http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-recent-global-economic-activity-2014-1
Friday, July 15, 2016
16-07-2016
The INDIAN OCEAN
http://imgur.com/eIhUdNv
![Detailed Map of the Indian Ocean Floor [1856 × 1413]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_udeqk8EKGAWIzn_kEau_DW3uiNHgKEdjC4mabtHKKCUzYAZf83shVngzQp_A5nJNb_9mmzTw4V_c1Qzt2KA_JIKA=s0-d)
On this day in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt, during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign.
The INDIAN OCEAN
http://imgur.com/eIhUdNv
Before I go
Time warps for a young surgeon with metastatic lung cancer
In residency, there’s a saying: The days are long, but the years are short. In neurosurgical training, the day usually began a little before 6 a.m., and lasted until the operating was done, which depended, in part, on how quick you were in the OR.
A resident’s surgical skill is judged by his technique and his speed. You can’t be sloppy and you can’t be slow. From your first wound closure onward, spend too much time being precise and the scrub tech will announce, “Looks like we’ve got a plastic surgeon on our hands!” Or say: “I get your strategy — by the time you finish sewing the top half of the wound, the bottom will have healed on its own. Half the work — smart!” A chief resident will advise a junior: “Learn to be fast now — you can learn to be good later.” Everyone’s eyes are always on the clock. For the patient’s sake: How long has the patient been under anesthesia? During long procedures, nerves can get damaged, muscles can break down, even causing kidney failure. For everyone else’s sake: What time are we getting out of here tonight?............
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2015spring/before-i-go.html
Time warps for a young surgeon with metastatic lung cancer
In residency, there’s a saying: The days are long, but the years are short. In neurosurgical training, the day usually began a little before 6 a.m., and lasted until the operating was done, which depended, in part, on how quick you were in the OR.
A resident’s surgical skill is judged by his technique and his speed. You can’t be sloppy and you can’t be slow. From your first wound closure onward, spend too much time being precise and the scrub tech will announce, “Looks like we’ve got a plastic surgeon on our hands!” Or say: “I get your strategy — by the time you finish sewing the top half of the wound, the bottom will have healed on its own. Half the work — smart!” A chief resident will advise a junior: “Learn to be fast now — you can learn to be good later.” Everyone’s eyes are always on the clock. For the patient’s sake: How long has the patient been under anesthesia? During long procedures, nerves can get damaged, muscles can break down, even causing kidney failure. For everyone else’s sake: What time are we getting out of here tonight?............
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2015spring/before-i-go.html
Are you an academic hermit?
Here’s how to easily change, if you want to
In a recent study of The Impact of the Social Sciences a team of researchers that I lead tried to establish what made some academics well cited and well-regarded academically, and what also made them influential in spheres of life outside academia. To do this we created a stratified random sample of just under 380 researchers at UK universities, assembled everything we could find on their citations and other influence indicators, and searched comprehensively on Google and press databases for mentions by external bodies, surfaced any funding links and looked for wider indications of external recognition on their department or center websites. We then undertook a regression analysis, trying to include variables like how old people were, what their highest qualification was, where they got their PhD, and so on.............
https://medium.com/advice-and-help-in-authoring-a-phd-or-non-fiction/are-you-an-academic-hermit-6d7ae5a0f16a#.a90b93gqc
Surviving the Anthropocene: What's Next for
Humanity?
Jedediah Purdy
Officially, for the past 11,700 years we have been living in the Holocene epoch. From the Greek for "totally new," the Holocene is an eyeblink in geological time.
In its nearly 12,000 years, plate tectonics has driven the continents a little more than half a mile: a reasonably fit person could cover the scale of planetary change in a brisk eight-minute walk.
It has been a warm time, when temperature has mattered as much as tectonics. Sea levels rose 115 feet from ice melt, and northern landscapes rose almost 600 feet, as they shrugged off the weight of their glaciers.
But the real news in the Holocene has been people. Estimates put the global human population between 1 million and 10 million at the start of the Holocene, and keep it in that range until after the agricultural revolution, some 5,000 years ago.
Since then, we have made the world our anthill: the geological layers we are now laying down on the Earth's surface are marked by our chemicals and industrial waste, the pollens of our crops, and the absence of the many species we have driven to extinction. Rising sea levels are now our doing. As a driver of global change, humanity has outstripped geology.
This is why, from the earth sciences to English departments, there's a veritable academic stampede to declare that we live in a new era, the Anthropocene - the age of humans. Coined by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s and brought to public attention in 2000 by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen, the term remains officially under consideration at the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London............
