Liberty State Park – Jersey City, NJ – State Park | Facebook

Posted on by

A LSP park user is suing the DEP to get the LSP development plans for commercializing and privatizing LSP, which the DEP obtained from NJ Future months ago. The citizen's name is in the excerpt from the Sierra Club release below.

No commercialization plans at all should be chosen from the NJ Future report and pushed forward by the NJDEP. This important lawsuit serves the public interest as New Jerseyans have the right to see the complete details of all plans from the tax-payer funded search.

By its LSP development plan search and privatization goals, the Christie administration has arrogantly cast aside the 39 year broad public consensus for a free and green open space park behind the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and against a commercialized, privatized park, no matter what revenue was promised from long term leasing out of this sacred public land. LSP commercialization plans are an attack on the quality of life of the urban people and an attack on the parks spirit, purpose and mission..

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2015/08/new_jersey_dep_sued_over_refusal_to_release_libert.html#incart_river

Excerpt from:

Liberty State Park - Jersey City, NJ - State Park | Facebook

Liberty House – 218 Photos – American (New) – Jersey City …

Posted on by

I was here last night for dinner, with 3 girlfriends. We made a reservation weeks prior, simply due to the fact that it's the holiday season and we figured it would be busy!

Once we walked in, we were greeted by the hostess, she showed us to our table and gave us the drink menu. Within 5 minutes we were introduced to our waiter, he took our drink order, told us the specials and left us with menus.

Being that this was all of our first times here we order a little bit of everything. For starters, drinks, obviously the most important, 3 cosmos and an extra dirty martini, all super yummy, yet a tiny bit to strong. For appetizer we ordered the sushi special, which was average, I've had better sushi at a take out place. The sausage risotto, which had wayyyyyy to much blue cheese on it, the organic salad, just your plain old salad, and the calamari, which was actually perfectly cooked. For dinner, we ordered the hanger steak, short ribs and the cod special. Presentation was very nice portion size was decent, but in my opinion a little small considering the large price tag. Everything was fresh though! For dessert we ordered the apple strudel, which was alright, not the best I've had. All that for 4 people came to $238, my opinion, just a tad pricey!!!

The view is great, but, during the winter you can't really sit outside and enjoy the view, and to be honest, I'm not paying for the view, I'm paying for the food!

Service was great! Our server was clearly knowledgeable of the food he was serving which is great!

All in all, I would come back! Maybe during the summer so I can enjoy the view!

Read the original here:

Liberty House - 218 Photos - American (New) - Jersey City ...

International Conference and Exhibition on Molecular …

Posted on by

2nd International Conference and Exhibition on Molecular Medicine and Diagnostics-2016

Sep 26-28, 2016

Market Analysis

Summary of Molecular Medicine Conference

Molecular Medicine-2016 welcomes attendees, presenters, and exhibitors from all over the world to Miami, USA. We are delighted to invite you all to attend and register for the 2nd International Conference & Exhibition on Molecular Medicine & Diagnostics (Molecular Medicine workshops) which is going to be held during September 26-28, 2016 in Miami, USA. The organizing committee is gearing up for an exciting and informative conference program including plenary lectures, symposia, workshops, poster presentations on diverse topics, and business meetings interconnecting people all over the globe. We invite you to join us at the Molecular Medicine-2016 (systems medicine conferences), where you will be sure to have a meaningful experience with scholars around the world. We look forward to meeting you in Miami, USA.

For more details please visit: http://molecularmedicine.conferenceseries.com/

Conference Highlights

Scope & Importance

Molecular Medicine conferences mostly comprises of the topics like Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Bio-Engineering etc. which are certainly a key issue in the modern perspective and through this conference we will get all relevant information. Conference is the quite essential platform for sharing vivid knowledge. This will provide scientific advancements in their respective field. Though the internet surely provides a true platform to know about international researches, but understanding the research from the inventor has no replacement. International conferences provide that perfect platform. Conference on Molecular Medicine is a much celebrated conference which basically deals with the latest research and developments in the sphere of biological science. Molecular Medicine meetings will provide a perfect stage to all the Researchers, Students to present their Research work on the respective sphere by interacting with highly eminent personal like Professors, Doctors & Scientists etc. Thus, they will get more ideas & Suggestion.

Why Miami (USA)?

Miami is a city located on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County. The 44th most populated city proper in the United States, with a population of 417,650, it is the principal, central, and most populous city of the Miami metropolitan area, and the most populous metropolis in the Southeastern United States after Washington, D.C. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Miami's metro area is the eighth most populous and fourth-largest urban area in the United States, with a population of around 5.5 million.

Miami is a major center and a leader in finance, commerce, culture, media, entertainment, the arts, and international trade. Miami was classified as an Alpha- World City in the World Cities Study Groups inventory. In 2010, Miami ranked seventh in the United States in terms of finance, commerce, culture, entertainment, fashion, education, and other sectors. It ranked thirty-third among global cities. In 2008, Forbes magazine ranked Miami "America's Cleanest City", for its year-round good air quality, vast green spaces, clean drinking water, clean streets and city-wide recycling programs. According to a 2009 UBS study of 73 world cities, Miami was ranked as the richest city in the United States, and the world's fifth-richest city in terms of purchasing power. Miami is nicknamed the "Capital of Latin America",[1] is the second largest U.S. city with a Spanish-speaking majority, and the largest city with a Cuban-American plurality.

Topics to be mainly focused

Members Associated with Molecular Medicine Research

Hospitals Associated with Molecular Medicine Research

There are about 680 hospitals hospital and research Centre related to Molecular Medicine worldwide and 36 of them are Miami, USA.

Societies Associated with Molecular Medicine Research

Following are the some of the major societies associated with Molecular and gene therapy across the world:

Companies Associated with Molecular Medicine Research

Here are some of the companies associated with Molecular Medicine Research:

Universities Associated with Molecular Medicine Research

Here is the list for some of the top Universities related with Molecular Medicine in London, UK and worldwide.

Market Value on Molecular Medicine Research

The global Molecular Medicine market in USA is $ 11 billion where as it is $ 24 billion throughout the world.

Market Growth of Molecular Medicine Research in the last and upcoming ten years

Medical doctors, patients and health care providers consider the prevention of genetic diseases as an essential tool to improve the general health status of the population and the proportion of people suffering from genetics and genomics disease will increase by 65.2% by 2025. The top institutions researching in the related studies have been funded with 100 Billion Dollar worldwide. According to recent statistics genetic diseases worldwide will double between 2012 and 2025. The current market value of Molecular Medicine is $24 billion and is expected to reach more than $100 billion by 2025.

Fund Allotment to Molecular Medicine & Genetics

Statistics of Physicians, Researchers and Academicians working on Molecular Medicine

Molecular Medicine conference gathers renowned scientists, physicians, surgeons, young researchers, industrial delegates, Doctors, and talented student communities in the field of medicine under a single roof where networking and global partnering happens for the acceleration of future research. Following are the statistics percentage wise:

Physicians 35%

Researchers 30%

Academia 30%

Others 5%

Read the original here:

International Conference and Exhibition on Molecular ...

What is genetic engineering? – Definition from WhatIs.com

Posted on by

Genetic engineering is the deliberate, controlled manipulation of the genes in an organism with the intent of making that organism better in some way. This is usually done independently of the natural reproductive process. The result is a so-called genetically modified organism (GMO). To date, most of the effort in genetic engineering has been focused on agriculture.

Proponents of genetic engineering claim that it has numerous benefits, including the production of food-bearing plants that are resistant to extreme weather and adverse climates, insect infestations, disease, molds, and fungi. In addition, it may be possible to reduce the amount of plowing necessary in the farming process, thereby saving energy and minimizing soil erosion. A major motivation is the hope of producing abundant food at low cost to reduce world hunger, both directly (by feeding GMOs to human beings) and indirectly (by feeding GMOs to livestock and fish, which can in turn be fed to humans).

Genetic engineering carries potential dangers, such as the creation of new allergens and toxins, the evolution of new weeds and other noxious vegetation, harm to wildlife, and the creation of environments favorable to the proliferation of molds and fungi (ironically, in light of the purported advantage in that respect). Some scientists have expressed concern that new disease organisms and increased antibiotic resistance could result from the use of GMOs in the food chain.

The darkest aspect of genetic engineering is the possibility that a government or institution might undertake to enhance human beings by means of genetic engineering. Some see the possibility of using this technology to create biological weapons.

Genetic engineering is also known as genetic modification.

This was last updated in May 2007

Go here to see the original:

What is genetic engineering? - Definition from WhatIs.com

Population | Define Population at Dictionary.com

Posted on by

Contemporary Examples

Dual-eligibles are the sickest, poorest, and most vulnerable segment of the Medicare population.

The Monitor in November reported that more than 10 percent of the population uses Facebook in 51 countries.

But for half the populationAfghanistan's womenthat's a truth with modifications.

Should I have married someone Jewish, if only to keep our population up?

Oklahoma Total background checks: 344,781 population: 3,791,508 Background checks per 100,000 residents: 9,094 9.

Historical Examples

Some reports give the nominal Christian population as high as 80,000.

What, then, must be the population of the British empire if the increase in one city was at that rate?

He expressed his preference for parliamentary reform, based on population.

As our population has expanded, the Union has been cemented and strengthened.

It is not so in fact, but in Russia it is believed to be so by all classes of the population.

British Dictionary definitions for population Expand

(sometimes functioning as pl) all the persons inhabiting a country, city, or other specified place

the number of such inhabitants

(sometimes functioning as pl) all the people of a particular race or class in a specific area: the Chinese population of San Francisco

the act or process of providing a place with inhabitants; colonization

(ecology) a group of individuals of the same species inhabiting a given area

(astronomy) either of two main groups of stars classified according to age and location. Population I consists of younger metal-rich hot white stars, many occurring in galactic clusters and forming the arms of spiral galaxies. Stars of population II are older, the brightest being red giants, and are found in the centre of spiral and elliptical galaxies in globular clusters

(statistics) Also called universe. the entire finite or infinite aggregate of individuals or items from which samples are drawn

Word Origin and History for population Expand

1610s, from Late Latin populationem (nominative populatio) "a people; a multitude," as if from Latin populus "a people" (see people (n.)). Population explosion is first attested 1953.

population in Medicine Expand

population population (pp'y-l'shn) n.

The total number of people inhabiting a specific area.

The set of individuals, items, or data from which a statistical sample is taken.

