however, in combination with other effects, this strategy can confirm existing beliefs or assumptions, independently of whether they are true. In real-world situations, evidence is often complex and mixed, for example, various contradictory ideas about someone could each be supported by concentrating on one aspect of his or her behavior. Thus any search for evidence in favor of a hypothesis is likely to succeed, one illustration of this is the way the phrasing of a question can significantly change the answer. For example, people who are asked, Are you happy with your social life, report greater satisfaction than those asked, Are you unhappy with your social life. Even a small change in a questions wording can affect how people search through available information and this was shown using a fictional child custody case
22.
Steven Novella
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Steven Paul Novella is an American clinical neurologist and assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine. Novella is best known for his involvement in the skeptical movement, growing up, Novella did not always want to be a physician. In an interview for the Books and Ideas podcast he said, I think I entertained various career ideas. When I was growing up I thought about being a lawyer for a while and then by the time I went to college, I knew I wanted to go into a science background, so certainly by then I had decided that that’s probably what I wanted to do. So I would probably say in my late teens is when I really decided to go into medicine. Regarding a career in medicine he said, The good thing about medicine is that late in the game theres lots of career paths open to you. After youre basically done with training, you could decide to be basically clinical or to do mainly research or to even go into industry or to do public health. Novella is a proponent of scientific skepticism and it just follows the methods as if it is naturalistic. It is not a system of beliefs, people often ask me and they will ask you as skeptics what do you believe. It doesnt matter if I believe in ESP, the only thing that matters is what is the evidence for ESP. Its very important I think to present skepticism as a method of inquiry not a set of conclusions, not a set of beliefs. In 1996 Novella, his brother Bob, and Perry DeAngelis founded The Connecticut Skeptical Society, as Evan Bernstein tells it, One night sometime in late 1995, Perry was over Steves condo, casually flipping through a copy of SI. He was reading through the list of groups, and commented to Steve. The group later joined with the Skeptical Inquirers of New England, Novella currently serves as president of the NESS. In the early days of the New England Skeptical Society, Novella participated in investigations of paranormal claims. Sometimes these were part of the process for the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge offered by the James Randi Educational Foundation. Novella investigated such claims as Ouija boards, the ability to control the flipping of a coin, a reader who got zero out of 20 correct. In May 2005, Novella started the The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast with his friends Perry DeAngelis and Evan Bernstein, in July 2006, Rebecca Watson joined the podcast as a regular. Novella both hosts the show and does the editing and post-production
23.
Barry Manilow
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Barry Manilow is an American singer-songwriter, arranger, musician, and producer with a career that has spanned over 50 years. He is best known for a string of hit recordings such as Mandy, Cant Smile Without You. He has recorded and released 47 Top 40 singles, including 12 that hit number one and 27 of which appeared within the top ten, and has released many multi-platinum albums. He is ranked as the top Adult Contemporary chart artist of all time, according to R&R and Billboard magazines, Manilow has been praised by several well-known entertainers, including Sinatra, who was quoted in the 1970s saying, Hes next. In 1988, Bob Dylan stopped Manilow at a party, hugged him and said, Dont stop what youre doing, as well as producing and arranging albums for other artists, including Bette Midler and Dionne Warwick, Manilow has written songs for musicals, films, and commercials. From February 2005 to December 2009, he was the headliner at the Las Vegas Hilton, since March 2010, he has headlined at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. He has sold more than 80 million records worldwide, making him one of the worlds best-selling artists of all time, Manilow was born Barry Alan Pincus on June 17,1943, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Edna Manilow and Harold Pincus. His father was born to a Jewish father and an Irish-American Catholic mother, Barry adopted his mothers maiden name, Manilow, at the time of his bar mitzvah. Manilow grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and attended Eastern District High School and that same year, he enrolled in the City College of New York where he briefly studied before entering the New York College of Music. He also worked at CBS while he was a student in order to pay his expenses, according to one source, he married Susan Deixler that year, with the marriage lasting only one year. Another source says Manilow got an annulment from Deixler in 1966 after two years of marriage and he later studied Musical Theater at the Juilliard performing arts school. In 1964, Manilow met Bro Herrod, a CBS director, instead, Manilow wrote an entire original score. Herrod used Manilows composition in the Off Broadway musical, which enjoyed a run at New Yorks 13th Street Theatre. Manilow then earned money by working as a pianist, producer and arranger, during this time, he began to work as a commercial jingle writer, continuing well into the 1970s. Many of the jingles he wrote and/or composed he would perform, including State Farm Insurance. A1965 Polaroid Swinger commercial featuring Manilows Meet The Swinger jingle starred a young Ali MacGraw and his singing-only credits include commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, and the famed McDonalds You Deserve a Break Today campaign. Manilow won two Clio Awards in 1976 for his work for Tab and Band-Aid, by 1967, Manilow was the musical director for the WCBS-TV series Callback, which premiered on January 27,1968. He next conducted and arranged for Ed Sullivans production company, arranging a new theme for The Late Show, while writing, producing, and singing his radio and television jingles
24.
