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Explaining Axiological theism, Axiological agnosticism, and Axiological atheism – Video

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Explaining Axiological theism, Axiological agnosticism, and Axiological atheism
Explaining Axiological theism, Axiological agnosticism, and Axiological atheism I am going to roughly offer the understanding how axiological thinking intera...

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Jeremiah Keenan | Science vs religion

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Jeremiah Keenan

Keen on the Truth

According to popular assumption, theres a simple dichotomy between science and religion. Science represents collective knowledge of objective reality; religion, a traditional codification of subjective experience. Everyone is entitled to their own religion just as they are to their own cheesesteak provided, of course, that the pursuit of your cheesesteak doesnt upset somebody elses bowl of peas. Whether you subscribe to a religion with sacred scrolls and ceremonies that predate history or give your God your own first name, its assumed that you dont relate empirical observation and rational deduction to faith.

Highly-educated believers are it follows simply fond of playing an elaborate psychological trick on themselves. They fool themselves into a mental state in which they feel convinced of some gods existence. Then they deliberately muddle their brains until they can feel that some old book written by a collection of dogmatic delusionals must be that gods word on morality.

This stereotype is, in many instances, justified. However, it fails to tell the whole story. While there have always been religious believers who accept the basic tenets of their faith dogmatically, many devout intellectuals have claimed to arrive at their worldviews because they found them the most plausible explanation based on the available information.

James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest physicists of the 19th century, reasoned that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent, it must have been created. He also claimed that he had looked into many philosophical systems but none could work without God. More recently, scientists like 1996 Nobel-prize recipient Richard Smalley have claimed that their study of the intricate design of the natural world gradually pushed them away from agnosticism into a settled belief in the supernatural. Some, such as Dr. Michael Behe of Lehigh University, have written quite persuasive works arguing that the complexity of biochemical life could not have randomly arisen under the natural laws.

For such scholars, this belief in the supernatural need not be a matter of subjective feelings or deliberate self-delusion. C. S. Lewis, a Cambridge professor and writer, described the gradual development of his belief in God as the painful culmination of too much careful thought. For example, Lewis was deeply concerned with the problem of materialistic determinism. Lewis argued that if human beings are purely material and matter follows natural laws, then our thoughts being mere agitations of neurons must follow those natural laws as well. But in that case our beliefs about logic and the world around us are simply the tail end of a chain of chemical interactions, all of which were predetermined by the natural laws and the random positioning of atoms at the beginning of the universe. Thus, Lewis concluded, if there is to be truth there must also be some things that are not made of matter.

Of course, such limited arguments in favor of the supernatural do not confirm the truth of the vast array of beliefs attendant upon any particular religion. But the fact remains that Agnosticism has never held a monopoly on rational thought. As far as the rational observer is concerned, the individual tenets of a religion must still stand or fall based on external evidence and internal coherence.

For example, many claim to find contradictions in the Quran. If these contradictions legitimately exist, then it is not possible that every word of the Quran was directly inspired by an infallible deity. The Bible contains extensive and detailed historical accounts of ancient Near Eastern history. If these accounts can be proven false, the Christian claim of Biblical inerrancy can likewise be invalidated.

On the other hand, Christians and Muslims alike claim that their holy books contain predictions which prove their inspiration. If such predictions are numerous, specific and accurate, then the rational enquirer may be inclined to consider the possibility that they are legitimately supernatural. If, on the other hand, they are vague, few in number or false, it equally makes sense to ignore them.

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Jeremiah Keenan | Science vs religion

Google Opens Its Cloud to Crack the Genetic Code of Autism

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Google has spent the past decade-and-a-half perfecting the science of recognizing patterns in the chaos of information on the web. Now its applying that expertise to searching for clues to the genetic causes of autism in the vast sea of data contained in the human genome.

On Tuesday, autism advocacy group Autism Speaks said it was partnering with Google to sequence the genomes of 10,000 people on the autism spectrum along with their family members. Google will host and index the data for qualified researchers to sift as they hunt for variations in DNA that could hint at autisms genetic origins.

We believe that the clues to understanding autism lie in that genome, Rob Ring, Autism Speaks chief science officer, told WIRED. Wed like to leverage the same kind of technology and approach to searching the internet every day to search into the genome for these missing answers.