All the organisms that constitute a specific group or occur in a specified habitat.

population in Science Expand

Excerpt from:

Population | Define Population at Dictionary.com

Agnosticism – Conservapedia

Posted on by

Agnosticism is, in weaker forms, an affirmation of ignorance regarding the existence of a God or gods, and in stronger forms, the assertion that the existence of a deity or deities is unknowable. By contrast Atheism is a strong form of ignorance that denies the existence of God.[1]

The proponent of the weaker form does not make a claim to knowledge about existence, but he simply suspends from making a decision. A suspension of decision, in terms of logic, does not have a truth value, and therefore they are not making an argument. The proponent of the stronger form goes a step further and makes a claim to knowledge by saying, I know that the existence of God cannot be known.

The word "agnostic" was coined in 1869 by T. H. Huxley[2] from the Greek roots a- not, and -gnostic, knowing; the philosopher Herbert Spencer was influential in spreading its use. One nineteenth-century saw held that "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet."[3]

Some accuse agnostics of being cowardly atheists, due to their supposedly wishy-washy rejection of God. It is also said by particular Christian groups, particularly but not exclusively in the United States of America, that those who know of Jesus but do not accept him are just as damned as those who reject him explicitly.

See also: Atheists doubting the validity of atheism

Agnostics differ from atheists in that they do not deny the existence of a deity while not affirming the existence of one (thus occupying a "middle-ground").

Further division lies with in two kinds of agnosticism: Agnostic Theism and Agnostic Atheism. Agnostic Theists believe in a god but do not claim to know there is a god. Agnostic Atheists do not believe in a god but do not claim to know there is not a god. Thus the distinction between Agnostics as opposed to Theists or Atheists is they do not claim knowledge even if they claim a belief. So contrary to what some may believe, they are not opinion-less on the subject.

Many religious believers make no distinction among non-believers. If you're not sure that God exists, they combine the unsure and "surely not" into one lump. For these believers, an "atheist" is any faithless person who doesn't believe in God.

Among those who have not decided whether to believe in a god, or to disbelieve in the existence of one, there are two main groups:

Bertrand Russell once wrote that, in describing his beliefs,

Christian apologist Norman Geisler wrote on complete agnosticism:

Using academic studies, survey data and other information, supporters of the Question evolution! campaign maintain that there is a lack of sound leadership within the agnostic/atheist and evolutionist communities in dealing with the global decline of atheism and agnosticism.

See:

Agnosticism has become a fairly common belief system in Western culture with 14% of people in the United States, 32% of people in France and 35% of people in Great Britain self-identifying as agnostics.[6]

Per capita atheists and agnostics in the United States give significantly less to charity than theists.

See also: Famous agnostics

For more information please see: Agnosticism, obesity and self-esteem

According to the Gallup Organization, "Very religious Americans are more likely to practice healthy behaviors than those who are moderately religious or nonreligious."[12]

Gallup further declares:

Two of the major risk factors for becoming obese according to the Mayo Clinic are poor dietary choices and inactivity, thus it appears as if agnostics/non-religious may be more prone to becoming obese than very religious individuals.[14]

In the absence of any cultural, metaphysical, and scientific history, as passed from one individual to another, the default position is a 'seeking theism'. Atheism and agnosticism are, at best, merely self-preserving coping responses to others' personally existentially unsatisfactory claims to having 'found God'. In their strongest forms, atheism and agnosticism are, for the individual, comparable respectively to what communist dictatorship and regressive anarchy are for the society: the presence of ontological disharmonies between individuals motivating, for lack of a complete basic knowledge of the world, an oppressive civil structure and a randomly destructive lack of civil structure.

Read more from the original source:
Agnosticism - Conservapedia

Agnosticism – By Branch / Doctrine – The Basics of Philosophy

Posted on by

Introduction | Types of Agnosticism | Support for Agnosticism

Agnosticism is the belief that the nature and existence of gods is unknown and inherently unknowable due to the nature of subjective experience. Technically, this position is strong agnosticism: in popular usage, an agnostic may just be someone who takes no position, pro or con, on the existence of gods, or who has not yet been able to decide, or who suspends judgment due to lack of evidence one way or the other (weak agnosticism).

Agnosticism maintains that the nature and attributes of God are beyond the grasp of man's finite and limited mind. Agnostics generally claim either that it is not possible to have absolute or certain knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God or gods, or that, while individual certainty may be possible, they personally have no knowledge. In both cases this involves some form of skepticism.

The earliest professed agnostic was Protagoras, although the term itself (from the Greek "agnosis" meaning "without knowledge") was not coined in English until the 1880s by T. H. Huxley.

Some of the most important agnostic philosophers are Protagoras, T. H. Huxley, Robert Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell, but many more public figures have been self-confessed agnostics, including Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman, Carl Sagan and Mark Twain.

The Greek Sophist Protagoras was probably the earliest agnostic. He professed that the existence of the gods was unknowable in the 5th Century B.C.

Huxley was responsible for creating the terms "agnostic" and "agnosticism" to sum up his own position on Metaphysics. His agnosticism was a response to the clerical intolerance of the 1860's as it tried to suppress scientific discoveries which appeared to clash with scripture.

Ingersoll, known as "The Great Agnostic", was an influential American politician in the late 19th Century, and a strong supporter of Freethought (the philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be formed on the basis of science and logic and not be influenced by emotion, authority, tradition or dogma). He popularized and justified the agnostic position, which he summed up in his 1986 lecture "Why I Am An Agnostic".

Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" and "Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?" are considered classic statements of agnosticism. He was careful to distinguish between his atheism as regards certain types of god concepts, and his agnosticism as regards some other types of superhuman intelligence. Though he generally considered himself an agnostic in a purely philosophical context, he said that the label "atheist" conveyed a more accurate understanding of his views in a popular context.

Read more from the original source:
Agnosticism - By Branch / Doctrine - The Basics of Philosophy

Health Care, Minnesota Department of Human Services DHS

Posted on by

Beginning July 1 the Minnesota Department of Human Services will enroll providers to deliver a new early intensive intervention Medical Assistance benefit for children and young adults with autism spectrum disorder and related conditions. Families and children will be able to access services later this summer. Under the new benefit, covered services will be designed to improve social interaction, communication and behavioral regulation skills at a critical time in development, promoting fuller participation by children in their family, schools and community life. Families interested in the new benefit should contact their county, tribe or managed care plan. More information is available in a news release and on the DHS website.

A new online publication from DHS provides information about DHS public health care programs and MNsure for county, tribal and state eligibility workers. DHS public health care programs and MNsure: Weekly information for county, tribal and state eligibility workers is available on the CountyLink website. DHS created the update in an effort to keep county, tribal and state eligibility workers informed about news and information that affects their work.

DHS and the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) recently launched a new State Innovation Model (SIM) Minnesota website at mn.gov/sim. In February 2013 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation awarded Minnesota a $45 million SIM testing grant to be implemented during a three-year period ending October 2016. The goal is to help Minnesota providers and communities work together to create healthier futures for Minnesotans. Minnesota will use the grant money to test new ways of delivering and paying for health care using the Minnesota Accountable Health Model. Minnesotas SIM initiative is a joint effort between the departments of Human Services and Health with support from Gov. Mark Daytons office.

Minnesotans in need of health care, nutrition assistance, child care assistance and emergency assistance can apply online through ApplyMN, applymn.dhs.mn.gov. This site allows Minnesotans for the first time to fill out a single application online for a majority of public assistance programs.

The Family Self Sufficiency and Health Care Program Statistics available through July 2015 (PDF) is available on the DHS public website. The report includes caseload numbers and expenditures for cash, emergency and food assistance programs and health care programs.

Subscribe to News from DHS if you would like to be added to a monthly email notification list for department news and website updates.

Continued here:

Health Care, Minnesota Department of Human Services DHS

Michaels Experience Moore’s Law Advancing Your Legal …

Posted on by

Michael Moorehas spent more than 25 years in the legal profession in private practice,as General Counsel for a public corporation,as aretained legal recruiter and consultant andasalaw firm executive.

Michaelhas helped law students launch careers, associates become partners and partners advance their practicesto new levels. He specializes inprofessional growth, marketing and client developmentand leadership coaching for attorneys at all levels of experience.

MichaelMoore provides value to law firms through strategic organizational and resource optimization. He has implemented proven methods to increase both associate and partner productivity, improve operational results and increase profits. He has helped firms with strategic planning, marketing programs andlateral recruitment as a growth option.

Michaelhas publishednumerous articleson a variety of legal topics such aseffective client development,social media use for lawyers,and law firm management including lawyer compensation, staff retention and smart growth. A few examples of his work can be found in the Articles section.

Michael has also conducted Webinars, seminars and retreats on behalf of various law firm administration and bar associations with topics such as effective client intake, matter budgeting and time management skills for lawyers as well as both strategic and succession planning.

If you think Michael could help you or your law firm, contact him at once for a free consultation.

Read more here:

Michaels Experience Moore's Law Advancing Your Legal ...

Mooers’ law – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted on by

For the observation regarding integrated circuits, see Moore's law.

Mooers' law is an empirical observation of behavior made by American computer scientist Calvin Mooers in 1959. The observation is made in relation to information retrieval and the interpretation of the observation is used commonly throughout the information profession both within and outside its original context.

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Mooers argued that information is at risk of languishing unused due not only on the effort required to assimilate it but also to any fallout that could arise from the discovery of information that conflicts with the users personal, academic or corporate interests. In interacting with new information, a user runs the risk of proving their work incorrect or even irrelevant. Instead, Mooers argued, users prefer to remain in a state of safety in which new arguments are ignored in an attempt to save potential embarrassment or reprisal from supervisors.[2]

The more commonly used interpretation of Mooers' law is considered to be a derivation of the principle of least effort first stated by George Kingsley Zipf. This interpretation focuses on the amount of effort that will be expended to use and understand a particular information retrieval system before the information seeker 'gives up', and the Law is often paraphrased to increase the focus on the retrieval system:

The more difficult and time consuming it is for a customer to use an information system, the less likely it is that he will use that information system.

J. Michael Pemberton

Mooers' Law tells us that information will be used in direct proportion to how easy it is to obtain.

In this interpretation, "painful and troublesome" comes from using the retrieval system.

Link:

Mooers' law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Uncertain Future of Moores Law

Posted on by

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

For examples of how digital technology is rapidly, profoundly, and unexpectedly shaping lives across the globe, look no further than todays news: social media and the Arab Spring; the Stuxnet worm and the clandestine cyberwar against Iran; the proliferation of smartphones and tablets; the ubiquitous web and the cloud; Netflix streaming surpassing web surfing on the net; Bradley Mannings data dump to Wikileaks; and Microsoft as the new tech underdog. The digital world is changing rapidly, and so are we.