Democratic Party (United States)
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The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The Democrats dominant worldview was once socially conservative and fiscally classical liberalism, while, especially in the rural South, since Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal coalition in the 1930s, the Democratic Party has also promoted a social-liberal platform, supporting social justice. Today, the House Democratic caucus is composed mostly of progressives and centrists, the partys philosophy of modern liberalism advocates social and economic equality, along with the welfare state. It seeks to provide government intervention and regulation in the economy, the party has united with smaller left-wing regional parties throughout the country, such as the Farmer–Labor Party in Minnesota and the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota. Well into the 20th century, the party had conservative pro-business, the New Deal Coalition of 1932–1964 attracted strong support from voters of recent European extraction—many of whom were Catholics based in the cities. After Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal of the 1930s, the pro-business wing withered outside the South, after the racial turmoil of the 1960s, most southern whites and many northern Catholics moved into the Republican Party at the presidential level. The once-powerful labor union element became smaller and less supportive after the 1970s, white Evangelicals and Southerners became heavily Republican at the state and local level in the 1990s. However, African Americans became a major Democratic element after 1964, after 2000, Hispanic and Latino Americans, Asian Americans, the LGBT community, single women and professional women moved towards the party as well. The Northeast and the West Coast became Democratic strongholds by 1990 after the Republicans stopped appealing to socially liberal voters there, overall, the Democratic Party has retained a membership lead over its major rival the Republican Party. The most recent was the 44th president Barack Obama, who held the office from 2009 to 2017, in the 115th Congress, following the 2016 elections, Democrats are the opposition party, holding a minority of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The party also holds a minority of governorships, and state legislatures, though they do control the mayoralty of cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Washington, D. C. The Democratic Party traces its origins to the inspiration of the Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and that party also inspired the Whigs and modern Republicans. Organizationally, the modern Democratic Party truly arose in the 1830s, since the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the party has generally positioned itself to the left of the Republican Party on economic issues. They have been liberal on civil rights issues since 1948. On foreign policy both parties changed position several times and that party, the Democratic-Republican Party, came to power in the election of 1800. After the War of 1812 the Federalists virtually disappeared and the national political party left was the Democratic-Republicans. The Democratic-Republican party still had its own factions, however. As Norton explains the transformation in 1828, Jacksonians believed the peoples will had finally prevailed, through a lavishly financed coalition of state parties, political leaders, and newspaper editors, a popular movement had elected the president
25.
