Muhammad was born in
570 CE, and over the following sixty years built a thriving spiritual
community, laying the foundations of a religion that changed the course
of world history. There is more historical data on his life than on that
of the founder of any other major faith, and yet his story is little
known. Karen Armstrong's immaculately researched new biography of
Muhammad will enable readers to understand the true origins and
spirituality of a faith that is all too often misrepresented as cruel,
intolerant, and inherently violent. An acclaimed authority on religious
and spiritual issues, Armstrong offers a balanced, in-depth portrait,
revealing the man at the heart of Islam by dismantling centuries of
misconceptions. Armstrong demonstrates that Muhammad's life--a pivot
point in history--has genuine relevance to the global crises we face
today.
Update
Showing posts with label Science/News Flash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science/News Flash. Show all posts
8:34 PM
Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time by Karen Amstrong | Download Free E-Book
Friday, September 14, 2018
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2:57 AM
It’s Worse Being Green
Sunday, December 23, 2012
In It’s Not Easy Being Grue, I argued for skepticism — or at least incredulity — towards any inductive inference made solely by appealing to a posteriori
evidence. Two hypotheses, as long as they have a logical content
greater than the evidence and are not yet refuted are, as a matter of
following the rules of logic, necessarily equally favored by the
evidence. Even if one should appeal to one of the two hypotheses having a
natural property, this problem still stands, since it cannot be
uncovered through a posteriori investigation. Of course, more
than two hypotheses fit this criteria — any number of empirically
adequate hypotheses with greater logical content than the evidence may
be constructed. In sum, favoring one hypothesis over another, even with
an a prior warrant, cannot be determined from a posteriori evidence at all.
Jessica is different than James. She sees the failure of his program and preemptively seeks out some a priori warrant for favoring some inductive inferences over others. Is there an a priori
warrant that would allow Jessica to favor one hypothesis over another?
For the time assume that such a warrant exists. Assume that if Jessica
finds this warrant, the problem is solved. I will not go into the other
problems that face Jessica — whether or not she can know that she has
the warrant, whether or not she can know that she knows that she has a
warrant, &c.
Some predicates, such as ‘green’ intuitively (so it is said) fit the
list of natural properties while others, such as ‘grue’, intuitively do
not. Call those grue-like properties ‘ill-behaved’ properties for now.
What metaphysical standard sets natural properties apart from
‘ill-behaved’ properties?
We might say that it is solely intuition that guides us; we reject
‘ill-behaved’ predicates like ‘grue’ because they are disjunctive: they
involve spatio-temporal properties that, like a cat that turns
into a dog after whistling, cannot function within our commonsense
ontology. If we assume that we are warranted in rejecting disjunctive
predicates due to our intuition, this does not solve the problem, since
it begs the question as to why our intuitions are warranted. How then can we give warrant to our intuitions? But first, some historical case-studies:
- We can take ‘leopard’ as not having spots before a certain time, and having spots after that time. Any other ‘Just-So’ story by Kipling is an example of a possible variation on English (call it ‘Kipling-English‘) that takes a number of animals as having a ‘ill-behaved’ list of properties.
- Christians take transubstantiation, the transformation of bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Christ after a specific incantation by a priest, very seriously. The term ‘Eucharist’ is then an ‘ill-behaved’ property that has been ingrained into the English lexicon and the Western mind for almost one thousand years.
- Aristotle took elements to be of two classes: the worldly elements would move linearly towards their natural place unless acted upon, while the heavenly element, known as ‘æther’, was incapable of change other than rotation. Natural motion was then for hundreds of years an ‘ill-behaved’ property as well: just in some cases linear, but in others rotational. It took the work of Newton and others, through imagination, scientific investigation, and questioning Aristotle’s metaphysics, to link these two classes under one unifying force.