The project will make use of Google Genomics, a tool launched by the company several months ago with little fanfare on Googles Cloud Platform. As sequencing the human genome becomes ever-faster and cheaperRing says it can be done for about $2,500, compared to nearly $3 billion for the Human Genome Projectthe volume of genetic data generated by researchers has grown astronomically. By allowing researchers to dump that data onto its servers, Google gets to show off and improve the capabilities of its cloud while providing a potentially important service.

David Glazer, director of engineering for Google Genomics and formerly director of engineering for Google Plus, says that instead of searching for keywords, researchers can search for particular regions and sequences along genomes and find sections with common variations. And because a single human genome can run to 100 gigabytes, having the data in a central location makes remote collaboration among researchers easier. Youre a lot more efficient than shipping around station wagons full of hard drives, Glazer says.

Liz Feld, president of Autism Speaks, says she hopes that intense genetic analysis will help researchers tailor more individualized treatments, much as genomic analysis has led to a more refined understanding of different subtypes of cancer. What matters most to us is that this research is going to allow us to uncover and understand the various forms of autism, Feld says.

The autism genomics project is hardly the first Google foray into health and medicine. The company has targeted everything from Parkinsons disease to cancer, though genomics research is especially well suited to Googles technological strengths. In recent years, researchers have come to see biology as ripe for understanding by way of computing as much as chemistry. After all, nature has spent billions of years perfecting DNA as its most efficient way for storing and transferring information.

Autism Speaks has itself been collected genomic data for more than a decade, Ring says. Now he says he believes they have the tools to do something valuable with it: We realized that some of our biggest biology problems were really big data problems.

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Google Opens Its Cloud to Crack the Genetic Code of Autism

Dr. John Salerno at Anti-Aging conference: Eternal youth, living to 120

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SuzanneSomers.

By Robin Leach (contact)

Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014 | 10 p.m.

New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Dr. John Palermo in 2001.

More than 25,000 physicians and scientists from 120 countries who believe in alternative medicine for anti-aging solutions and regenerative medical cures arrived here today for the 22nd annual world congress of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, or A4M.

The not-for-profit society is dedicated to the advancement of technology to detect, prevent and treat aging-related disease and to promote research into methods to roll back, slow down and optimize the human-aging process.

A4M believes that the disabilities associated with normal aging are caused by physiological dysfunction, which in many cases are restored with medical treatment such that human life span can be increased and the quality of ones life is improved as one grows older.

Actress, singer and author Suzanne Somers at age 67 has become the face and messenger of the nontraditional approaches to health and well-being. Shes written 25 books on the subject, including Ageless, Eight Steps to Wellness, Sexy Forever and Knockout.

Suzanne has been in Las Vegas recently exploring a resumption of her variety show here. She credits her discovery of the fountain of youth treatments as one of the reasons for her beating Stage-4 breast cancer without chemotherapy and remaining cancer free for 13 years.

Im going to live to be 110 years old, she declared.

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Dr. John Salerno at Anti-Aging conference: Eternal youth, living to 120

Elmar Fuchs – Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water 2014 – Video

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Elmar Fuchs - Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water 2014
Protons and the electrical conduction in a floating water bridge. Elmar Fuchs Wetsus, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands The Ninth Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water...

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Ahern’s Biochemistry #27 – Glycogen Metabolism III / Metabolic Melodies – Video

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Ahern #39;s Biochemistry #27 - Glycogen Metabolism III / Metabolic Melodies
1. Contact me at kgahern@davincipress.com / Friend me on Facebook (kevin.g.ahern) 2. Download my free biochemistry book at http://biochem.science.oregonstate...

By: Kevin Ahern

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Ahern's Biochemistry #27 - Glycogen Metabolism III / Metabolic Melodies - Video

Science proves high heels do have power over men

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PARIS The well-heeled Marilyn Monroe once said, "Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world."

The allure of high-heeled shoes is no secret among women, who have used them to entice men from the streets of Ancient Rome to the New York City sidewalks of Carrie Bradshaw. Heels have also been a controversial symbol in the battleground of sexual politics.

Now a scientific study in France has measured their power.

Scientists from the Universite de Bretagne-Sud conducted experiments that showed that men behave very differently toward high-heeled women. The results, published online in the journal "Archives of Sexual Behaviour," may please the purveyors of Christian Louboutin or Jimmy Choo shoes yet frustrate those who think stilettos encourage sexism.

The study found if a woman drops a glove on the street while wearing heels, she's almost 50 percent more likely to have a man fetch it for her than if she's wearing flats.

Another finding: A woman wearing heels is twice as likely to persuade men to stop and answer survey questions on the street. And a high-heeled woman in a bar waits half the time to get picked up by a man, compared to when her heel is nearer to the ground.