Republican Party (United States)
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The Republican Party, commonly referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, the other being its historic rival, the Democratic Party. The party is named after republicanism, the dominant value during the American Revolution and it was founded by anti-slavery activists, modernists, ex-Whigs, and ex-Free Soilers in 1854. The Republicans dominated politics nationally and in the majority of northern States for most of the period between 1860 and 1932, there have been 19 Republican presidents, the most from any one party. The Republican Partys current ideology is American conservatism, which contrasts with the Democrats more progressive platform, further, its platform involves support for free market capitalism, free enterprise, fiscal conservatism, a strong national defense, deregulation, and restrictions on labor unions. In addition to advocating for economic policies, the Republican Party is socially conservative. As of 2017, the GOP is documented as being at its strongest position politically since 1928, in addition to holding the Presidency, the Republicans control the 115th United States Congress, having majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The party also holds a majority of governorships and state legislatures, the main cause was opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise by which slavery was kept out of Kansas. The Northern Republicans saw the expansion of slavery as a great evil, the first public meeting of the general anti-Nebraska movement where the name Republican was suggested for a new anti-slavery party was held on March 20,1854, in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. The name was chosen to pay homage to Thomas Jeffersons Republican Party. The first official party convention was held on July 6,1854, in Jackson and it oversaw the preserving of the union, the end of slavery, and the provision of equal rights to all men in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861–1877. The Republicans initial base was in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, with the realignment of parties and voters in the Third Party System, the strong run of John C. Fremont in the 1856 United States presidential election demonstrated it dominated most northern states, early Republican ideology was reflected in the 1856 slogan free labor, free land, free men, which had been coined by Salmon P. Chase, a Senator from Ohio. Free labor referred to the Republican opposition to labor and belief in independent artisans. Free land referred to Republican opposition to the system whereby slaveowners could buy up all the good farm land. The Party strove to contain the expansion of slavery, which would cause the collapse of the slave power, Lincoln, representing the fast-growing western states, won the Republican nomination in 1860 and subsequently won the presidency. The party took on the mission of preserving the Union, and destroying slavery during the American Civil War, in the election of 1864, it united with War Democrats to nominate Lincoln on the National Union Party ticket. The partys success created factionalism within the party in the 1870s and those who felt that Reconstruction had been accomplished and was continued mostly to promote the large-scale corruption tolerated by President Ulysses S. Grant ran Horace Greeley for the presidency. The Stalwarts defended Grant and the system, the Half-Breeds led by Chester A. Arthur pushed for reform of the civil service in 1883
26.
Electoral college
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An electoral college is a set of electors who are selected to elect a candidate to a particular office. Many times, though, the electors are simply important people whose wisdom would ideally provide a choice than a larger body. The system can ignore the wishes of a general membership, early Germanic law stated that the German king led only with the support of his nobles. Thus, Pelagius needed to be elected by his Visigothic nobles before becoming king of Asturias, in the Church, both the clergy and laity elected the bishop or presiding presbyter. In the Popes case, the system of people and clergy was eventually replaced by a college of the important clergy of Rome, since 1059, it has had exclusive authority over papal selection. In the 19th century and beyond, it was usual in many countries that voters did not directly vote the members of parliament, in Prussia for example, in 1849–1918 the voters were Urwähler, appointing with their vote a Wahlmann. The group of electors in a district elected the deputy for the Prussian House of Representatives, such indirect suffrage was a means to steer the voting, to make sure that the electors were able persons. For electors, the requirements were higher than for the original voters. The left wing opposition was much opposed to indirect suffrage. Even today in the Netherlands, the deputies of the First Chamber are elected by the provincial parliaments and those provincial parliaments form the electoral colleges for the First Chamber elections, the lists of candidates are national. Countries with complex regional electorates may elect a head of state by means of a college rather than a direct popular election. In the sovereign Holy See, with the Vatican City as sovereign territory, the United States Electoral College is an example of a system in which an executive president is indirectly elected, with electors representing the 50 states and the federal district. Each state has a number of equal to its Congressional representation. The electors generally cast their votes for the winner of the vote in their respective states. However, there are states where this is not required by law. In the United States,270 electoral votes are required to win the presidential election. Similar systems are used in presidential elections around the world. In Italy the presidential electoral college is composed of the members of houses of Parliament and three members elected by each of the regional assemblies
27.