Thus, the English language already has several well-established ‘ill-behaved’ spatio-temporal
properties in its lexicon. Of course, they are few and far between, so
this is far from a convincing argument. It might be said that they’re
works of fiction, or strange imaginings, and do not belong to
commonsense talk. However, the predicate ‘grue’ is a disjunctive
predicate only according to the colors expressed in standard English. If there was an alternative history where all colors were expressed in predicates that are ‘ill-behaved’ in English (call it ‘Engrish’),
the predicate ‘grue’ would not be disjunctive or ‘ill-behaved’ in that
language; we could not say the same about the predicates ‘green’ and
‘blue’ in Engrish.
It is plausible that, had Engrish been the lingua franca today, we would intuit that any ‘ill-behaved’ property according to English was a natural property, since it did not express a spatio-temporal property,
while any natural property according to English was ‘ill-behaved’.
Imagine that Jessica and James both decided to base their favoring of
one hypothesis over another on their list of (supposed) natural
properties. As it so happens, Jessica speaks Engrish and James speaks English. Both Jessica and James see X number
of emeralds. Jessica and James both look to their intuitions, and each
of them decides that the emeralds are ‘grue’ and ‘green’, respectfully.
Each claims that the other is adopting a language that functions with
‘ill-behaved’ properties. How can we decide?
We cannot say that our list of natural properties is
obviously true, and choose between Jessica and James on the basis of
this list. We are not an outsider with privileged access to the list of
natural properties. This would immediately assume the solution to the
problem at hand, since like Jessica, we could have been raised speaking Engrish
and not English. An accident of birth, rather than a strong
metaphysical or epistemological argument, is (as I see it) the only
thing that leads to favoring one unfalsified hypothesis over the other.
8:30 PM
Why Afternoon May Be the Best Time to Exercise
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
Does
exercise influence the body’s internal clock? Few of us may be
conscious of it, but our bodies, and in turn our health, are ruled by
rhythms. “The heart, the liver, the brain — all are controlled by an
endogenous circadian rhythm,” says Christopher Colwell, a professor of
psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Brain Research
Institute, who led a series of new experiments on how exercise affects
the body’s internal clock. The studies were conducted in mice, but the
findings suggest that exercise does affect our circadian rhythms, and
the effect may be most beneficial if the exercise is undertaken midday.
For the study, which appears in the December Journal of Physiology, the researchers gathered several types of mice. Most of the animals were young and healthy. But some had been bred to have a malfunctioning internal clock, or pacemaker, which involves, among other body parts, a cluster of cells inside the brain “whose job it is to tell the time of day,” Dr. Colwell says.
These pacemaker cells receive signals from light sources or darkness that set off a cascade of molecular effects. Certain genes fire, expressing proteins, which are released into the body, where they migrate to the heart, neurons, liver and elsewhere, choreographing those organs to pulse in tune with the rest of the body. We sleep, wake and function physiologically according to the dictates of our body’s internal clock.
But, Dr. Colwell says, that clock can become discombobulated. It is easily confused, for instance, by viewing artificial light in the evening, he says, when the internal clock expects darkness. Aging also worsens the clock’s functioning, he says. “By middle age, most of us start to have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep,” he says. “Then we have trouble staying awake the next day.”
The consequences of clock disruptions extend beyond sleepiness. Recent research has linked out-of-sync circadian rhythm in people to an increased risk for diabetes, obesity, certain types of cancer, memory loss and mood disorders, including depression.
“We believe there are serious potential health consequences” to problems with circadian rhythm, Dr. Colwell says. Which is why he and his colleagues set out to determine whether exercise, which is so potent physiologically, might “fix” a broken clock, and if so, whether exercising in the morning or later in the day is more effective in terms of regulating circadian rhythm.
They began by letting healthy mice run, an activity the animals enjoy. Some of the mice ran whenever they wanted. Others were given access to running wheels only in the early portion of their waking time (mice are active at night) or in the later stages, the equivalent of the afternoon for us.