We have become accustomed to this state of perpetual flux, of this open-endedness in the application and proliferation of new digital technologies. Yet underneath this flux and unpredictability lies a shared certainty: The cost of digital electronics, and the technologies built with them, will dramatically plummet as their power and performance continues to rise exponentially.

This conviction about the future of digital electronicssilicon microchipsis widely known as Moores Law, named after Gordon Moore (a chemist and co-founder of both Fairchild Semiconductor and the Intel Corporation) for his explication of this developmental dynamic in silicon microchips in 1964.

We have already entered into an age of uncertainty about Moores Law itself.

Equal parts economic and technical, this developmental dynamic has been maintained for a half century by the semiconductor industry, through the efforts of thousands of researchers and the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars. Maintaining Moores Law has required a coordinated push in a single, common direction: shrinking the size of the basic building blocks of microchipstiny switches known as planar transistorsand, to use Moores term, cramming more and more of them into the same area of a silicon chip. To semiconductor initiates, this common direction is known as CMOS scaling (CMOS is an acronym for the variety of microchip that rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s). In fact, since the 1990s the semiconductor industry along with its specialty manufacturing tool and materials partners have collaborated on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, a careful timeline of the problems that must be solved to maintain the traditional pace of change in silicon microchips.

The metronomic pace of CMOS scaling, largely taken for granted outside of certain technical communities, underlies our expectation of continual surprise in the digital world, from the continued proliferation of ever-more-powerful microchips. Our conviction in the reliability of Moores Law profoundly shapes the expectations and decisions of both producers and consumers of electronics-reliant goods and services. From military weapons systems to consumer electronics, product planning is grounded in Moores Law. As individual consumers, our purchasing decisions share this grounding: Who has not waited a year to buy a gadget, with the expectation that next years gadget version 2.0 will deliver much more bang for the buck?

But what weve taken for granted for decades may soon change. On Wednesday, May 4, some of the leading technologists at the Intel Corporation held a press conference to disclose details about their new silicon manufacturing technology. While there was much of interest in the Intel disclosures about the future of silicon microchips and the competitive landscape of the global semiconductor industry, perhaps the most important implication of the presentation has received little comment: We have already entered into an age of uncertainty about Moores Law itself. This conclusion is somewhat ironic, since Intel announced that it had succeeded in developing a new innovation that will extend Moores Law for at least another six years.

What did Intel disclose last month? In essence, Intel announced that it had abandoned the planar transistor, and, therefore, traditional CMOS scaling. As Mark Bohr, one of Intels most senior technologists put it in the press conference Q&A, We can say goodbye to planar transistors.

For the remarkable run of CMOS scaling over the past four decades, a defining feature of planar transistors was that they were flat; hence, their name. As planar transistors were shrunk so that a billion of them could be crammed into a single microchip, one problem became more and more pronounced. They became harder to turn off, a very bad thing for a switch. Solutions to this problem entailed a growing difficulty of their own: The improved transistors were power hungry, anathema to applications like smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

To continue shrinking transistors in order to maintain the pace of performance and cost improvement for microchips, and to untangle itself from this power dilemma, Intel announced a new manufacturing technology that it will begin to use for all of its products next year. In this technology, Intel will replace planar transistors with Tri-Gate transistors. These new transistors are no longer flat, but rather take the form of a minute rail or fin. Indeed, the more generic term of this new form of transistor, used by other semiconductor firms, is finFET. One of the principle virtues of these new non-flat or 3-D transistors is that they are easy to turn off, and thus combine great switching speed with very low power consumption.

At left is a traditional 32-nanometer 2-D transistor, while at right is the newer, smaller, 22-nanometer 3-D transistor.

Intel is making the jump to its Tri-Gate transistors several years ahead of its semiconductor industry rivals, and sees them as providing a basis for its subsequent generation of manufacturing technology in the next six years. This new path to maintaining Moores Law, as the Intel researchers noted, builds on previous deviations in the last five years or more from traditional materials and structures for CMOS scaling. As Bill Holt, the Intel VP for technology development put it, Simple CMOS scalingended a while ago. In the midst of their press conference, the Intel team presented a quote about the move to 3-D transistors from none other than Gordon Moore himself: For years we have seen limits to how small transistors can get. This change in the basic structure is a truly revolutionary approach, and one that should allow Moores Law, and the historic pace of innovation to continue.

While Intels jump to the world beyond traditional CMOS provides a view into the immediate future of the worlds largest chipmaker, a considerable haze of uncertainty now surrounds what its rivals will do in the near term, and what the whole industry will do after six short years. For the immanent 22 nanometer or 22 nm technology for which Intel will use 3-D transistorsand which Intel claims will have the capability of cramming as many as 6 million such transistors into the area occupied by a standard printed periodmany of its major competitors will maintain the planar transistor, and pursue an alternate approach to the power problem known as silicon on insulator. At the upcoming 14 nm technology some three years down the line, the semiconductor industry could bifurcate, with larger firms abandoning planar for 3-D transistorsmoving beyond CMOSwhile smaller firms pursue the silicon on insulator technology.

This handy (and not-at-all corny) video Intel put together illustrates the difference between 2-D and 3-D transistor technology:

Looking out further toward 2016, at the 10 nm technology for which development is already underway, the haze thickens. The optical technology used to form todays microchips becomes increasingly improbable at that level of the nanoscale, and the top contenders to replace it are already late in their development to keep pace with Moores Law. Looking out less than a decade from now to the 7 nm technology that is planned to follow 10 nm, the inherent atomic nature of matter looms as an issue for fabricating uniform devices. The diameter of a silicon atom is 0.2 nm.

As the semiconductor industry drives deeper into the nanoscale, it appears that we are returning to an age of technological uncertainty not dissimilar from the one from which silicon microchips first emerged. Such a return to a period in which the future of electronics was highly uncertain, and developments were far more unpredictable, could be both highly disruptive and incredibly exciting.

Disruption could occur in many forms. Patterns of technological change may become less uniform, with the magnitude of changes and their timescale disaggregating across different technologies. The management and funding of research and innovation may have to undergo considerable revision to adapt to uncertainty. On the one hand this means technological and economic planning may become significantly more difficult. On the other, creative and unexpected new directions in research might abound.

For most of the past 40 years, industry has conducted and financed the bulk of the R&D for CMOS scaling. In an age of increased technological uncertainty, government support of high-risk research may return to prominence. Indeed, direct military funding of R&D and activist, price-insensitive military demand were essential to the initial development of the microchip in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this era, government research spending on microelectronics was significant, risk-tolerant, and open-ended, supporting a broad array of speculative approaches. It is interesting to note that the semiconductor community looks to DARPA-funded research at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1990s as the origin of the 3-D transistor approach.

One conclusion to be drawn from Intels recent announcement is that while the immediate future of Moores Law appears clear, the longer term developmental path for electronics is now as, or more, uncertain than it has been for a half century. Previous news of the death of Moores Law has turned out to be exaggerated. The rather incredible extensibility of silicon technology and the creative potentials of the semiconductor community have repeatedly surmounted previous purported barriers. Surely silicon technology and microchips will continue to surprise even the most knowledgeable observers in the years ahead.

Nevertheless, with Intels leap to the world beyond traditional CMOS scaling and the planar transistor we appear to be quickly approaching a regime of increased technological uncertainty. Perhaps this is a return to a more typical state of affairs from a temporary excursion into unprecedented continuous and predictable change. Doubt is not an agreeable condition, Voltaire once quipped, but certainty is an absurd one.

David C. Brock is an historian of technology and the co-author of Makers of the Microchip (MIT Press, 2010). Brock is a Senior Research Fellow with the Center for Contemporary History and Policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and is also affiliated with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Tags: Computing, information-technology, Intel, Moore's Law

By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the Science Progress Privacy Policy and agree to the Science Progress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

The rest is here:

The Uncertain Future of Moores Law

55 Jobs Of The Future | Future Jobs | Futurist Predictions …

Posted on by

Last week I was speaking at an event in Istanbul. As usual, once I landed at the airport, I made my way to the customs area where I was greeted by no fewer than 1,000 people in line ahead of me.

Long lines in airport customs is not unusual. But as I waded through this 45-minute process I couldnt help but do some mental calculations surrounding the massive waste of human capital throughout this whole process. Since there were two separate customs areas at the Istanbul airport, my rough calculations came out to well over 10 million man-hours a year wasted at this one single airport.

Its not unusual for governments to waste peoples time over what they like to phrase as the greater good. However, this entire security process will eventually be automated down to a fraction of the time it takes today, eliminating the need for over 90% of all customs agents.

The same goes for TSA-like security agents on the front end of airports. Within the next decade, 90% of those jobs will be gone as well. All of them, automated out of existence.

A recent article in The Economist quotes Bill Gates as saying at least a dozen job types will be taken over by robots and automation in the next two decades, and these jobs cover both high-paying and low-skilled workers. Some of the positions he mentioned were commercial pilots, legal work, technical writing, telemarketers, accountants, retail workers, and real estate sales agents.

Indeed, as Ive predicted before, by 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear. Again, this is not a doom and gloom prediction, rather a wakeup call for the world.

Will we run out of work for the world? Of course not. Nothing is more preposterous than to somehow proclaim the human race no longer has any work left to do. But having paid jobs to coincide with the work that needs to be done, and developing the skills necessary for future work is another matter.

Our goal needs to be focused on the catalytic innovations that create entirely new industries, and these new industries will serve as the engines of future job creation, unlike anything in all history.

I have written in the past about future industries. This time Id like to focus on many of the future jobs within these industries that currently dont exist.

Facing the Transition Ahead

Many people are scared of the future. With every science fiction movie that portrays technology as evil, and lets be honest, thats the theme of almost every science fiction movie thats ever existed, its easy to develop some paranoia about the dangers ahead.

However, much of todays technology is giving us super-human attributes. The same technology that gets blamed for eliminating our jobs, is also giving us capabilities beyond our wildest dreams. We have instant access to friends and family, instant access to answers for almost any question we ask, and instant entertainment if ever we get bored.

We can now think-faster, know-faster, and do-faster than ever before. We no longer end up being the last to know.

At the same time, every new technology also requires new skill sets for those working in those environments. Here are just a few of the skills that will be highly prized in the future.