Regret
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Regret is a negative conscious and emotional reaction to personal past acts and behaviors. Regret is often a feeling of sadness, shame, embarrassment, depression, annoyance, or guilt, regret is distinct from guilt, which is a deeply emotional form of regret — one which may be difficult to comprehend in an objective or conceptual way. In this regard, the concept of regret is subordinate to guilt in terms of its emotional intensity, by comparison, shame typically refers to the social aspect of guilt or regret as imposed by the society or culture, which has substantial bearing in matters of honor. It is also distinct from remorse, which is direct and emotional form of regret over a past action that is considered by society to be hurtful, shameful. Unlike regret, it includes an element of desire for apology to others rather than an internal reflection on ones actions. Regret can describe not only the dislike for an action that has been committed, many people find themselves wishing that they had done something in a past situation. There are extremely specific models of mostly in economics and finance under a new field called behavioral economics. Of these, the most clearly emotional is buyers remorse, also called buyers regret, other examples include regret aversion or more generally, regret. People who have antisocial personality disorder and dissocial personality disorder are incapable of feeling regret or remorse, meta-analysis involving what we regret most has concluded that overall, Americans regret choices regarding their education the most. Subsequent rankings then include decisions about career, romance, and parenting, education was the forerunner of regret in a number of different studies. This finding can be attributed to the opportunity principle, Opportunity principle defines peoples biggest regrets as those marked by the greatest opportunity for corrective action. When the opportunity to improve conditions is nonexistent, cognitive processes proceed to mitigate regret, with the rise of community colleges and student aid programs in recent decades, education of some sort is accessible to nearly all socioeconomic groups. Regret pushes people toward revised decision making and corrective action that often bring improvement in life circumstances, a study measured regret in accordance to negative reviews with service providers. It was concluded that regret was a predictor of who switched providers. Regret can be seen as an evolutionary development, as more intense regret is experienced, the likelihood of initiating change is increased. Consequently, the opportunity of corrective action available, the larger the regret felt. In response to the opportunity principle, the lost opportunity principle directly opposes its views, people who habitually consider future consequences experience less, rather than more, intense regret after a negative outcome. This principle offers another reason as to why education is the most regretted aspect in life, education becomes a more limited opportunity as time passes
28.
Anchoring
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Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use a piece of information to make subsequent judgments. Once an anchor is set, other judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, the focusing effect is a cognitive bias that occurs when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event, causing an error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome. People focus on differences, excluding those that are less conspicuous. A rise in income has only a small and transient effect on happiness and well-being, Kahneman et al. proposed that this is a result of a focusing illusion, with people focusing on conventional measures of achievement rather than on everyday routine. Anchoring and adjustment is a heuristic that influences the way people intuitively assess probabilities. According to this heuristic, people start with an implicitly suggested reference point, a person begins with a first approximation and then makes incremental adjustments based on additional information. These adjustments are usually insufficient, giving the initial anchor a great deal of influence over future assessments, the anchoring and adjustment heuristic was first theorized by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Because participants did not have time to calculate the full answer. In another study by Tversky and Kahneman, participants observed a roulette wheel that was predetermined to stop on either 10 or 65, participants were then asked to guess the percentage of the United Nations that were African nations. Participants whose wheel stopped on 10 guessed lower values than participants whose wheel stopped at 65, the pattern has held in other experiments for a wide variety of different subjects of estimation. Various studies have shown that anchoring is very difficult to avoid, for example, in one study students were given anchors that were obviously wrong. They were asked whether Mahatma Gandhi died before or after age 9, clearly neither of these anchors can be correct, but the two groups still guessed significantly differently. Other studies have tried to eliminate anchoring much more directly, in a study exploring the causes and properties of anchoring, participants were exposed to an anchor and asked to guess how many physicians were listed in the local phone book. In addition, they were informed that anchoring would contaminate their responses. A control group received no anchor and no explanation, regardless of how they were informed and whether they were informed correctly, all of the experimental groups reported higher estimates than the control group. Thus, despite being aware of the anchoring effect, participants were still unable to avoid it. A later study found even when offered monetary incentives, people are unable to effectively adjust from an anchor
29.