After several weeks of running, the exercising mice, no matter when they ran, were found to be producing more proteins in their internal-clock cells than the sedentary animals. But the difference was slight in these healthy animals, which all had normal circadian rhythms to start with.
So the scientists turned to mice unable to produce a critical internal clock protein. Signals from these animals’ internal clocks rarely reach the rest of the body.
But after several weeks of running, the animals’ internal clocks were sturdier. Messages now traveled to these animals’ hearts and livers far more frequently than in their sedentary counterparts.
The beneficial effect was especially pronounced in those animals that exercised in the afternoon (or mouse equivalent).
That finding, Dr. Colwell says, “was a pretty big surprise.” He and his colleagues had expected to see the greatest effects from morning exercise, a popular workout time for many athletes.
But the animals that ran later produced more clock proteins and pumped the protein more efficiently to the rest of the body than animals that ran early in their day.
What all of this means for people isn’t clear, Dr. Colwell says. “It is evident that exercise will help to regulate” our bodily clocks and circadian rhythms, he says, especially as we enter middle age.
But whether we should opt for an afternoon jog over one in the morning “is impossible to say yet,” he says.
Late-night exercise, meanwhile, is probably inadvisable, he continues. Unpublished results from his lab show that healthy mice running at the animal equivalent of 11 p.m. or so developed significant disruptions in their circadian rhythm. Among other effects, they slept poorly.
“What we know, right now,” he says, “is that exercise is a good idea” if you wish to sleep well and avoid the physical ailments associated with an aging or clumsy circadian rhythm. And it is possible, although not yet proven, that afternoon sessions may produce more robust results.
“But any exercise is likely to be better than none,” he concludes. “And if you like morning exercise, which I do, great. Keep it up.”
For the study, which appears in the December Journal of Physiology, the researchers gathered several types of mice. Most of the animals were young and healthy. But some had been bred to have a malfunctioning internal clock, or pacemaker, which involves, among other body parts, a cluster of cells inside the brain “whose job it is to tell the time of day,” Dr. Colwell says.
These pacemaker cells receive signals from light sources or darkness that set off a cascade of molecular effects. Certain genes fire, expressing proteins, which are released into the body, where they migrate to the heart, neurons, liver and elsewhere, choreographing those organs to pulse in tune with the rest of the body. We sleep, wake and function physiologically according to the dictates of our body’s internal clock.
But, Dr. Colwell says, that clock can become discombobulated. It is easily confused, for instance, by viewing artificial light in the evening, he says, when the internal clock expects darkness. Aging also worsens the clock’s functioning, he says. “By middle age, most of us start to have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep,” he says. “Then we have trouble staying awake the next day.”
The consequences of clock disruptions extend beyond sleepiness. Recent research has linked out-of-sync circadian rhythm in people to an increased risk for diabetes, obesity, certain types of cancer, memory loss and mood disorders, including depression.
“We believe there are serious potential health consequences” to problems with circadian rhythm, Dr. Colwell says. Which is why he and his colleagues set out to determine whether exercise, which is so potent physiologically, might “fix” a broken clock, and if so, whether exercising in the morning or later in the day is more effective in terms of regulating circadian rhythm.
They began by letting healthy mice run, an activity the animals enjoy. Some of the mice ran whenever they wanted. Others were given access to running wheels only in the early portion of their waking time (mice are active at night) or in the later stages, the equivalent of the afternoon for us.
After several weeks of running, the exercising mice, no matter when they ran, were found to be producing more proteins in their internal-clock cells than the sedentary animals. But the difference was slight in these healthy animals, which all had normal circadian rhythms to start with.
So the scientists turned to mice unable to produce a critical internal clock protein. Signals from these animals’ internal clocks rarely reach the rest of the body.
But after several weeks of running, the animals’ internal clocks were sturdier. Messages now traveled to these animals’ hearts and livers far more frequently than in their sedentary counterparts.