14 Hot New Skills

1. Transitionists Those who can help make a transition.

2. Expansionists A talent for adapting along with a growing environment.

3. Maximizers An ability to maximize processes, situations, and opportunities.

4. Optimizers The skill and persistence to tweak variables until it produces better results.

5. Inflectionists Finding critical inflection points in a system will become a much-prized skill.

6. Dismantlers Every industry will eventually end, and this requires talented people who know how to scale things back in an orderly fashion.

7. Feedback Loopers Those who can devise the best possible feedback loops.

8. Backlashers - Ever- new technology will have its detractors, and each backlash will require a response.

9. Last Milers Technologies commonly reach a point of diminishing returns as they attempt to extend their full capacity to the end user. People with the ability to mastermind these solutions will be in hot demand.

10. Contexualists In between the application and the big picture lays the operational context for every new technology.

11. Ethicists There will be an ever-growing demand for people who can ask the tough question and standards to apply moral decency to some increasingly complex situations.

12. Philosophers With companies in a constant battle over my-brain-is-bigger-that-your-brain, it becomes the overarching philosophy that wins the day.

13. Theorists Every new product, service, and industry begins with a theory.

14. Legacists Those who are passionate and skilled with leaving a legacy.

Predicting future jobs is an exercise that involves looking at future industries and speculating on ways in which they will be different than the workforce today. Business management, engineering, accounting, marketing, and sales are all necessary skills for the future, but the work involved will also be different.

At the same time there will be many less-obvious positions that will need to be created. This is about those less-obvious positions.

The following is not an exhaustive list, nor do these job titles all have good explanations. Rather, this column is intended to be a thought-generator, an idea-sparker, to help you draw your own conclusions.

Personal Rapid Transit Systems (PRTs)

PRTs like Hyperloop, Skytran, Jpods, and ET3 offer a new dimension in transportation. They operate above the fray, independent of the frenetic energy of todays highways, airports, train, and bus depots. Details here.

1. Station Designers & Architects

2. Circulation Engineers

3. Traffic Flow Analyzers

4. Command Center Operators

5. Traffic Transitionists

6. Impact Minimizers

7. Demand Optimizers

8. Secondary Opportunity Developers

9. Feedback Loopers

10. Construction Teams PRTs have the potential to become the largest infrastructure project the earth has ever seen, costing literally trillions of dollars and employing hundreds of millions of people. Details here.

Fog nets for harvesting water

Atmospheric Water Harvesters

One of todays most significant breakthroughs is happening in the area of atmospheric water harvesters, being developed by a new breed of water innovators intent on solving one of earths most vexing problems.

11. Site Collection Lease Managers

12. System Architects

13. Water Supply Transitionists

14. Purification Monitors

15. Impact Assessors

Creating the God Globe

The God Globe is intended to be a master command center for planet earth, where we will, for the first time ever, begin to control natures greatest forces. Details here.

16. Global System Architect

17. Data Integration Manager

18. Inflectionists Those who can pinpoint the optimal intersection of time, place, and information for change to occur.

19. Fear Containment Managers

20. Privacy Theorists, Philosophers, and Ethicists

The Sharing Economy

The sharing economy is creating some amazing business models around the use of other peoples stuff.

21. Sharability Auditors People who analyze homes and businesses for sharable assets.

22. Corporate Sharing Managers

23. Opportunity Spotters

24. Impact Assessors

25. Involvement Specialists

The Quantified Self

The quantified self is all about building a measurable information sphere around each of us. As we get better acquainted with the Delphic maxim know thyself, we will become far more aware of our deficiencies and the pieces needed to shore up our shortfalls. Details here.

26. Quantified Self Assessment Auditors

27. Data Contexualists

28. Deficiency Analyzers

29. Skill Quantifiers

30. Bio-Waste Optimizers

31. Guardians of Privacy

Future Sports

Sports have become the ultimate form of storytelling. Each contest is a test of the human spirit, with good guys and bad guys pairing off, amidst great drama, as contestants test their limits overcoming adversity, to achieve an unknown outcome. And all of this is happening in real time. Details here.

32. Simulation Specialists

33. Genetic Modification Designers and Engineers

34. Body Modification Ethicists

35. Athlete Qualification Analyzers

36. Cradle to Grave Lifecycle Managers

37. Super Baby Designers

38. Super Baby Psychologists

39. Super Baby Advocates

Commercial Drone Industry

The U.S. Congress has mandated the FAA develop a plan to incorporate drones into national airspace by Sept. 30, 2015. Many in this new industry are chomping at the bit to get started.

40. Drone Classification Gurus Different laws will apply to different classifications of drone vehicles.

41. Drone Standards Specialists

42. Drone Docking Designers and Engineers

43. Operator Certification Specialists

44. Environmental Minimizers Sound diminution engineers, visual aesthetic reductionists, etc.

45. Drone Traffic Optimizers

46. Automation Engineers

47. Backlash Minimizers Ever-new technology has its detractors, this perhaps more than most.

On the path to a trillion sensors

Our Trillion-Sensor Future

Industry experts are now projecting that we will reach 1 trillion sensors in the world by 2024, and 100 trillion by 2036.

Follow this link:

55 Jobs Of The Future | Future Jobs | Futurist Predictions ...

Astrophysics authors/titles "new"

Posted on by

Authors: M. Montalto (1), N. Iro (3), N. C. Santos (1,2), S. Desidera (4), J. H. C. Martins (1,7), P. Figueira (1,2), R. Alonso (5,6). ((1) Instituto de Astrofsica e Cincias do Espao, Universidade do Porto, CAUP, Rua das Estrelas, PT4150-762 Porto, Portugal, (2) Departamento de Fsica e Astronomia, Faculdade de Cincias, Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 687, PT4169-007 Porto, Portugal, (3) Theoretical Meteorology group Klimacampus, University of Hamburg Grindelberg 5, 20144, (4) INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Vicolo dellOsservatorio 5, Padova, IT-35122, (5) Instituto de Astrofsica de Canarias, E-38205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain, (6) Dpto. de Astrofsica, Universidad de La Laguna, 38206 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain, (7) European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Cordova 3107, Vitacura Casilla 19001, Santiago 19, Chile)

We report on novel observations of HAT-P-1 aimed at constraining the optical transmission spectrum of the atmosphere of its transiting Hot-Jupiter exoplanet. Ground-based differential spectrophotometry was performed over two transit windows using the DOLORES spectrograph at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG). Our measurements imply an average planet to star radius ratio equal to $rm R_p/R_{star}$=(0.1159$pm$0.0005). This result is consistent with the value obtained from recent near infrared measurements of this object but differs from previously reported optical measurements being lower by around 4.4 exoplanet scale heights. Analyzing the data over 5 different spectral bins 600AA$,$ wide we observed a single peaked spectrum (3.7 $rmsigma$ level) with a blue cut-off corresponding to the blue edge of the broad absorption wing of sodium and an increased absorption in the region in between 6180-7400AA. We also infer that the width of the broad absorption wings due to alkali metals is likely narrower than the one implied by solar abundance clear atmospheric models. We interpret the result as evidence that HAT-P-1b has a partially clear atmosphere at optical wavelengths with a more modest contribution from an optical absorber than previously reported.

Visit link:

Astrophysics authors/titles "new"

Libertarian T Shirts, Shirts & Tees | Custom Libertarian Clothing

Posted on by

20% OFF*

your order -

Transform your creativity into beautiful products, sell them on CafePress and make money. It's easy and fun.

Filter Results

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Kid's Basic T-shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Women's Basic T-shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Men's V-Neck T-Shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Women's Basic T-shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Men's Basic T-Shirt

Women's Basic T-shirt

New! Added {{designCreateDate}}

Find Libertarian T shirts for everyone (including yourself). Shop for popular Libertarian designs in our marketplace, or customize and personalize one yourself! We have a huge selection of unique, Libertarian tees (we're talking about millions of cool-looking designs printed on T-shirts for women, men and children). With so many, it's simple to find that one-of-a-kind tee that expresses your personality. We have shirts in different styles, color, and sizes. Find your favorite design on Organic, Classic, and V-neck tees. There is no minimum order size and our products have fast shipping. Can't find the perfect Libertarian shirt? It is easy to customize and design your own custom Libertarian shirts at CafePress! Simply add text and images with our easy online designer. Create your own Libertarian T Shirt now at CafePress!

{"ViewRendering.SerpMobileNew":28,"SearchController.Search()":106,"SearchController.SearchResults().new SearchResultSet()":93,"RetailSearch.new RetailSearchResponse()":28,"EndairaRequest.MakeRequest().MultiSearch1":24,"SumOfAllMeasurementsBelowReportingThreshold":6}

Original post:

Libertarian T Shirts, Shirts & Tees | Custom Libertarian Clothing

Modern Art Movements (1870-1970)

Posted on by

De Stijl (1917-31)

De Stijl (Dutch for "the style,") was the name of a group of artists (and the art, design and aesthetics journal they published, which was one of the most influential avant-garde magazines of the 1920s). Founded in the Netherlands during World War I, by Theo van Doesburg, the older Piet Mondrian, architect Gerrit Rietveld, and Bart Van der Leck, it advocated a geometrical type of abstract art, (later called concrete art, by Van Doesburg), based on universal laws of harmony that would be equally applicable to life and art. The movement had its greatest impact on architecture. Although Piet Mondrian seceded from the group in 1923, he remained faithful to its themes until the end of his life by which time he had become one of the most famous of all abstract painters. By comparison, the more restless Van Doesburg abandoned one of the basic tenets of De Stijl in 1924 when he substituted diagonals for verticals and horizontals in search of greater dynamism.

Neo-Plasticism (fl.1918-26)

Term used to describe the style of painting invented by Piet Mondrian. It comes from the Dutch words "Nieuwe Beelding", used by Mondrian in his articles in De Stijl magazine (1917-19), and in his book "Neo-Plasticisme" from 1921 onwards to describe his own type of abstract art. Essentially it means "new art", since sculpture and certain types of painting are considered 'plastic arts'. However the German version "Neue Gestaltung" (new forming) captures Mondrian's meaning best. He used the name to advocate a 'new forming' in the widest sense, as well as his own ideas and images. In his long essay "Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art", Mondrian wrote: "The new plastic idea ... should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour". Thus in a sense Neo-Plasticism was an ideal form of painting, which used only pure colour, line and form. In addition to insisting only on primary colours (or non-colours), it advocated solely squares, rectangles, and straight horizontal or vertical lines. Despite his disagreement with Van Doesburg over the latter's launch of Elementarism, in 1924, Mondrian's theories exercised had a huge impact on later painting, and he is now regarded as one of the greatest of all modern artists.