Brian Lehrer
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Brian Lehrer is an American radio talk show host on New York Citys public radio station WNYC. His daily two-hour 2007 Peabody Award-winning program, The Brian Lehrer Show, features interviews with newsmakers and experts about current events, Lehrer was formerly an anchor and reporter for NBC Radio Networks, and has been in broadcast journalism for more than 20 years. Lehrer also hosts a weekly tech- and web-oriented television show, BrianLehrer. TV on CUNY TV, Lehrer obtained B. A. degrees in Music and Mass Communications from the State University of New York at Albany. While a student there, he hosted a program on the college radio station WSUA which has since become WCDB Albany. He holds a Master of Public Health degree from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Lehrer resides in Inwood, Manhattan with his two sons. Lehrer has been hosting his show, originally called On The Line, the format is interviews with newsmakers, combined with listener phone calls. But sometimes guests are less-famous individuals affected by the news, like Brooklyn residents on the site of giant housing developments and his programs often use The New York Times for leads and guests. He tries to maintain a balance between issues as they affect listeners, and horse-race pundit discussions of politics and it won a 2007 Peabody Award for facilitating reasoned conversation about critical issues and opening it up to everyone within earshot. Sometimes you have to ask that question that may not be what the guest wants. For example, in 2003, Lehrer interviewed Iraqi foreign minister Adnan Pachachi, a caller from Iraq said that he would not recognize the Iraqi government because it was installed by the American government. Pachachi answered the question, but angrily responded, I find it extraordinary that you people like that to use these airways. In another example, Lehrer asked Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OConnor and this was appropriate, he said, because 75% of the New York vote went for Al Gore in the 2000 election. Be ready to turn on a dime, for example, during the New York City blackout, the stations main power went out. Research includes getting out and talking to people, taxi drivers are a font of information. If a subject provokes discussion, its going to work on the radio. For example, one subject is parenting kids in the City. One successful segment was about a mother who allowed her 9-year-old son to travel alone on the subway, audience call-ins are an important resource for good programs. Successful call-ins were about first-time voters, how it is to live with HIV, how religion affects your politics, your environmental sins, one listener suggested renaming Citi Field to Debits Field
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Economic inequality
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Economic inequality is the difference found in various measures of economic well-being among individuals in a group, among groups in a population, or among countries. Economic inequality is sometimes called income inequality, wealth inequality, or the wealth gap, economists generally focus on economic disparity in three metrics, wealth, income, and consumption. The issue of inequality is relevant to notions of equity, equality of outcome. Economic inequality varies between societies, historical periods, economic structures and systems, the term can refer to cross-sectional distribution of income or wealth at any particular period, or to changes of income and wealth over longer periods of time. There are various numerical indices for measuring economic inequality, a widely used index is the Gini coefficient, but there are also many other methods. Some studies say economic inequality is a problem, for example too much inequality can be destructive. However, too much income equality is also destructive since it decreases the incentive for productivity, the first set of income distribution statistics for the United States covering the period from was published in 1952 by Simon Kuznets, Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings. It relied on US federal income tax returns and Kuznets’s own estimates of US national income, National Income, economists generally consider three metrics of economic dispersion, wealth, income, and consumption. A skilled professional may have low wealth and low income as student, low wealth and high earnings in the beginning of the career, peoples preferences determine whether they consume earnings immediately or defer consumption to the future. The distinction is important at the level of economy, There are economies with high income inequality. There are economies with low income inequality and high wealth inequality. There are different ways to measure income inequality and wealth inequality, Different choices lead to different results. g. Annual wages, including wages from part-time work or work during only part of the year, individual earnings inequality among all workers – Includes the self-employed. Individual earnings inequality among the entire working-age population – Includes those who are inactive, e. g. students, unemployed, early pensioners, household earnings inequality – Includes the earnings of all household members. Household market income inequality – Includes incomes from capital, savings, household disposable income inequality – Includes public cash transfers received and direct taxes paid. Household adjusted disposable income inequality – Includes publicly provided services, There are many challenges in comparing data between economies, or in a single economy in different years. Examples of challenges include, Data can be based on joint taxation of couples or individual taxation, the tax authorities generally only collect information on income that is potentially taxable. The precise definition of income varies from country to country