"Women's shoe heel size exerts a powerful effect on men's behavior," says the study's author, Nicolas Gueguen, a behavioral science researcher. "Simply put, they make women more beautiful."

Raised shoes have an unglamorous beginning: worn first by Egyptian butchers, who donned platforms to avoid treading in bloody offal.

But on women as "signifiers of femininity," raised shoes initially appeared in Ancient Greece and Rome, according to Elizabeth Semmelhack of The Bata Shoe Museum. In Rome, where the sex trade was legal, high heels helped clients identify prostitutes in crowds.

Although high heels were worn for centuries in the Ottoman Empire and in Persia for horseback riding, they only minced into the West in the 1500s, when they were associated with imperial power and popularized as erotic in the 19th and 20th centuries. Such was the allure that a person with status or wealth became referred to as "well-heeled."

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Science proves high heels do have power over men

Q105 Are people who test HIV positive required to tell their doctors the names of their partners? – Video

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Q105 Are people who test HIV positive required to tell their doctors the names of their partners?
From the HIV Avatar Project, posted by the Department of Behavioral Science and Community Health at the University of Florida hiv-avatar-project.com http://bsch.phhp.ufl.edu/

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Q105 Are people who test HIV positive required to tell their doctors the names of their partners? - Video

Behavioral and Intellectual Disabilities in Pediatric Epilepsy Examined in Three Studies at AES Annual Meeting

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Embargoed for release until December 8, 2014 TIME 11: 45 AM PT / 2:45 PM ET

Newswise SEATTLE, December 8, 2014 Children with epilepsy can face greater intellectual and behavioral problems compared to their peers. New research presented at the American Epilepsy Societys (AES) 68th Annual Meeting explores the complex emotional, behavioral and intellectual disabilities associated with childhood epilepsy and their effect on development.

The first of three studies (Platform Session A.04) presents a culmination of 20-30 years of research that sought out to understand if intellectual disability (ID) predicts a low chance of remission and a high risk of intractability in epilepsy. Researchers of this study focused on examining the severity of ID to predict epilepsy outcome.

A cohort of children from Nova Scotia who developed epilepsy between 1977 and 1985 and had ID was followed for an average of 21 years following diagnosis. The initial study followed 692 children with incident epilepsy, of which 147 (21%) had intellectual disability. The degree of intellectual disability was established by standard psychometric testing around 5 years of age, and confirmed by subsequent academic achievements.

Researchers at Dalhousie University found that the degree of intellectual disability in children with epilepsy did predict seizure outcome. Mild intellectual disability was associated with a substantially better prognosis for remission and absence of intractability than moderate or severe/profound ID. Focal epilepsy and mild intellectual disability had the same rate of remission and intractability as focal epilepsy with normal intelligence. While mild ID seriously affects social outcome, it is not an important prognostic factor for seizure outcome, particularly if the epilepsy is focal.

The level of ID varied by the type of epilepsy present, with focal epilepsy apparent in 70% with mild ID, 38% with moderate and 29% with severe/profound ID. Generalized symptomatic epilepsies were most common with moderate (53%) and severe/profound ID (65%) than with mild ID (13%). Participants with mild ID were more likely to be in remission at the end of the twenty-year follow up (50%) than moderate (34%) or severe/profound ID (28%). Intractable epilepsy was more common with moderate (35%) and severe/profound (59%) than with mild ID (17%).

Mild intellectual disability has a profound effect on a childs adaptation to adult life, said Dr. Peter Camfield, M.D., Professor Emeritus, Department of Pediatrics, Dalhousie University. However, it is not particularly associated with severe epilepsy. Moderate to severe ID has ominous implications for seizure control.

A second study (Poster 1.097) explores the relationship between behavioral/psychiatric disorders and childhood epilepsy. Researchers at Northwestern Universitys Feinberg School of Medicine referenced children with the Connecticut Study of Epilepsy (CSE) that were recruited between 1993 and 1997, and underwent comprehensive reassessments between 2002 and 2006, 8 to 9 years after they were diagnosed with epilepsy. Within those 16 years, cognitive testing was conducted with a Wechsler IQ test and behavioral assessment with the parent-reported Child Behavior Check List (CBCL). Controls of this study were similar-aged siblings without epilepsy who received the same assessment instruments.

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Behavioral and Intellectual Disabilities in Pediatric Epilepsy Examined in Three Studies at AES Annual Meeting