Bauhaus School (Germany, 1919-1933)

Founded in 1919 by the innovative modern architect Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany, the Bauhaus Design School was a revolutionary school of art upon which so many others have been modelled. Its name, derived from the two German words "bau" for building and "haus" for house, together with its artist-community system, hints at the the idea of a fraternity working on the construction of a new society. Highly influential in both architecture and design, its teachers included Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anni Albers and Johannes Itten. Its stated goal was to bring art into contact with everyday life, hence design was accorded as much weight as fine art. Among the leading principles taught at The Bauhaus were the virtues of simple, clean design; abstraction; massproduction; the ethical and practical advantages of a well-designed environment, as well as democracy and worker participation. In 1925, The Bauhaus moved into a new building in Dessau in 1925-6, and in 1932 relocated to Berlin where it was eventually closed by the Nazis in 1933. Its teachers then dispersed, with several moving to America: Moholy-Nagy went to Chicago where he established the New Bauhaus in 1937, while Albers took Bauhaus methods with him to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later to Yale University.

Purism (Early, mid-1920s)

Fashionable 1920s Parisian Movement founded by Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier) and Amedee Ozenfant, based on theories outlined in their 1918 book Aprs le Cubisme (After Cubism). Disagreeing with Cubist fragmentation, they produced figurative art (mostly still lifes) basic forms stripped of detail and supposedly pure in colour, form and design. Other artists loosely associated with the movement which peaked at the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925, were Fernand Leger, Juan Gris and the Russian-Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.

Precisionism (Cubist-Realism) (fl.1920s)

An important influence on modern art painting in the United States, Precisionism was an American movement (also referred to as Cubist Realism) whose focus was modern industry and urban landscapes, characterized by the realistic depiction of objects but in a manner which also highlighted their geometric form. An idealized, almost Romantic style, it was exemplified in works by Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, while the urban pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe also fall into the Precisionist genre. See also Charles Sheeler's photographs of Ford's River Rouge Car Factory.

Surrealist Movement (1924 onwards)

Rooted in the Metaphysical Painting of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), the revolutionary painterly ideas of Cubism, the subversive art of Dada and the psychoanalysis ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Surrealism was the most influential avant-garde art movement of the inter-war years. Its goal, according to its founding father, the French writer Andre Breton - in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism - was to fuse the unconscious (the part of the human mind where memories and instincts are stored) with the conscious, to create a new "super-reality" - a surralisme. A broad intellectual movement, Surrealism encompassed a diverse range of styles from abstraction to expressionism and full-blown realism, characteristically punctuated with weird, hallucinatory or fundamentally 'unreal' imagery. Leading surrealist artists included Salvador Dali (1904-89), Max Ernst (1891-1976), Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Andre Masson (1896-1987), Yves Tanguy (1900-55), Joan Miro (1893-1983), Jean Arp (1886-1966), and Man Ray (1890-1976). Their immediate impact was seen in Germany in the Magic Realism of Franz Roh, and later in Britain, where British Surrealism was founded in 1936 by the writer Herbert Read, together with the artists David Gascoyne, Paul Nash, and Roland Penrose. The First International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London in 1936 and sparked enormous interest, not least because of the talk given by the flamboyant self-publicist Salvador Dali from inside a deep-sea diving suit. Surrealism had a huge influence on Europe, and few European artists of the 1930s were unaffected by the movement. It continues to have a significant influence on art, literature and cinematography.

Art Deco (c.1925-40)

A popular and fashionable style of decorative design and architecture in the inter-war years (much beloved by cinema and hotel architects), Art Deco designs also extended to furniture, ceramics, textile fabrics, jewellery, and glass. Showcased in 1925 at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris, Art Deco was essentially a reaction against Art Nouveau: replacing the latter's flowing curvilinear shapes with Cubist and Precisionist-inspired geometric forms. Classic examples of Art Deco design include the New York Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. Art Deco also drew inspiration from the modern architectural designs of The Bauhaus. Famous artists associated with Art Deco include the Polish-Russian society portraitist Tamara de Lempicka, glass artist Rene Lalique and graphic designer Adolphe Mouron.

Ecole de Paris (Paris School)

For half a century (1890-1940) Paris remained the centre of world art, culminating in the dazzling works of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. The Paris School is a term used by art historians to denote the community of artists, both French and foreign, working in the city during the first half of the 20th century, rather than a strictly defined style, school or movement. For many reasons, Paris was exceptionally attractive to artists. It was free of political repression, it was home to a number of influential 20th century painters (eg. Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger, Amedeo Modigliani, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Cham Soutine, Mikhail Larionov, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, to name but a few), and it boasted a booming art world with galleries, collectors and critics to support artists with talent. The twin leaders (chefs d'cole) were Picasso and Matisse.

Neue Sachlichkeit (Germany, c.1925-35)

Die Neue Sachlichkeit - a German term, meaning "New Objectivity" - was the name given to a group of Expressionist artists in Germany during the 1920s, derived from their 1925 Neue Sachlichkeit show in Mannheim. It was the third phase of the Expressionist movement in Germany, after Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Key members included Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad and to a lesser extent Georg Schrimpf and Max Beckmann. Although the exhibition curator, GF Hartlaub, described its paintings as "new realism bearing a socialist flavour", the style was vividly expressionist in its satirical portrayal of corruption and decadence in post-war Weimar Germany.

Magic Realism (1925-40)

Although influenced by Surrealism, Magic Realism was actually part of the 'return to order' trend which occured in post-World War I Europe in the 1920s. The name derives from a 1925 book by German art historian and critic Franz Roh called "Nach Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus" (After Expressionism: Magic Realism). Members included Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Alexander Kanoldt and Adolf Ziegler.

Socialist Realism (1928-80)

Socialist Realism was a form of heroic political propaganda employed by dictator Joseph Stalin in Russia, from 1929 onwards, to buttress his program of accelerated industrial development. Formally announced by his artistic stooge Maxim Gorky, at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, the style or direction involved the creation of bold optimistic imagery to evangelize the achievements of the Soviet State and inspire workers to Stakhanovite feats of labour. The most ubiquitous media used by Socialist Realist artists was the poster, although painting and sculpture was also produced, typically on a monumental scale, showing fearless individuals and groups in idealistic and heroic poses.

Social Realism (America) (1930-45)

A general category describing works of art which focus on relatively low-brow subjects to do with eveyday life, as opposed to the 'ideal' or romantic settings employed by artists up until the 19th century. It embraces American Scene Painting and Regionalism.

Social Realism denotes the socially-aware painters of the Depression era, such as Ben Shahn, Reginald Marsh, Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, William Gropper, Jack Levine, Jacob Lawrence and Isabel Bishop. They took their inspiration from the traditions of the earlier New York Ashcan School. Photographers like Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) and Walker Evans (1903-75) also contributed to the movement with their portraits of migrant workers from the Depression.

Mexican Murals/Muralism describes the national wall painting campaign, conceived by the education minister Jose Vasconcelos Calderon (1882-1959). The Mexican painters involved included Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as Alfredo Martinez (1871-1946), Roberto Nervo (1885-1968), Amado de la Cueva (1891-1926), Ramon Alva de la Canal (1892-1985), Pedro Nel Gomez (18991984), Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), Fermin Revueltas Sanchez (1901-1935), Federico Heraclio Cantu Garza (1907-89), Jorge Gonzalez Camarena (1908-80), and Alfredo Zalce Torres (1908-2003), to name but a few.

American Scene Painting was a sort of patriotic reaction to avant-garde European abstract art. Artists turned their back on European hypermodernism and looked for truth in specifically American imagery. Regionalism was the midwest variant of American Scene Painting, which relied on the realistic nostalgic setting of rural and small-town America.

Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) (1933-45, Germany)

Coined by Adolf Hitler, the term "Entartete Kunst" meaning degenerate art, expresses the Nazi idea that any art which did not conform to the ideal of well-crafted figurative images depicting heroic acts or comfortable day-to-day living, was the product of degenerate people. Not surprisingly most modern art was labelled degenerate, which meant that most modern artists in Germany (from 1933 onwards) could not show or sell their works. In 1937, the Nazis removed all modern works from German art museums. A selection was then exhibited in Munich to demonstrate how repulsive they were, but the plan backfired and introduced modern art to huge crowds.

See more here:

Modern Art Movements (1870-1970)

Freedom (Franzen novel) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted on by

Freedom is a novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and released on August 31, 2010.

Freedom received general acclaim from book critics, and was ranked one of the best books of 2010 by several publications.

Freedom follows several members of an American family, the Berglunds, as well as their close friends and lovers, as complex and troubled relationships unfold over many years. The book follows them through the last decades of the twentieth century and concludes near the beginning of the Obama administration.

Freedom opens with a short history of the Berglund family from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as the most ideal liberal middle-class family, and they are among the first families to move back into urban St. Paul, Minnesota, after years of white flight to the suburbs. Patty Berglund is an unusually young and pretty homemaker with a self-deprecating sense of humor; her husband Walter is a mild-mannered lawyer with strong environmentalist leanings.

They have one daughter, Jessica, and a son, Joey, who early on displays an independent streak and an interest in making money. Joey becomes sexually involved with a neighborhood teen named Connie and begins to rebel against his mother, going so far as to move in with Connie, her mother, and her mother's boyfriend Blake, making Patty and Walter increasingly unstable. After several unhappy years, the family relocates to Washington, D.C., abandoning the neighborhood and house they worked so hard to improve. Walter takes a job with an unorthodox environmental project, tied to big coal.

The second portion of the book takes the form of an autobiography of Patty Berglund, composed at the suggestion of her therapist. The autobiography tells of Patty's youth as a star basketball player, and her increasing alienation from her artistically inclined parents and sisters. Instead of attending an East Coast elite college like her siblings, she gets a basketball scholarship to the University of Minnesota and adopts the life of the athlete. She meets an attractive but unattainable indie rock musician named Richard Katz, and his nerdy but kind roommate, Walter Berglund. After her basketball career-ending knee injury, Patty suddenly becomes desperate for male affection, and after failing to woo Richard, she settles down with Walter, who had been patiently courting her for more than a year. We learn that Patty retained her desire for Richard and eventually had a brief affair with him at the Berglunds' lakeside cabin.

