“David Brooks: Getting Obama right - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette” plus 3 more |
- David Brooks: Getting Obama right - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Friction: All May Look Smooth, but There Are 'Bumps' Along the Way - Science Daily
- Education Philosophy - Associated Content
- 'My brain made me do it' - Genetic Engineering News
| David Brooks: Getting Obama right - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Posted: 14 Mar 2010 09:28 PM PDT Who is Barack Obama? If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Mr. Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine. If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Mr. Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through. You'll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You'll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you'll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Mr. Obama himself. The fact is, Mr. Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy -- from his book "The Audacity of Hope" to his joint-session health care speech last September -- he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market. He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center -- in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims. But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I've been critical on health care and other matters. Mr. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: The $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn't exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington. Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He's just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That's just not a fair reading of his agenda. Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo -- too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Mr. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform. Take education. Mr. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers' unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Mr. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency. Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Mr. Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Mr. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate. Take finance. Mr. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations. In a sensible country, people would see Mr. Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Mr. Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don't live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Friction: All May Look Smooth, but There Are 'Bumps' Along the Way - Science Daily Posted: 09 Mar 2010 11:59 AM PST ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2010) — Friction in human relations is all too obvious and prevalent, but friction in physics has had a "secret life" of its own that has now been revealed by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In an article appearing in the journal Nature (with a further reference to it in Nature Physics), the scientists show how frictional strength evolves from extremely short to long time scales. The new information could be useful in assessing a wide range of natural and man-made phenomena -- from earthquakes to computer hard drives "Although friction plays such an important role in so many aspects of our lives, it is surprising that many key processes embodied within frictional motion have been far from understood," said Jay Fineberg, the Max Born Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Hebrew University and author of the Nature article along with Ph.D. students Oded Ben-David and Shmuel Rubinstein. Fineberg said that while frictional motion is often thought of as the motion of two bodies against each other, separated by a perfectly smooth plane, in fact, due to the microscopic roughness of sliding surfaces, all of the contact between sliding bodies takes place in only a tiny area. Thus, only a sparsely spaced microscopic "bumps" are responsible for maintaining the contact between two sliding bodies. It is the behavior of these bumps which governs friction. These microscopic contacts have a life of their own that very much differs from that of bulk materials, commented Fineberg. It is that "secret life" that has now been described in the research of the Hebrew University researchers. Their study shows how frictional strength evolves from extremely short to long time scales. Millionths of seconds before bodies start to slide against one another, a miniature "earthquake" tears through the interface and ruptures the contacts, said Fineberg. From that moment of contact rupture, four distinct and interrelated phases of evolution are identified, he said. These include the violent rupture phase, resultant contact weakening, and continuing through renewal and re-strengthening. These results provide a comprehensive picture of how frictional strength evolves. Fineberg emphasized that a fundamental understanding of these processes is critical to a variety of important problems and applications, such as the evolution of frictional strength at short-time impacts as in, for example, the read/write cycle of hard drives, frictional dissipation in an internal combustion engine, and the dynamics of earthquakes. At the other end of the spectrum, long-time strengthening processes are critical when considering the need for strengthening a fault or frictional interface. This understanding could lead the way to manipulation and control of such dynamics, at small and large scales alike, he said. Story Source: Adapted from materials provided by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Education Philosophy - Associated Content Posted: 15 Mar 2010 09:24 AM PDT Having attended ten schools between kindergarten and high school