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/03/01/4416386.htm
Game Theory for Parents
Mathematically tested measures to make your kids cooperate—all on their own
Adapted from The Game Theorists’s Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know—Your Kids, by Paul Raeburn and Kevin Zollman, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), Commonwealth Publishing (Taiwan) and Grand China Publishing House (China). Copyright © 2016 by Paul Raeburn and Kevin Zollman
Sibling rivalry? We talk about it all the time, but what we're really concerned with is the incessant squabbling that can turn a happy home into what feels like a battleground. That's not rivalry—it's conflict. After repeatedly separating our kids and reminding them for the thousandth time that they should try to be a little nicer to one another, many of us begin to think we will never put an end to the fighting. But reducing the number and intensity of these conflicts is possible—if we strike the right bargain
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/game-theory-for-parents1/
Mathematically tested measures to make your kids cooperate—all on their own
Adapted from The Game Theorists’s Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know—Your Kids, by Paul Raeburn and Kevin Zollman, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), Commonwealth Publishing (Taiwan) and Grand China Publishing House (China). Copyright © 2016 by Paul Raeburn and Kevin Zollman
Sibling rivalry? We talk about it all the time, but what we're really concerned with is the incessant squabbling that can turn a happy home into what feels like a battleground. That's not rivalry—it's conflict. After repeatedly separating our kids and reminding them for the thousandth time that they should try to be a little nicer to one another, many of us begin to think we will never put an end to the fighting. But reducing the number and intensity of these conflicts is possible—if we strike the right bargain
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/game-theory-for-parents1/
The Case for Reparations
TA-NEHISI COATES - JUNE 2014 ISSUE
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
TA-NEHISI COATES - JUNE 2014 ISSUE
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Watch Cities Spread Across The Planet Over 5,000 Years
A group of researchers combed through 10,000 data entries to create the first mappable record of human population changes, dating back to 3,700 B.C.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/history-of-cities-urbanization-map_us_576433f3e4b0fbbc8bea3eda?section=
Spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000
How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did cities influence their local and regional environments? In order to understand the current era of urbanization, we must understand long-term historical urbanization trends and patterns. However, to date there is no comprehensive record of spatially explicit, historic, city-level population data at the global scale. Here, we developed the first spatially explicit dataset of urban settlements from 3700 BC to AD 2000, by digitizing, transcribing, and geocoding historical, archaeological, and census-based urban population data previously published in tabular form by Chandler and Modelski. The dataset creation process also required data cleaning and harmonization procedures to make the data internally consistent. Additionally, we created a reliability ranking for each geocoded location to assess the geographic uncertainty of each data point. The dataset provides the first spatially explicit archive of the location and size of urban populations over the last 6,000 years and can contribute to an improved understanding of contemporary and historical urbanization trends.
http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201634
A group of researchers combed through 10,000 data entries to create the first mappable record of human population changes, dating back to 3,700 B.C.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/history-of-cities-urbanization-map_us_576433f3e4b0fbbc8bea3eda?section=
Spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000
How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did cities influence their local and regional environments? In order to understand the current era of urbanization, we must understand long-term historical urbanization trends and patterns. However, to date there is no comprehensive record of spatially explicit, historic, city-level population data at the global scale. Here, we developed the first spatially explicit dataset of urban settlements from 3700 BC to AD 2000, by digitizing, transcribing, and geocoding historical, archaeological, and census-based urban population data previously published in tabular form by Chandler and Modelski. The dataset creation process also required data cleaning and harmonization procedures to make the data internally consistent. Additionally, we created a reliability ranking for each geocoded location to assess the geographic uncertainty of each data point. The dataset provides the first spatially explicit archive of the location and size of urban populations over the last 6,000 years and can contribute to an improved understanding of contemporary and historical urbanization trends.
http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201634
How Machines Destroy (And Create!) Jobs, In 4 Graphs
The Decline Of Farming And The Rise Of Everything Else
For hundreds of years, people have been talking about machines taking jobs from people. Less often discussed: machines creating new jobs.In the first part of the 20th century, agricultural technology — the tractor, chemical fertilizers — meant a single farmer could suddenly grow much more food. So we didn't need as many farmers. Technology destroyed a huge number of farming jobs
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/18/404991483/how-machines-destroy-and-create-jobs-in-4-graphs?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
There's a slow, slow train coming...
and if you’re on top of it, keep your head down
No. 52171 on this line is the only through train that connects the outpost of Sheopur Kalan to Gwalior city. It runs at a stately speed of 18 kilometres per hour on average. Which means you take ten and a half hours to complete the trip.
The train, now part of the Indian Railways, leaves Gwalior at 6.25 a.m. and I reached the station half an hour earlier, bought my Rs. 29 ticket and got on the train. It was already crowded with commuters. The “Gwalior-Sheopur NG Passenger” has seven small coaches and a capacity of around 200 travellers. But it carries at least twice that number every day. People cram into the coaches, hang by the sides, and climb on to the roof.
WORLD WAR II - TIME LINE
For Americans, World War II began on December 7, 1941. But war had been going on for years elsewhere. For the Chinese, war began in 1931, when Japan invaded northeastern China, setting up a Japanese state called Manchukuo. By 1938 Japan occupied much of China and had taken Nanking, longtime capital of China, where Japanese troops killed more than 42,000 civilians. For Europeans, war began in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The war in Europe would end in May 1945 and in the Pacific in August 1945.......