The novel then jumps ahead to New York City in 2004 and shifts to the story of Walter and Patty's friend Richard, who has finally succeeded in becoming a minor indie rock star in his middle age. His hit album Nameless Lake tells the story of his brief love affair with Patty at the Berglunds' lakeside cabin in Minnesota. Richard is uncomfortable with commercial success, throws away his new-found money, and returns to building roof decks for wealthy people in Manhattan. Walter calls him out of the blue to enlist his help as a celebrity spokesman for an environmental campaign. Walter has taken a job in Washington, D.C. working for a coal mining magnate who wants to strip mine a section of West Virginia forest before turning it into a songbird preserve of future environmental value. Walter hopes to use some of this project's funding to hold a concert to combat overpopulation, the common factor behind all his environmental concerns, and he believes that Richard will be able to rally well-known musicians to his cause. Meanwhile, Walter's marriage to Patty has been deteriorating steadily, and his pretty young assistant Lalitha has fallen deeply in love with him.

In parallel, the Berglunds' estranged, Republican son Joey attempts to finance his college life at the University of Virginia by taking on a dubious subcontract to provide spare parts for outdated supply trucks during the Iraq War. While at college, he marries his childhood sweetheart but dares not tell his parents. After visiting his roommate's family in the DC suburbs, he also pursues his friend's beautiful sister Jenna and is exposed to her father's Zionist, neoconservative politics. After months of pursuing Jenna, when she finally wants him to have sex with her, he cannot maintain an erection. Later he becomes conflicted after making $850,000 selling defective truck parts to military suppliers in Iraq. In the end Joey gives away the excess proceeds of his profiteering, reconciles with his parents, settles down with Connie, and moves into a sustainable coffee business with the help of his father Walter.

Now, Richard's re-appearance destroys Walter and Patty's weakening marriage. Richard tries to convince Patty to leave Walter, but she shows Richard the autobiography she wrote as "therapy", trying to convince him that she's still in love with Walter. Richard deliberately leaves the autobiography on Walter's desk, and Walter reads Patty's true thoughts. Walter kicks Patty out of the house, and she moves to Jersey City to be with Richard, but the relationship only lasts six months. Later, she moves to Brooklyn alone and takes a job at a private school, discovering her skill for teaching younger children. When Patty leaves him, Walter has a catharsis on live television, revealing his contempt for the displaced West Virginian families and his various commercial backers. Local rednecks respond by dragging him from the platform and beating him up. He is promptly fired by the environmental trust, but his TV debacle makes him a viral video hero to radical youth across the nation. He and his assistant Lalitha become lovers and continue their plans to combat overpopulation through a concert to rally young people in the hills of West Virginia. Lalitha is killed in a suspicious car accident a few days before the concert is due to take place. Shattered, and having lost both of the women who loved him, Walter retreats to his family's lakeside vacation house back in Minnesota. He becomes known to a new street of neighbors as a cranky old recluse, obsessed with house cats killing birds nesting on his property.

After a few years living in Brooklyn, Patty's father dies and she is forced to settle the fight that erupts within her family of spoiled bohemians as they attempt to split up the much-diminished family fortune. This experience helps Patty to mature. After a few years of living alone, she appraises the emptiness of her life and honestly faces her advancing age. She decides to hunt down Walter, the only man who had ever really loved her. She drives to the lakeside cabin in Minnesota, and despite his rage and confusion, he eventually agrees to take her back. The book ends in 2008 as they leave as a couple to return to Patty's job in New York City, after turning their old lakeside vacation home into a cat-proof fenced bird sanctuary, named in memory of Lalitha.

After the critical acclaim and popular success of his third novel The Corrections in 2001, Franzen began work on his fourth full-length novel. When asked during an October 30, 2002 interview on Charlie Rose how far he was into writing the new novel, Franzen replied:

I'm about a year of frustration and confusion into it...Y'know, I'm kind of down at the bottom of the submerged iceberg peering up for the surface of the water...I don't have doubt about my ability to write a good book, but I have lots of doubt about what it's going to look like.[1]

Franzen went on to suggest that a basic story outline was in place, and that his writing of the new novel was like a "guerilla war" approaching different aspects of the novel (alluding to characters, dialogue, plot development etc.).[1] Franzen also agreed that he would avoid public appearances, saying that "...getting some work done is the vacation" from the promotional work surrounding The Corrections and How To Be Alone.[1]

An excerpt entitled "Good Neighbors" appeared in the June 8 and June 15, 2009 issues of The New Yorker.[2] The magazine published a second extract entitled "Agreeable" in the May 31, 2010 edition.[3]

On October 16, 2009, Franzen made an appearance alongside David Bezmozgis at the New Yorker Festival at the Cedar Lake Theatre to read a portion of his forthcoming novel.[4][5] Sam Allard, writing for North By Northwestern website covering the event, said that the "...material from his new (reportedly massive) novel" was "as buoyant and compelling as ever" and "marked by his familiar undercurrent of tragedy".[5] Franzen read "an extended clip from the second chapter."[5]

On March 12, 2010, details about the plot and content of Freedom were published in the Macmillan fall catalogue for 2010.[6]

In an interview with Dave Haslam on October 3, 2010 Franzen discussed why he had called the book Freedom:

The reason I slapped the word on the book proposal I sold three years ago without any clear idea of what kind of book it was going to be is that I wanted to write a book that would free me in some way. And I will say this about the abstract concept of 'freedom'; it's possible you are freer if you accept what you are and just get on with being the person you are, than if you maintain this kind of uncommitted I'm free-to-be-this, free-to-be-that, faux freedom.[7]

Freedom received general acclaim from book critics, particularly for its writing and characterization. Shortly after the book's release, the front cover of a TIME magazine issue showed a picture of Franzen above the words "Great American Novelist," making him the first author to appear on the front cover in a decade.

Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times and Benjamin Alsup of Esquire believed it measured up to Franzen's previous novel, The Corrections. Tanenhaus called it a "masterpiece of American fiction," writing that it "[told] an engrossing story" and "[illuminated], through the steady radiance of its authors profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew."[8] Alsup called it a great American novel. "[9] In The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg argued that readers who enjoyed The Corrections would enjoy Freedom. He also wrote that they're "likely to come away from this novel moved in harder-to-fathom waysand grateful for it."[10] An editor for Publishers Weekly wrote that it stood apart from most modern fiction because "Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters and find where they (and we) went wrong, arriving atincrediblygenuine hope."[11]

Benjamin Secher of The Telegraph called Franzen one of America's best living novelists, and Freedom the first great American novel of the "post-Obama era."[12] In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones called him "a literary genius" and wrote that Freedom stood on "a different plane from other contemporary fiction."[13]

Michiko Kakutani called the book "galvanic" and wrote that it showcased Franzen's talent as a storyteller and "his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life." Kakutani also praised the novel's characterization, going on to call it a "compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times."[14]The Economist wrote that the novel contained "fully imagined characters in a powerful narrative." The reviewer went on to say that it had "all its predecessor's power and none of its faults."[15]

Not all reviews were raving. Most lukewarm reviews praised the novel's prose, but believed the author's left-wing political stance was too obvious. Sam Anderson, in a review for New York magazine, thought the characterization was strong, but perceived the politics as sometimes too heavy-handed: "Franzen the crankmighty detester of Twitter, ATVs, and housing developments" occasionally "overpower[s] Franzen the artist [...] but if crankiness is the motor that powers Franzen's art, I'm perfectly willing to sit through some speeches."[16]Ron Charles of The Washington Post also felt less favorably, remarking that it lacked the wit and "[freshness]" of The Corrections. Charles praised Franzen's prose and called him "an extraordinary stylist," but questioned how many readers would settle for good writing as "sufficient compensation for what is sometimes a misanthropic slog."[17] In addition, Ruth Franklin of The New Republic believed the novel resembled a "soap opera" more than it did an epic, and that Franzen had forgotten "the greatest novels must [...] offer [...] profundity and pleasure."[18]

Alexander Nazaryan criticized its familiarity in the New York Daily News remarking that the author "can write about a gentrifying family in St. Paul. Or maybe in St. Louis. But that's about it. Nazaryan also didn't believe Franzen was joking when he suggested "being doomed as a novelist never to do anything but stories of Midwestern families."[19]Alan Cheuse of National Public Radio found the novel "[brilliant]" but not enjoyable, suggesting that "every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didn't want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to. His book just has too much brightness and not enough color."[20]

Ross Douthat of First Things praised the "stretches of Freedom that read like a master class in how to write sympathetically about the kind of characters" with an abundance of freedom. Yet, Douthat concluded the novel was overlong, feeling the "impression that Franzen's talents are being wasted on his characters."[21]

Freedom won the John Gardner Fiction Award. Additionally, it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The American Library Association also named it a notable fiction of the 2010 publishing year.

Oprah Winfrey made Freedom her first book club selection of 2010, saying, "this book is a masterpiece."[22][23] US President Barack Obama called it "terrific" after reading it over the summer.[24]

Follow this link:

Freedom (Franzen novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eugenics – Conservapedia

Posted on by

Eugenics was a movement which tried to eliminate "dangerous human pests" and "the rising tide of imbeciles" through what has been euphemistically called "selective breeding". What this meant, in actual practice, was forced sterilization of American immigrants and minorities (particularly in California).[1]

The theory of evolution suggests that humans are merely evolving animals. The claimed biological struggle for survival that brought humans here is continuing. Man's long-term survival is, according to evolution, a biological survival of the fittest. Evolution theory teaches that there must be a biological struggle for survival among various human races and groups.

Charles Darwin declared in The Descent of Man:[2]

Darwin was not the first to claim racial superiority. But he was the first to teach that some races of man "will almost certainly exterminate, and replace" other races of man. His followers developed a new intellectual field called "eugenics" for this mythical biological struggle.

In fact, the term "eugenics" was coined by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.[3]

Defenders of Darwin, and Darwinism, often try to argue that Darwin, and Darwinism, have no logical connection to eugenics at all. However, in a 1914 speech, Charles Darwin's son, Francis Darwin, wrote: "In the first edition of The Descent of Man, 1874, [my father] distinctly gives his adherence to the eugenic idea by his assertion that many might by selection do something for the moral and physical qualities of the race."[4] He based his ideas on his cousin's work.

Francis Darwin's clear statement that his father endorsed Galton's conception of eugenics is important, because many people try to distance Darwin from the taint of eugenics by pointing out that Darwin himself never advocated for it by name. But Galton coined the word after Darwin's death, so naturally he wouldn't have used the word 'eugenics.' Darwin's son can be expected to have understood his father's theory well enough to know whether or not his father's book, "The Descent of Man", 'gave adherence to the eugenic idea.'