I have been exposed to a wide variety of classroom experiences and styles of education, and my involvement with agriculture from a young age has given me the opportunity to be a leader in the 4-H and FFA organizations, and the Reedley college show team where I have taught hundreds of kids how to raise, show, and market livestock. I have had good and bad encounters in both the private and public school systems and these experiences have helped to form my personal philosophy in regards to the education of students in the classroom. I believe that a teacher's attitude and ethics are of the utmost importance as they affect the students desire to learn and the overall classroom environment. Likewise the manner in which the teacher interacts with his students is also very important as the teacher has to know how to deal with each student's individual needs, along with the societal pressures and expectations placed upon each student. I believe that state mandated testing is a waste of time and energy as it promotes teaching for a test and not learning, students need to learn how to learn, not how to pass a test. It is my intention to set forth substantiation of these statements in the essay to follow. A teacher's attitude and ethics are the most influential ingredients in creating a healthy classroom environment. My most memorable teachers have been those with the highest moral character as they not only taught me my three R's but they showed me through example how to be a good person and a good student. I had a teacher who every day would walk into class and exclaim "Today is a great day!," and it was, not just because he said it would be but because he believed it was going to be and he did everything in his power to make every day a great day for his students. The power of a positive attitude is infectious, and when it comes from one who is respected, such as a teacher, it instills a desire in the student to be like his teacher and to please his teacher, and nothing pleases a teacher more than when his student learns. Thus the basis for student teacher interaction has been set. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| 'My brain made me do it' - Genetic Engineering News Posted: 15 Mar 2010 11:54 AM PDT Mar 15 2010, 2:40 PM EST 'My brain made me do it'EUREKALERT Contact: Jennifer Kovachjkovach@prometheusbooks.com 800-853-7545 Prometheus Books Exploring the threat of neuroscience to the concept of free will and whether we're truly in control of our actionsAs scientists continue to explore how the brain works, using ever more sophisticated technology, it seems likely that new findings will radically alter the traditional understanding of human nature. One aspect of human nature already being questioned by recent developments in neuroscience is free will. Do our decisions arise from purely mechanistic processes? Is our feeling of self-control merely an illusion created by our brains? If so, what will become of free will and moral responsibility? In MY BRAIN MADE ME DO IT: THE RISE OF NEUROSCIENCE AND THE THREAT TO MORAL RESPONSIBILITY (Prometheus Books, $21) author Eliezer J. Sternberg attempts to answer these thorny questions and more. "At some point in our lives, we get puzzled about how we can be held responsible for actions seemingly initiated by brain chemistry. My Brain Made Me Do It is a terrific guide for those who are ready to confront this puzzle in its full scientific and philosophical complexity," said Jerry Samet, associate professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Brandeis University. "It clearly explains the fascinating scientific advances in our understanding of the brain-behavior connection and carefully considers their relevance to the free will questionmaking these complicated theoretical issues come alive in vivid case studies." Sternberg delves into a host of fascinating topics related to neuroscience and ethics, including:
Using illustrative examples from philosophy, mythology, history, and criminology, and with thorough discussions of actual scientific experiments, Sternberg explores the threat of neuroscience to moral responsibility as he attempts to answer the question: Are we truly in control of our actions? MY BRAIN MADE ME DO IT is an "impressively clear account of what neuroscience tells us about the workings of the brain, and its implications for the issue of free will" says BBC Focus magazine, in a five-star review. "A masterful study of [the] interface between science and philosophy which will undoubtedly get you thinking." "Blending Dostoyevsky with neuroscience[this] is a provocative defense of free will and moral responsibility. It repudiates the chemical determinism of mainstream scientists," said Nigel Barber, author of Kindness in a Cruel World and The Myth of Culture: Why We Need a Genuine Natural Science of Societies. Adds Michael Ruse, author of Defining Darwin, "Whether or not you agree with the author, you will come away challenged and informed." About the Author: Eliezer J. Sternberg (Boston, MA) is the author of Are You a Machine? The Brain, the Mind, and What It Means to Be Human (Humanity Books, 2007). A recent graduate of Brandeis University, where he majored in neuroscience and philosophy, Sternberg is now at Tufts University School of Medicine. MEDIA NOTE: Eliezer J. Sternberg is available to discuss recent developments in neuroscience and their relevance to free will and moral responsibility. Contact Prometheus Books at publicity@prometheusbooks.com or 1-800-853-7545 for author contact information or to request press materials or a review copy of MY BRAIN MADE ME DO IT: THE RISE OF NEUROSCIENCE AND THE THREAT TO MORAL RESPONSIBILITY (ISBN 978-1-61614-165-3). Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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