The Prime Minister will say that it would be a “mistake” to miss the opportunity to encourage more Islamic investment in the UK and that the City of London should rival Dubai as a centre for sharia-compliant finance. “When Islamic finance is growing 50pc faster than traditional banking and when global Islamic investments are set to grow to £1.3 trillion by 2014, we want to make sure a big proportion of that new investment is made here in Britain,” Mr Cameron will tell an audience
Britain to become first non-Muslim country to launch sharia bond - Telegraph October 30, 2013
In the culinary world, heating is easy; there are dozens of tools in my kitchen that can apply heat in different ways depending on the effect I'm going for. But for cooling, apart from the freezer, you pretty much only get to pick between liquid nitrogen (expensive, limited control) and the anti-griddle (limited applications).
It is now a reality. I present to you the Reverse Microwave. Chills drinks in 45 seconds. : technology October 27, 2013
Research has suggested that in the modern world, the relationship between fertility and intelligence is such that those with higher intelligence have fewer children, one possible reason being more unintended pregnancies for those with lower intelligence. Several researchers have argued that the average genotypic intelligence of the United States and the world are declining which is a dysgenic effect. This has been masked by the Flynn effect for phenotypic intelligence. The Flynn effect may have ended in some developed nations, causing some to argue that phenotypic intelligence will or has started to decline.
Eugenics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia October 25, 2013
Conan tries to talk to the emotionally stoic associate producer, Jordan Schlansky, about love. It doesn't work. Like Dr. Phil said, Conan's an amorous guy! But there's one "Conan" employee who is definitely not, and that is associate producer Jordan Schlansky. Conan has been working with Jordan for a while now, and has chatted with him on-air in the past. This time, they tackle the very emotional, no-way its possible he knows a thing about it, love. Jordan has some very clinical, emotionless, robotic responses; it looks like SOMEBODY studied philosophy a little too hard in college.
▶ Conan & Jordan Schlansky Talk About Love 02/15/11 @ TeamCoco.com October 23, 2013
I’ve come to believe that when two reasonably smart people disagree on a subject, at the core, it is often because one of the following: One or both of the participants is missing key information. One or both of the participants made a logic error that leads to a wrong conclusion. The participants agree on the facts, but have different values and priorities leading them to either disagree on what conclusion should come from the facts. In my mind, a good debate tries to expose missing facts and illogical conclusions so that two in the debate can get to the real crux of the matter, how their biases, experiences, and values shape their beliefs.
Argue Well By Losing October 23, 2013
Suppose you and I have an argument. You believe a proposition, P, and I don’t. I’ve objected, I’ve questioned, I’ve raised all sorts of counter-considerations, and in every case you’ve responded to my satisfaction. At the end of the day, I say, ‘You know what? I guess you’re right.’ So I have a new belief. And it’s not just any belief, but it’s a well-articulated, examined and battle-tested belief. Cohen continues, “So who won that argument? Well, the war metaphor seems to force us into saying you won, even though I’m the only one who made any cognitive gain. The point of a good argument isn’t for one person to simply win over the other. It’s ideally for both to come away with cognitive gains. Even if the goal of an argument is to reach a decision, the goal isn’t to win, the goal is to define the parameters for a good decision and then make the best possible decision with that in mind.
Argue Well By Losing October 23, 2013
A Tuesday kind of love is this: commuting to work knowing that someone cares about what you’re going to have for lunch; understanding that you do not have to be your dynamic, charming, weekend self this time; this time you can butcher sentences and make bad jokes and trip over thin air and it won’t change anything.
Things I Find Wonderful : From... October 23, 2013
We tend to see gesticulation as a behavioral quirk, but research shows these hand movements actually assist our mental processes. A study published last year found that people were better able to explain math problems and simultaneously remember a string of letters if they were allowed to gesture meaningfully as they spoke [because] gesturing probably makes the math part of the task less mentally taxing by externalizing and visualizing relevant information, thereby freeing up cognitive resources for the memory challenge. As a bonus, gesturing while you speak won’t only aid your thought processes, it likely will also help you make a good impression. Research has shown that presenters are judged as more effective and competent when they make hand gestures compared with when they keep their hands still.