The beneficial effect was especially pronounced in those animals that exercised in the afternoon (or mouse equivalent).
That finding, Dr. Colwell says, “was a pretty big surprise.” He and his colleagues had expected to see the greatest effects from morning exercise, a popular workout time for many athletes.
But the animals that ran later produced more clock proteins and pumped the protein more efficiently to the rest of the body than animals that ran early in their day.
What all of this means for people isn’t clear, Dr. Colwell says. “It is evident that exercise will help to regulate” our bodily clocks and circadian rhythms, he says, especially as we enter middle age.
But whether we should opt for an afternoon jog over one in the morning “is impossible to say yet,” he says.
Late-night exercise, meanwhile, is probably inadvisable, he continues. Unpublished results from his lab show that healthy mice running at the animal equivalent of 11 p.m. or so developed significant disruptions in their circadian rhythm. Among other effects, they slept poorly.
“What we know, right now,” he says, “is that exercise is a good idea” if you wish to sleep well and avoid the physical ailments associated with an aging or clumsy circadian rhythm. And it is possible, although not yet proven, that afternoon sessions may produce more robust results.
“But any exercise is likely to be better than none,” he concludes. “And if you like morning exercise, which I do, great. Keep it up.”
9:04 PM
Researchers may have discovered the earliest dinosaur yet, or at least its closest relative.
The Earliest Dinosaur, or Maybe Its Closest Kin
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Mark Witton/Natural History Museum
The creature, named Nyasasaurus parringtoni, was the size of a Labrador
retriever but with a five-foot-long tail. It roamed the earth about 243
million years ago, 10 million years before other early dinosaurs, like
Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus.
“We’re being cautious about saying it’s the earliest dinosaur,” said Sarah Werning a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the study, which appears in the journal Biology Letters. “But if it’s not, it’s the closest cousin found to dinosaurs so far.”
The fossilized bones of Nyasasaurus parringtoni were excavated in the
1930s in Tanzania and reside in the Natural History Museum of London.
The bones include one humerus, or upper arm bone, and six vertebrae.
The researchers found that the fossilized bones had an abundance of bone cells and blood vessels.
“We only see that many in animals that grow really fast,” Ms. Werning
said. “It was growing about as fast as other early dinosaurs.”
The upper arm bone also has an enlarged crest, to anchor upper arm muscles — another feature common in early dinosaurs.
The fossils were first described in the 1950s by the paleontologist Alan J. Charig in his doctoral dissertation.
Dr. Charig, who died in 1997, is named as a co-author of the paper.
1:27 AM
Are Doctors Too Wary of Drug Companies?
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Not long ago, I asked a colleague for advice on a patient. He offered
up a couple of treatment options, then stopped to show me a new medical app
on his electronic tablet. With a few swipes of his finger, he summoned a
compilation of research articles, synopses and even entire textbooks
that, printed and bound, would have filled shelves in a library.
Dr. Pauline Chen on medical care.
“But
do you know what the best part is?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.
I thought of the exhaustive reference material and the seemingly
endless scroll of diagnoses that were all so easy to access on the small
screen balanced on his knees.
“The best part is that none of this is sponsored by Pharma!” he said with a broad smile. “There’s no bias.”
My colleague is not the only doctor who feels that way, according to a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
For years, most doctors have had a predictable, if not close, relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.
Companies handed out office tchotchkes, paid for staff lunches and
distributed drug samples for patients. More significantly, drug
companies were important sources of biomedical research money,
particularly during periods when federal support wavered. It was understood that the companies providing funding would leave the researchers alone to design and conduct the study, analyze the data and write up the results.
That understanding began to fray about a decade ago when doctors, and patients, began to realize that drug companies were becoming too involved with the research
they were supporting. For example, one major pharmaceutical firm
manipulated data and underestimated the risk of heart attacks, strokes
and deaths in a large study of a drug for arthritis. The drug was
eventually withdrawn from the market, but not before 80 million patients had used it, with annual sales topping $2.5 billion.