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Motivation
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Motivation is a theoretical construct used to explain behaviour. It gives the reason for actions, desires, and needs. Motivation can also be defined as ones direction to behavior, or what causes a person to want to repeat a behavior, a motive is what prompts the person to act in a certain way, or at least develop an inclination for specific behavior. According to Maehr and Meyer, Motivation is a word that is part of the culture as few other psychological concepts are. Motivation theories can be classified on a number of bases, Natural vs. Rational, content vs. Process, based on whether the focus is on the content motivates vs process motivation takes place. This type of motivation has neurobiological roots in the basal ganglia, activated seeking behavior, such as locomotor activity is influenced by dopaminergic drugs, and in micro dialysis reveals dopamine release during anticipation of a reward. The wanting behavior associated with a stimulus can be increased by microinjections of dopamine and dopaminergic drugs in the dorsorostral nucleus accumbens. Opioid injections in this area produce pleasure, however outside of these hedonic hotspots they create an increased desire, furthermore, depletion or inhibition of DA in neurons of the nucleus accumbens decreases appetitive but not consummatory behavior. Dopamine is further implicated in motivation as administration of amphetamine increased the break point in a progressive ratio self-reinforcement schedule and that is, subjects were willing to go to greater lengths to obtain a reward. Motivation can be conceived of as a cycle in which thoughts influence behaviors, behaviors drive performance, performance affects thoughts, and the cycle begins again. Each stage of the cycle is composed of many dimensions including attitudes, beliefs, intentions, effort, the idea that human beings are rational and human behavior is guided by reason is an old one. However, recent research has significantly undermined the idea of homo economicus or of perfect rationality in favour of a more bounded rationality, the field of behavioural economics is particularly concerned with the limits of rationality in economic agents. Motivation can be divided into two different theories known as intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, Intrinsic motivation has been studied since the early 1970s. Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire to seek out new things and new challenges, to analyze ones capacity, to observe and it is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on external pressures or a desire for consideration. The phenomenon of intrinsic motivation was first acknowledged within experimental studies of animal behavior, in these studies, it was evident that the organisms would engage in playful and curiosity driven behaviors in the absence of reward. Intrinsic motivation is a natural motivational tendency and is an element in cognitive, social. Students who are motivated are more likely to engage in the task willingly as well as work to improve their skills. The employee has the motivation to gain more knowledge
32.
Kirkus Reviews
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Kirkus Reviews is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus. The magazine is headquartered in New York City, Kirkus Reviews, published on the first and 15th of each month, previews books prior to their publication. Kirkus reviews over 7,000 titles per year, in 2014, Kirkus Reviews started the Kirkus Prize. It is one of the richest literary awards in the world, bestowing $50,000 prizes annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction, Kirkus operates a number of additional services, including Kirkus Editorial, Kirkus Indie, and Kirkus Marketing. And, Motoko reported, Authors seemed to have a relationship with Kirkus. Not surprisingly, it had to do with what the reviewers said about their books, one book reviewed in the Kirkus Indie is chosen to be included in the bi-weekly magazine and one is included in the weekly email newsletter. Virginia Kirkus was hired by Harper & Brothers to establish a book department in 1926. The department was eliminated as a measure in 1932, so Kirkus left. Initially, she arranged to get galley proofs of 20 or so books in advance of their publication, almost 80 years later and it was sold to The New York Review of Books in 1970 and later sold by the Review to Barbara Bader and Josh Rubins. In 1985, magazine consultant James B, david LeBreton bought Kirkus from Kobak in 1993. BPI Communications, owned by Dutch publisher VNU, bought Kirkus from LeBreton in 1999, at the end of 2009, the company announced the end of operations for Kirkus. The journal was purchased from VNU on February 10,2010 by businessman Herbert Simon and it was thereafter renamed Kirkus Media, and book industry veteran Marc Winkelman was made publisher. Official website Kirkus Service at Library of Congress Authorities, with 4 catalog records Virginia Kirkus at Library of Congress Authorities, with 7 catalog records
33.