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/history/wwii_timeline.html
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari – review
A swash-buckling account that begins with the origin of the species and ends with post-humans
Human beings (members of the genus Homo) have existed for about 2.4m years. Homo sapiens, our own wildly egregious species of great apes, has only existed for 6% of that time – about 150,000 years. So a book whose main title is Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled "A Brief History of Humankind". It's easy to see why Yuval Noah Harari devotes 95% of his book to us as a species: self-ignorant as we are, we still know far more about ourselves than about other species of human beings, including several that have become extinct since we first walked the Earth. The fact remains that the history of sapiens – Harari's name for us – is only a very small part of the history of humankind.
Can its full sweep be conveyed in one fell swoop – 400 pages? Not really; it's easier to write a brief history of time – all 14bn years – and Harari also spends many pages on our present and possible future rather than our past. But the deep lines of the story of sapiens are fairly uncontentious, and he sets them out with verve..........
Great Aspirations of the Iron Age
Renaissance philosophers, musing on European voyages to the New World, speculated that the dispersal of gold deposits throughout the globe was part of God’s plan to spur travel, exploration, and communication between continents. In antiquity, other metals had the same effect: tin and copper for smelting bronze, lead for leaching other metals out of ore and slag, and, most crucially in the late second and early first millennia BC, iron for making tools, armor and weapons. This “Iron Age,” as historians often term the seven or eight centuries preceding the start of the Greek classical period (circa 500 BC), saw trade and travel that not only linked the Mediterranean nations but moved goods between lands as far removed as modern Iran and western France. This is the focus of the vast and impressive exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age.” With objects grouped according to the cultures that produced them and also arranged loosely in a chronological sequence spanning nearly a millennium, this show presents a vast panorama of the Iron Age and an exploration of the commerce and connections between its major civilizations.......
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/12/16/great-aspirations-iron-age/
America’s Founding Myths
This Thanksgiving, it’s worth remembering that the narrative we hear about America’s founding is wrong. The country was built on genocide.
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America — “from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters” — are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today.
It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction. Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself — the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, overheated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/11/americas-founding-myths/
This Thanksgiving, it’s worth remembering that the narrative we hear about America’s founding is wrong. The country was built on genocide.
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America — “from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters” — are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today.
It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction. Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself — the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, overheated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/11/americas-founding-myths/
Did This Ancient Civilization Avoid War for 2,000 Years?
Annalee Newitz
6/24/14 9:22pmFiled to: SECRET HISTORY
The Harappan civilization dominated the Indus River valley beginning about five thousand years ago, many of its massive cities sprawling at the edges of rivers that still flow through Pakistan and India today. But its culture remains a mystery. Why did it leave behind no representations of great leaders, nor of warfare?
Archaeologists have long wondered whether the Harappan civilization could actually have thrived for roughly 2,000 years without any major wars or leadership cults. Obviously people had conflicts, sometimes with deadly results — graves reveal ample skull injuries caused by blows to the head. But there is no evidence that any Harappan city was ever burned, besieged by an army, or taken over by force from within. Sifting through the archaeological layers of these cities, scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction. There are no enormous caches of weapons, and not even any art representing warfare
http://io9.gizmodo.com/a-civilization-without-war-1595540812
Annalee Newitz
6/24/14 9:22pmFiled to: SECRET HISTORY
The Harappan civilization dominated the Indus River valley beginning about five thousand years ago, many of its massive cities sprawling at the edges of rivers that still flow through Pakistan and India today. But its culture remains a mystery. Why did it leave behind no representations of great leaders, nor of warfare?
Archaeologists have long wondered whether the Harappan civilization could actually have thrived for roughly 2,000 years without any major wars or leadership cults. Obviously people had conflicts, sometimes with deadly results — graves reveal ample skull injuries caused by blows to the head. But there is no evidence that any Harappan city was ever burned, besieged by an army, or taken over by force from within. Sifting through the archaeological layers of these cities, scientists find no layers of ash that would suggest the city had been burned down, and no signs of mass destruction. There are no enormous caches of weapons, and not even any art representing warfare
http://io9.gizmodo.com/a-civilization-without-war-1595540812
How Farming Almost Destroyed Ancient Human Civilization
Annalee Newitz
11/17/14 5:50pmFiled to: ARCHAEOLOGY
Roughly 9,000 years ago, humans had mastered farming to the point where food was plentiful. Populations boomed, and people began moving into large settlements full of thousands of people. And then, abruptly, these proto-cities were abandoned for millennia. It's one of the greatest mysteries of early human civilization............
http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-farming-almost-destroyed-human-civilization-1659734601
Annalee Newitz
11/17/14 5:50pmFiled to: ARCHAEOLOGY
Roughly 9,000 years ago, humans had mastered farming to the point where food was plentiful. Populations boomed, and people began moving into large settlements full of thousands of people. And then, abruptly, these proto-cities were abandoned for millennia. It's one of the greatest mysteries of early human civilization............
http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-farming-almost-destroyed-human-civilization-1659734601
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