The
case highlighted the dangers of industry sponsorship of research into
new drugs, and the public became eager to expose any potential conflict
of interest, particularly for doctors. Within a few years, a new
standard of transparency in medicine emerged. Brightly labeled drug
company pens became an embarrassment; lunches on the drug company tab
and sponsored conferences turned suspect; and editors at numerous
medical journals published lengthy screeds detailing their disclosure requirements.
The
new skepticism and transparency were no doubt good for patients and
doctors, but this recent study reveals that in our zeal to single out
the pharmaceutical industry’s biases, we may have become blind to our
own.
The researchers created several hypothetical drug studies,
then asked a group of practicing physicians to rate the “studies” and
the likelihood they would prescribe the new “drug.” The researchers
purposefully varied the quality of the studies and the disclosures –
some of the made-up studies disclosed that they had received
pharmaceutical company funding, others said they’d received support from
the National Institutes of Health, and the rest listed no funding
disclosures at all.
Most of the doctors were able to assess the
quality of the research pretty accurately. After reading the less
rigorous studies, the ones that weren’t designed, conducted or analyzed
well, the doctors were hesitant to prescribe the new drugs under study;
seeing the more rigorous studies, they were more willing to do so.
But
the researchers also found that the doctors were also unduly swayed by
any mention of industry funding. Regardless of the quality, if a study
was supported by a pharmaceutical company, doctors were less willing to
consider prescribing the studied drug and less likely to assess the
quality of the research with accuracy.
“Some amount of skepticism
is warranted,” said Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim, lead author of the study
and an assistant professor of medicine in the division of
pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics at the Brigham and Women’s
Hospital in Boston. “But ultimately it should be the quality of the
study and the impact of the results that determine your confidence about
using a new drug, not who was funding it.”
Being overly skeptical
has serious implications for patient care. The pharmaceutical industry,
along with medical device and biotechnology firms, continues to finance a majority of current research. In 2007, for example, industry was responsible for nearly 60 percent
of the more than $100 billion spent on research. Much
industry-supported research focuses on the side effects of new drugs. By
writing off such research, doctors risk overlooking findings that may
have important treatment implications for their patients, like a new
cholesterol-lowering drug that is found to have less of an effect on
energy and blood sugar levels than other similar medications.
Dr.
Kesselheim and his collaborators believe what is needed in biomedical
research is even greater transparency. Such openness would include more
independent third-party statistical reviews to ensure that data is not
being manipulated or misleading and wider use of public Web sites like ClinicalTrials.gov, regardless of the source of funding.
ClinicalTrials.gov
lists study details like objectives, design and data gathered,
providing doctors and patients alike with a way to confirm that no data
is being selectively reported or distorted. But participation on the
site is voluntary, and pharmaceutical, medical device and biomedical
companies are often hesitant to share what they consider proprietary
data, choosing instead to list only selective details, or no information
at all.
Until full transparency is achieved and such details are
available to all on the Web or for independent statistical reviews, Dr.
Kesselheim and his collaborators suggest that both doctors and patients
remain alert to potential biases — Big Pharma’s, and also their own.
“Excessive skepticism,” Dr. Kesselheim observed, “is as much a bad thing as naïveté.”
Source:nyt
8:09 PM
Download Now!
A Brief History of Time-Stephen Hawking
Friday, October 19, 2012
A Brief History of Time attempts to explain a range of subjects in cosmology, including the Big Bang, black holes and light cones,
to the nonspecialist reader. Its main goal is to give an overview of
the subject but, unusual for a popular science book, it also attempts to
explain some complex mathematics.
The 1996 edition of the book and subsequent editions discuss the
possibility of time travel and wormholes and explore the possibility of
having a universe without a quantum singularity at the beginning of
time.