The word "eugenics" is based on Greek roots meaning "well born." The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides 1883 as the date of origin for the term. Later, Darwin's son, Leonard, served as the president of the First Congress of Eugenics in 1912 in London.

The encyclopedia describes eugenics as now being "in disrepute,"[5] although Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University has sought to remove the stigma from it. Evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins has stated in one letter his wish that it no longer be banned from polite discussion.[6]

The Spartans in ancient Greece practiced a primitive form of eugenics, wherein babies which were judged to be too "weak" or "sickly" would be left to die.

In the early 1900s, many influential officials advocated Darwinism and eugenics. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes became a strong proponent. So did many others in prominent government and academic positions. Members of the British Eugenics Society, including the International Planned Parenthood Federation, are listed.[7]

Between 1907 and 1937, 32 American states passed eugenics laws requiring sterilization of citizens deemed to be misfits, such as the mentally infirm. Oliver Wendell Holmes and all but one conservative Democratic Justice upheld such laws in a Supreme Court decision that included Holmes' offensive statement that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927).[8] In fact, the third generation "imbecile" was very bright, but was declared by a eugenics "expert" as "supposed to be a mental defective," apparently without an examination.

Eugenics was taught as part of the evolution curriculum of many science classes in America in the early 1900s. For example, it was featured in the textbook used in the famous Scopes trial in 1925.

"By 1928, the American Genetics Association boasted that there were 376 college courses devoted exclusively to eugenics. High-school biology textbooks followed suit by the mid-1930s, with most containing material favorable to the idea of eugenical control of reproduction. It would thus have been difficult to be an even moderately educated reader in the 1920s or 1930s and not have known, at least in general terms, about the claims of eugenics."[9]

Important remnants of the evolution-eugenics approach exist today, in part because many of Justice Holmes' opinions are still controlling law. The very first quote in the infamous Roe v. Wade abortion decision is an unprincipled statement of Justice Holmes in a 1905 opinion. Indeed, Holmes once wrote favorably in a letter to a future Supreme Court Justice about "restricting propagation by the undesirables and putting to death infants that didn't pass the examination.[10]

Existing laws requiring students to receive controversial vaccines are based on a eugenics-era decision granting the State the power to forcibly vaccinate residents. [11] That decision, in fact, was the cited precedent for Justice Holmes' offensive "imbeciles" holding quoted above.

For the same reason that evolution teaching led to eugenics, evolution teaching today encourages acceptance of abortion and euthanasia. Under evolution theory, after all, we are merely animals fighting for biological survival.

German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel promoted evolution by drawing fraudulent pictures of humans embryos, to pretend that their developmental stages imitate an historical evolution of humans from other species.[12]

In 1904, Haeckel reiterated the view of Darwin quoted above: "These lower races are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes or dogs) than to civilized Europeans; we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives." [13]

It wasn't long before intellectuals viewed war as an essential evolutionary process. Vom Heutigen Kriege, a popular book by Geberal Bernhardi, "expounded the thesis that war was a biological necessity and a convenient means of ridding the world of the unfit. These views were not confined to a lunatic fringe, but won wide acceptance especially among journalists, academics and politicians."[14] In America, Justice Holmes similarly wrote that "I always say that society is founded on the death of men - if you don't kill the weakest one way you kill them another."[15]

World War I entailed a brutality unknown in the history of mankind. Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor of the liberal New Republic magazine, observed that "prior to the Scopes trial [in 1925, William Jennings] Bryan had been on a revival tour of Germany and had been horrified by the signs of incipient Nazism. Before this point, Bryan had been a moderate in the evolution debate; for instance, he had lobbied the Florida legislature not to ban the teaching of Darwin, only to specify that evolution must be taught as a theory rather than a fact. But after hearing the National Socialists talk about the elimination of genetic inferiority, [historian Gary] Wills wrote, Bryan came to feel that evolutionary ideas had become dangerous; he began both to oppose and to lampoon them."

The march of evolution/eugenics continued unabated in Germany. By the 1920s, German textbooks were teaching evolution concepts of heredity and racial hygiene. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927.

In 1933, Germany passed the Law for the Protection of Heredity Health. Next was the Nazi sterilization law entitled "Eugenics in the service of public welfare." It required compulsory sterilization for the prevention of progeny with hereditary defects in cases including congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis and hereditary epilepsy.

The German schools indoctrinated their students. In 1935, a German high-school math textbook included the following problem:[9] " how much does it cost the state if:

One German student was Josef Mengele, who studied anthropology and paleontology and received his Ph.D. for his thesis entitled "Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups." In 1937, Mengele was recommended for and received a position as a research assistant with the Third Reich Institute for Hereditary, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfort. He became the "Angel of Death" for directing the operation of gas chambers of the Holocaust and for conducting horrific medical experiments on inmates in pursuit of eugenics.

The liberal American Medical Society provided this summary:[16]

Many genocides have been commited in the name of Eugenics, most notably the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler was a strong believer in eugenics and evolution and believed that Jewish people were closest to apes, followed by Africans, Asians, non-Aryan Europeans, and finally Aryans, who he believed were most evolved.

Pat Milmoe McCarrick and Mary Carrington Coutts, reference librarians for the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature at Georgetown University, were more succinct: "The Nazi racial hygiene program began with involuntary sterilizations and ended with genocide." [17]

From The Nazi Connection[18]:

In The Nazi Connection, Stefan Kuhl uncovers the ties between the American eugenics movement and the Nazi program of racial hygiene, showing that many American scientists actively supported Hitler's policies. After introducing us to the recently resurgent problem of scientific racism, Kuhl carefully recounts the history of the eugenics movement, both in the United States and internationally, demonstrating how widely the idea of sterilization as a genetic control had become accepted by the early twentieth century. From the first, the American eugenicists led the way with radical ideas. Their influence led to sterilization laws in dozens of stateslaws which were studied, and praised, by the German racial hygienists. With the rise of Hitler, the Germans enacted compulsory sterilization laws partly based on the U.S. experience, and American eugenists took pride in their influence on Nazi policies. Kuhl recreates astonishing scenes of American eugenicists travelling to Germany to study the new laws, publishing scholarly articles lionizing the Nazi eugenics program, and proudly comparing personal notes from Hitler thanking them for their books. Even after the outbreak of war, he writes, the American eugenicists frowned upon Hitler's totalitarian government, but not his sterilization laws. So deep was the failure to recognize the connection between eugenics and Hitler's genocidal policies, that a prominent liberal Jewish eugenicist who had been forced to flee Germany found it fit to grumble that the Nazis "took over our entire plan of eugenic measures."

By 1945, when the murderous nature of the Nazi government was made perfectly clear, the American eugenicists sought to downplay the close connections between themselves and the German program. Some of them, in fact, had sought to distance themselves from Hitler even before the war. But Stefan Kuhl's deeply documented book provides a devastating indictment of the influenceand aidprovided by American scientists for the most comprehensive attempt to enforce racial purity in world history.

Some argue that parents who abort infants with genetic mutation or other disabilities are practicing a form of eugenics.[19] Some doctors and scientists have defended this practice and named it "liberal eugenics" in order to differentiate it from traditional forms of eugenics such as Nazi eugenics.[20] Eugenicists in the United States and elsewhere have been known to employ or advocate abortion as a method of eugenics.

In the 2006 satirical comedy Idiocracy, the entire movie is premised on the idea that the out-breeding of the stupid over the intelligent will lead to a uniformly stupid world run by advertisers, marketers, and anti-intellectualism.

Read the original here:

Eugenics - Conservapedia

EugenicsArchive.Org: Image Archive on American Eugenics Movement

Posted on by

he philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This adage is appropriate to our current rush into the "gene age," which has striking parallels to the eugenics movement of the early decades of the 20th century. Eugenics was, quite literally, an effort to breed better human beings by encouraging the reproduction of people with "good" genes and discouraging those with "bad" genes. Eugenicists effectively lobbied for social legislation to keep racial and ethnic groups separate, to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and to sterilize people considered "genetically unfit." Elements of the American eugenics movement were models for the Nazis, whose radical adaptation of eugenics culminated in the Holocaust.

We now invite you to experience the unfiltered story of American eugenics primarily through materials from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910-1940. In the Archive you will see numerous reports, articles, charts, and pedigrees that were considered scientific "facts" in their day. It is important to remind yourself that the vast majority of eugenics work has been completely discredited. In the final analysis, the eugenic description of human life reflected political and social prejudices, rather than scientific facts.

You may find some of the language and images in this Archive offensive. Even supposedly "scientific" terms used by eugenicists were often pervaded with prejudice against racial, ethnic, and disabled groups. Some terms have no scientific meaning today. For example, "feeblemindedness" was used as a catch-all for a number of real and supposed mental disabilities, and was a common "diagnosis" used to make members of ethnic and racial minority groups appear inferior. However, we have made no attempt to censor this documentary record to do so would distort the past and diminish the significance of the lessons to be learned from this material.

During a two-year review process, involving a 14-member Advisory Panel, this site has developed an editorial policy to protect personal privacy and confidentiality. For this reason, names and places have been deleted from pedigrees, medical documents, and personal photographs.

Visit link:

EugenicsArchive.Org: Image Archive on American Eugenics Movement

Origins of Eugenics: From Sir Francis Galton to Virginias …

Posted on by

Sir Francis Galton. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society. [2.1]

ENLARGE [2.2] Faces and Races, illustration from a eugenical text, Racial History of Mankind. Courtesy of Special Collections, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University.

[2.3] Harry H. Laughlin and Charles Davenport at the Eugenics Record Office. Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.

Sir Francis Galton first coined the term eugenics in 1883. Put simply, eugenics means well-born. Initially Galton focused on positive eugenics, encouraging healthy, capable people of above-average intelligence to bear more children, with the idea of building an improved human race. Some followers of Galton combined his emphasis on ancestral traits with Gregor Mendels research on patterns of inheritance, in an attempt to explain the generational transmission of genetic traits in human beings.

Negative eugenics, as developed in the United States and Germany, played on fears of race degeneration. At a time when the working-class poor were reproducing at a greater rate than successful middle- and upper-class members of society, these ideas garnered considerable interest. One of the most famous proponents in the United States was President Theodore Roosevelt, who warned that the failure of couples of Anglo-Saxon heritage to produce large families would lead to race suicide.

The center of the eugenics movement in the United States was the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Biologist Charles Davenport established the ERO, and was joined in his work by Director Harry H. Laughlin. Both men were members of the American Breeders Association. Their view of eugenics, as applied to human populations, drew from the agricultural model of breeding the strongest and most capable members of a species while making certain that the weakest members do not reproduce.