The Atlantic
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The Atlantic is an American magazine, founded in 1857 as The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, Massachusetts. Since 2006, the magazine is based in Washington, D. C, created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine, it has grown to achieve a national reputation as a high-quality review organ with a moderate worldview. The magazine has recognized and published new writers and poets. It has published leading writers commentary on abolition, education, the periodical has won more National Magazine Awards than any other monthly magazine. The first issue of the magazine was published on November 1,1857, the magazines initiator and founder was Francis H. Underwood, an assistant to the publisher, who received less recognition than his partners because he was neither a humbug nor a Harvard man. After experiencing financial hardship and a series of changes, the magazine was reformatted as a general editorial magazine. Focusing on foreign affairs, politics, and the cultural trends, it is now primarily aimed at a target audience of serious national readers. In 2010, The Atlantic posted its first profit in a decade, in profiling the publication at the time, The New York Times noted the accomplishment was the result of a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue. The magazine, subscribed to by over 425,000 readers, the Atlantic features articles in the fields of the arts, the economy, foreign affairs, political science, and technology. The Atlantics president is Bob Cohn, in April 2005, The Atlantics editors decided to cease publishing fiction in regular issues in favor of a newsstand-only annual fiction issue edited by longtime staffer C. Michael Curtis. They have since re-instituted the practice, on January 22,2008, TheAtlantic. com dropped its subscriber wall and allowed users to freely browse its site, including all past archives. TheAtlantic. com covers politics, business, entertainment, technology, health, international affairs, and more. In December 2011, a new Health Channel launched on TheAtlantic. com, incorporating coverage of food, as well as related to the mind, body, sex, family. TheAtlantic. com has expanded to visual storytelling with the addition of the In Focus photo blog, curated by Alan Taylor. A leading literary magazine, The Atlantic has published significant works. It was the first to publish pieces by the abolitionists Julia Ward Howe, for example, Emily Dickinson, after reading an article in The Atlantic by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asked him to become her mentor. In 2005, the magazine won a National Magazine Award for fiction, the magazine also published many of the works of Mark Twain, including one that was lost until 2001. Editors have recognized major cultural changes and movements, for example, the magazine has also published speculative articles that inspired the development of new technologies
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Gratitude
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Gratitude, thankfulness, or gratefulness is the proper, fitting or called-for response to benefits or beneficence from a benefactor. The experience of gratitude has historically been a focus of world religions. It has also been a topic of interest to ancient, medieval and modern philosophers, Gratitude is not the same as indebtedness. While both emotions occur following help, indebtedness occurs when a person perceives that they are under an obligation to make some repayment of compensation for the aid, Gratitude may also serve to reinforce future prosocial behavior in benefactors. For example, one experiment found that customers of a store who were called and thanked showed a subsequent 70% increase in purchases. In comparison, customers who were called and told about a sale showed only a 30% increase in purchases, in another study, regular patrons of a restaurant gave bigger tips when servers wrote Thank you on their checks. The link between spirituality and gratitude has recently become a subject of study. Gratitude is viewed as a prized human propensity in the Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Bahai, worship with gratitude to God is a common theme in such religions and therefore, the concept of gratitude permeates religious texts, teachings, and traditions. For this reason, it is one of the most common emotions that religions aim to provoke, in Judaism, gratitude is an essential part of the act of worship and a part of every aspect of a worshiper’s life. According to the Hebrew worldview, all come from God and because of this. The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with the idea of gratitude, two examples included in the psalms are O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever, and I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart. The concluding prayer, the Alenu, also speaks of gratitude by thanking God for the destiny of the Jewish people. Along with these prayers, faithful worshipers recite more than one hundred blessings called berachot throughout the day, in Judaism there is also a major emphasis on gratitude for acts of human kindness and goodness. Gratitude has been said to mold and shape the entire Christian life, martin Luther referred to gratitude as The basic Christian attitude and today it is still referred to as the heart of the gospel. As each Christian believes they were created by a personal God, Christians are strongly encouraged to praise, Gratitude in Christianity is an acknowledgment of God’s generosity that inspires Christians to shape their own thoughts and actions around such ideals. Instead of simply a feeling, Christian gratitude is regarded as a virtue that shapes not only emotions and thoughts but also actions. Jonathan Edwards writes in his A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections that gratitude, because of this interpretation, modern measures of religious spirituality include assessments of thankfulness and gratitude towards God. In a study done by Samuels and Lester it was contended that in a sample of Catholic nuns and priests, out of 50 emotions, love
35.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
36.