The author notes that an editor warned him that for every equation in the book the readership would be halved, hence it includes only a single equation: E = mc2. Early in 1983, Hawking approached Simon Mitton, the editor in charge of astronomy books at Cambridge University Press,
with his ideas for a popular book on cosmology. Mitton was doubtful
about all the equations in the draft manuscript, which he felt would put
off the buyers in airport bookshops that Hawking wished to reach. It
was with some difficulty that he persuaded Hawking to drop all but one
equation.[4]
In addition to Hawking's notable abstention from presenting equations,
the book also simplifies matters by means of illustrations throughout
the text, depicting.
Download Now!
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5:23 AM
Milan In Russian's Hell
Thursday, October 4, 2012
MILAN – In football, evening’s like this are called turning points. In one of the hardest places in Europe to travel to, Milan come out 3-2 winners and get back the points dropped against Anderlecht. It needed a big performance from the players who started well and took the game back in hand after some difficult moments.
Milan started with the same 4-2-3-1 that we saw against Parma but with Emanuelson and Montolivo instead of Nocerino and Ambrosini. After kick-off Bojan turned well and Malafeev was called into action for the first time. Bystrov from distance failed to really test Abbiati and it was all Milan for the first 20 minutes. Emanuelson broke the deadlock on 13 minutes earning a free kick and taking it only for the ball to deflect off Shirnov giving Malafeev no chance. Allegri’s team kept pushing forward. Two minutes later a cross from Antonini and Emanuelson hit the side netting on the far post. On 16, El Shaarawy got the ball on the left side and left two defenders in his wake as before placing the ball past the keeper. 2-0 and it could even have been 3 on 19 minutes when Bojan was brought down in the area but no penalty was given. Abbitati was then called into action a few times. Then on 33 minutes he did well to push out a shot from Hulk for a corner. A superlative save came five minutes from the end of the first half from a frightening strike from the same player on the edge of the area. Abbitati pulled off a miracle to stop him celebrating the goal. Then, in the second minute of injury time, Hulk finally got his goal with a violent left footed shot. At half time Milan were up 2-1.
The home side pushed hard early in the second half and on 4 minutes Hulk won another corner and the Rossoneri defense found itrself unprepared. Shirokov brought his side back onto level terms. Pazzini then came on for Bojan and Milan gained more presence in the final third. On 9 minutes, Abate crossed from the right for Boateng but the header was off target. Allegri then brought on Nocerino for Emanuelson beefing up the middle of the field. Zenit dropped and Milan pushed on. With 15 left, Milan went back into the lead. Montolivo crossed from the right and Hubocan deflected the ball past his keeper when trying to get there ahead of Pazzini. Then Abbiati did his job well to ensure that Milan saw out the rest of the game without conceding any further goals. It was big win for the team and it has come right in the nick of time. Now for the derby.
THE NUMBERS
ZENIT-MILAN 2-3
GOALS: Emanuelson (M) on 13', El Shaarawy (M) on 16', Hulk (Z) on 46'fh; Shirokov (Z) al 4', O.G. Hubocan (Z) al 30'sh
ZENIT (4-3-3): Malafeev; Anyukov, Hubocan, Lombaerts (44'st Bukharov), Criscito; Shirokov, Fayzulin (34'st Kanunnikov), Witsel; Bystrov (27'st Zyryanov), Kerzhakov, Hulk. Subs: Baburin, Bruno Alves, Lukovic, Lumb. All. Spalletti
MILAN (4-2-3-1): Abbiati; Abate, Bonera, Zapata, Antonini; De Jong, Montolivo; Emanuelson (19'st Nocerino), Boateng (35'st Yepes), El Shaarawy; Bojan (7'st Pazzini). Subs: Amelia, Mexes, Flamini, Robinho. All. Allegri
REFEREE: Brych (German)
NOTES: Booked: Fayzulin, Anyukov, Hubocan, Shirokov, Bonera, El Shaarawy,
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