Eugenicists attempted to demonstrate the power of heredity by constructing pedigree charts of defective families. These charts were used to scientifically quantify the assertion that human frailties such as profligacy and indolence were genetic components that could be passed from one generation to the next. Two studies were published that charted the propensity towards criminality, disease, and immoral behavior of the extended families of the Jukes and the Kallikaks. Eugenicists pointed to these texts to demonstrate that feeblemindedness was an inherited attribute and to reveal how the care of such degenerates represented an enormous cost to society.

The ERO promoted eugenics research by compiling records or pedigrees of thousands of families. Charles Davenport created The Family History Book, which assisted field workers as they interviewed families and assembled pedigrees specifying inheritable family attributes which might range from allergies to civic leadership. Even a propensity for carpentry or dress-making was considered a genetically inherited trait. Davenport and Laughlin also issued another manual titled How to Make a Eugenical Family Study to instruct field workers in the creation of pedigree charts of study subjects from poor, rural areas or from institutionalized settings. Field workers used symbols to depict defective conditions such as epilepsy and sexual immorality.

The American Eugenics Society presented eugenics exhibits at state fairs throughout the country, and provided information encouraging high-grade people to reproduce at a greater rate for the benefit of society. The Society even sponsored Fitter Family contests.

ENLARGE [2.4] Kallikak family of New Jersey Normal and Degenerate Lines (enlarge to view additional eugenical pedigree charts). Courtesy of Paul Lombardo.

ENLARGE [2.5] Eugenics Display. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

[2.6] Winners of Fittest Family Contest. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

[2.7] Harry H. Laughlin photograph. Courtesy of American Philosophical Society.

ENLARGE [2.8] Comparative Intelligence Chart. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

ENLARGE [2.9] Virginias Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (enlarge to view additional Virginia legislative acts). Courtesy of Special Collections, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University.

In 1914, Harry H. Laughlin attended the first Race Betterment Conference, sponsored by J. H. Kellogg. The same year, in his Model Sterilization Law, Laughlin declared that the socially inadequate of society should be sterilized. This Model Law was accompanied by pedigree charts, which were used to demonstrate the hereditary nature of traits such as alcoholism, illegitimacy, and feeblemindedness. Laughlin asserted that passage of these undesirable traits to future generations would be eradicated if the unfortunate people who possessed them could be prevented from reproducing. In 1922 Laughlins Model Law was included in the book Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. This book compiled legal materials and statistics regarding sterilization, and was a valuable reference for sterilization activists in states throughout the country.

Proponents of eugenics worked tirelessly to assert the legitimacy of this new discipline. For Americans who feared the potential degradation of their race and culture, eugenics offered a convenient and scientifically plausible response to those fears. Sterilization of the unfit seemed a cost-effective means of strengthening and improving American society.

By 1924 Laughlins influence extended in several directions. He testified before Congress in support of the Immigration Restriction Act to limit immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Laughlin influenced passage of this law by presenting skewed data to support his assertion that the percentage of these immigrant populations in prisons and mental institutions was far greater than their percentage in the general population would warrant.

Laughlin also provided guidance in support of Virginias Racial Integrity Act, which made it illegal for whites in Virginia to marry outside their race. The act narrowly defined who could claim to be a member of the white race stating that the term white person shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian. Virginia lawmakers were careful to leave an escape clause for colleagues who claimed descent from Pocahontasthose with 1/16 or less of the blood of the American Indian would also count as white.

The language of Laughlins Model Sterilization Act was used in Virginias Eugenical Sterilization Act to legalize compulsory sterilizations in the state. This legislation to rid Virginia of defective persons was drafted by Aubrey E. Strode, a former member of the Virginia General Assembly, at the request of longtime associate, Albert Priddy, who directed the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia.

2004 Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

Read more:

Origins of Eugenics: From Sir Francis Galton to Virginias ...

Artificial Intelligence Catches Fire in Ethiopia | Techonomy

Posted on by

Young Ethiopian with robot whose AI software was created in his country. (courtesy of iCog Labs)

Ethiopia is an unlikely but thriving center of artificial intelligence R&D. A local company works for global customers and the government is all for it.

By: Christina Galbraith

Ethiopia has come a long way from its nightmare past of famine and war. It still has splendid 12th century rock churches carved into the ground, the plateaued Simian Mountains, the ancient city of Gondar and of course, the human ancestral fossil Lucy, its oldest hominid ambassador. But now computer science is thriving in its capital, Addis Ababa. And Ethiopian artificial intelligence R&D is on fire.

The driver for this unexpected artificial intelligence (AI) industry sector is the autocratic government's massive multi-billion dollar, ultra-high tech, industrial plans and its fervent development of higher education to support them. Today, there are over 30 official universities and 130 or so polytechnics, most of them emphasizing technology. Many of them are in the capital and, in 2012, the Ministry of Science and Technology established its own university and a $250 million dollar tech park nearby.

Despite all the tech glitz, however, Ethiopia's economic reality remains grim. Less than 2% of citizens have access to the Internet. Only 34% of Ethiopian children get as far as the equivalent of 9th grade. Early adult literacy is approximately 35%, child labor at 27%, girl marriage an appalling 41%, and the country still ranks near the bottom of the UNDP's World Index for quality of life.

But in Addis Ababa, education rates have soared above national averages. With 70% of the population under the age of 29, an urban sub-culture of keen young, software engineers is emerging. Among its best private sector opportunities are to program for the outside world. And program they do, at a fraction of the cost elsewhere. Today, the Ministry of Trade and Industry identifies more than 700 companies in computer technology and 95 software businesses serving customers worldwide.

At the hub of this tech growth is an AI group, iCog Labs, co-founded in 2012 by a young Ethiopian roboticist, Getnet Aseffa Gezaw, and an American AI pioneer, Ben Goertzel. With a team of twenty five Ethiopian software engineers, iCog pursues full-on 'Strong Intelligence,' the conviction that computers can potentially emulate the entire human brain, not just aspects of it. The ambitious lab has a bold mission: to create software that not only simulates the brain, but pushes the envelope of what the brain can do. The lab also focuses on a host of practical applications for clients around the world, including humanoid robots for Hanson Robotics, makers of the renowned Robot Einstein; AI-driven automated pill dispensers and elder-care robots for a Chinese company, Telehealth; and mapping the genetics of longevity for two Californian corporations: Age Reversal Incorporated and Stevia First. iCog also delves into 'deep learning' algorithms for vision processing and object recognition (used in drones, satellites and security systems), machine learning algorithms to predict patterns in everything from agriculture to electricity consumption, and algorithms that react to English and a host of African languages.

iCog's humanitarian work includes developing software for AI tablets for children--distributed to Ethiopian villages--with games that help children teach themselves elementary coding, mathematics and English. The endeavor builds on One Laptop per Child's initiative which earlier distributed thousands of tablets to rural children to help them learn computer programs in the language Squeak. iCog recently doubled its office space and has collaborated with Addis Ababa Institute of Science and Technology to form the first post-graduate AI program in the country. It is also a major contributor to the OpenCog foundation, the largest open-source AI group in the world, co-founded by Goertzel and based in Hong Kong.

Other labs are laying a foundation for AI developers to work in Ethiopia's native Amharic language. EthioCloud created the first advanced Amharic code programming language, which runs on Microsoft's .NET and C# platforms. The company also developed an optical character recognition program to convert Amharic paper documents into editable text and an Amharic text-to-speech conversion system.

The government is zealously inserting robotics and advanced algorithmic intelligence elements into a variety of mega-industrial projects, part of its massive, big brother-sounding 5 year Growth and Transformation Plan. In part, it has to maintain the multi-billion dollar flood of foreign investment on which it relies to stay in power. And given that it sits on a goldmine of minerals and clean energy potential including ample geothermal power, it is ardently soliciting sophisticated technology partnerships from countries like China, India and Saudi Arabia, aiming to become a major exporter.

Current AI ventures and supporting infrastructure projects, which will all be Ethiopian-operated, include a $1.4 billion mobile phone deal for Ethiotelecom to install network-quality-assessing robots in moving vehicles for mobile calls; advanced Chinese-built QoS (quality of service) ambient intelligence for the communication networks in its massive $4 billion electric Light Rail project, the largest in East Africa; French/US machine-learning self-diagnostic intelligence software to support the Blue Nile's $5 billion Grand Renaissance Dam, the largest hydro plant in Africa (which will also come with its own tech park); cement loading robots, quality assessment robot technology and a robotics lab for Dangote Cement, the largest cement plant in East Africa; and self-diagnostic intelligence for power grids of the Ethiopian Electric Corporation and the Ashegoda Wind Farm, the largest in Africa.

The stage is also ripe for AI to go into other mammoth projects including a $4 billion US-Icelandic geothermal plant, one of the world's largest; two deep space telescope observatories coupled with multi-billion dollar satellite plans; integration of intelligence into the country's own fleet of locally manufactured drones; and factory robotics into its rapidly growing, $10 billion dollar industrial tax free zone, primarily for Chinese companies seeking to outsource labor from $30 a day per worker in China to $1 per day in Ethiopia. Today, the country has become Africa's 3rd largest recipient of foreign investment and its largest recipient of developmental aid.

"Technological leapfrogging" is a term that proudly buzzes around the ministries and tech community of Addis Ababa and other African cities: the notion that advanced technology in developing nations can help them bypass the bureaucracy of older systems elsewhere. The concept is hugely attractive, but if basic human conditions don't improve, all this high-tech, artificially intelligent economics will end up as just artificial, neocolonial circuitry hubris. The country needs rapid progress in health, education, representation, labor rights, and private sector GDP growth (now the 6th lowest in the world). It needs to end the forced relocation of entire communities, with little to no compensation, to accommodate the government's mega-plans. These real challenges still starkly face what could be one of the most promising economies in Africa.

Ethiopia has a uniquely rich history of pioneers. It is the presumed birthplace of Homo sapiens as well as Africa's oldest independent country, and the cradle of culturally-advanced, fiercely-independent kingdoms dating to the 8th century BC. It is one of first 24 members of the United Nations and the first African country to join the League of Nations, the protector of some of the most important heritage sites and a multitude of record breaking scientists, Olympians and marathoners. If the Ethiopian people can progressively claim their country, they may help mankind leap from Homo sapiens to homo cyborg and beyond.

Original article published at Techonomy.com

See the original post:

Artificial Intelligence Catches Fire in Ethiopia | Techonomy