PubMed Identifier
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PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval, from 1971 to 1997, MEDLINE online access to the MEDLARS Online computerized database primarily had been through institutional facilities, such as university libraries. PubMed, first released in January 1996, ushered in the era of private, free, home-, the PubMed system was offered free to the public in June 1997, when MEDLINE searches via the Web were demonstrated, in a ceremony, by Vice President Al Gore. Information about the journals indexed in MEDLINE, and available through PubMed, is found in the NLM Catalog. As of 5 January 2017, PubMed has more than 26.8 million records going back to 1966, selectively to the year 1865, and very selectively to 1809, about 500,000 new records are added each year. As of the date,13.1 million of PubMeds records are listed with their abstracts. In 2016, NLM changed the system so that publishers will be able to directly correct typos. Simple searches on PubMed can be carried out by entering key aspects of a subject into PubMeds search window, when a journal article is indexed, numerous article parameters are extracted and stored as structured information. Such parameters are, Article Type, Secondary identifiers, Language, publication type parameter enables many special features. As these clinical girish can generate small sets of robust studies with considerable precision, since July 2005, the MEDLINE article indexing process extracts important identifiers from the article abstract and puts those in a field called Secondary Identifier. The secondary identifier field is to store numbers to various databases of molecular sequence data, gene expression or chemical compounds. For clinical trials, PubMed extracts trial IDs for the two largest trial registries, ClinicalTrials. gov and the International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number Register, a reference which is judged particularly relevant can be marked and related articles can be identified. If relevant, several studies can be selected and related articles to all of them can be generated using the Find related data option, the related articles are then listed in order of relatedness. To create these lists of related articles, PubMed compares words from the title and abstract of each citation, as well as the MeSH headings assigned, using a powerful word-weighted algorithm. The related articles function has been judged to be so precise that some researchers suggest it can be used instead of a full search, a strong feature of PubMed is its ability to automatically link to MeSH terms and subheadings. Examples would be, bad breath links to halitosis, heart attack to myocardial infarction, where appropriate, these MeSH terms are automatically expanded, that is, include more specific terms. Terms like nursing are automatically linked to Nursing or Nursing and this important feature makes PubMed searches automatically more sensitive and avoids false-negative hits by compensating for the diversity of medical terminology. The My NCBI area can be accessed from any computer with web-access, an earlier version of My NCBI was called PubMed Cubby
37.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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Dædalus, the Academys quarterly journal, is widely regarded as one of the worlds leading intellectual journals. The Academy is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Academy was established by the Massachusetts legislature on May 4th,1780. Its purpose, as described in its charter, is to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people. The sixty-two incorporating fellows represented varying interests and high standing in the political, professional, the first class of new members, chosen by the Academy in 1781, included Benjamin Franklin and George Washington as well as several foreign honorary members. The initial volume of Academy Memoirs appeared in 1785, and the Proceedings followed in 1846, in the 1950s the Academy launched its journal Daedalus, reflecting its commitment to a broader intellectual and socially-oriented program. The Academy has sponsored a number of awards throughout its history and its first award, established in 1796 by Benjamin Thompson, honored distinguished work on heat and light and provided support for research activities. Additional prizes recognized important contributions in the sciences, social sciences, since the second half of the twentieth century, policy research has become a central focus of the Academy. In the late 1950s, arms control emerged as a concern of the Academy. The Academy also served as the catalyst in establishing the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, in 2002, the Academy established a visiting scholars program in association with Harvard University. More than 60 academic institutions from across the country have become Affiliates of the Academy to support this program, robert Oppenheimer, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Edward R. Murrow, Jonas Salk, Eudora Welty, and Duke Ellington. Astronomer Maria Mitchell was the first woman to be elected to the Academy, the current membership encompasses over 4,900 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members on the roster, including more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. The current membership is divided into five classes and twenty-four sections, Class I – Mathematical and Physical Sciences Section 1. Applied Mathematics and Statistics Section 2, astronomy and Earth Science Section 5. Engineering Sciences and Technologies Section 6, computer Sciences Class II – Biological Sciences Section 1. Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology Section 2, cellular and Developmental Biology, Microbiology and Immunology Section 3. Neurosciences, Cognitive Sciences, and Behavioral Biology Section 4, evolutionary and Population Biology and Ecology Section 5. Medical Sciences, Clinical Medicine, and Public Health Class III – Social Sciences Section 1, Social and Developmental Psychology and Education Section 2. Political Science, International Relations, and Public Policy Section 4, archaeology, Anthropology, Sociology, Geography and Demography Class IV – Arts and Humanities Section 1
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