Explore – We tend to see gesticulation as a behavioral... October 22, 2013
Still, CGI is only the 29th largest federal IT contractor, with about $950 million in contracts in 2012, compared to number one Lockheed Martin's $14.9 billion. They also don't make high-profile weapons systems, but rather the guts of government Web sites that rarely bear their names.
Meet CGI Federal, the company behind the botched launch of HealthCare.gov October 22, 2013
Is Japan providing a glimpse of all our futures? Many of the shifts there are occurring in other advanced nations, too. Across urban Asia, Europe and America, people are marrying later or not at all, birth rates are falling, single-occupant households are on the rise and, in countries where economic recession is worst, young people are living at home. But demographer Nicholas Eberstadt argues that a distinctive set of factors is accelerating these trends in Japan. These factors include the lack of a religious authority that ordains marriage and family, the country's precarious earthquake-prone ecology that engenders feelings of futility, and the high cost of living and raising children.
Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? | World news | The Observer October 22, 2013
Romantic commitment seems to represent burden and drudgery, from the exorbitant costs of buying property in Japan to the uncertain expectations of a spouse and in-laws. And the centuries-old belief that the purpose of marriage is to produce children endures. Japan's Institute of Population and Social Security reports an astonishing 90% of young women believe that staying single is "preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like".
Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? | World news | The Observer October 22, 2013
The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.
Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? | World news | The Observer October 22, 2013
Consider the politically charged question of whether extending unemployment benefits increases unemployment rates by reducing workers’ incentives to return to work. Nearly a dozen economic studies have analyzed this question by comparing unemployment rates in states that have extended unemployment benefits with those in states that do not. These studies approximate medical experiments in which some groups receive a treatment — in this case, extended unemployment benefits — while “control” groups don’t. These studies have uniformly found that a 10-week extension in unemployment benefits raises the average amount of time people spend out of work by at most one week. This simple, unassailable finding implies that policy makers can extend unemployment benefits to provide assistance to those out of work without substantially increasing unemployment rates.
Yes, Economics Is a Science - NYTimes.com October 22, 2013
In previous decades the most prominent economists were typically theorists like Paul Krugman and Janet L. Yellen, whose models continue to guide economic thinking. Today, the most prominent economists are often empiricists like David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who focus on testing old theories and formulating new ones that fit the evidence.
Yes, Economics Is a Science - NYTimes.com October 22, 2013
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reports Shiller is responsible for discovering "stock prices fluctuate much more than corporate dividends, and that the ratio of prices to dividends tends to fall when it is high, and to increase when it is low." The pattern holds true for stocks, bonds and other assets, and has helped lay the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices. His work followed Fama's—who also has Boston ties, having been born here in 1939. Fama and several collaborators began demonstrating in the 1960s that stock prices are difficult to predict in the short run and that "new information is very quickly incorporated into prices," according to the Nobel committees. Shiller's been called "a god among economists," however, after having predicted the dot-com and housing bubbles. Both times, Shiller published an edition of his book "Irrational Exuberance," according to Business Insider, "which described and predicted each respective bubble."
MIT Alumni: Robert Shiller Wins 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics | BostInno October 18, 2013
in study published in 2001, Linda Polka and colleagues found that at 6-8 months, babies exposed mainly to French and those exposed mainly to English could both distinguish words like "doze" and "those". (They differ only in the initial interdental.) At 10-12 months, English-learning babies had already begun to pull away from the babies learning French. By adulthood, English-speakers are significantly better at perceiving the difference between the initial sounds in "those" and "doze".
Language learning: Babies and sound perception | The Economist October 17, 2013
Muslims have a different interpretation of history from the modern secular humanist one.
(51) Islam: What factors keep Islam from modernizing? - Quora October 15, 2013
For example, let's take the events following the Protestant Reformation. Modern Western civilization's roots are in the reformation of Martin Luther (the doctrine of the two kingdoms), the friction between Galileo and the Catholic Church over heliocentrism, the formation of the Church of England and the founding of the United States.
After the behavior of a church that seemed to be doing strange things (selling forgiveness, dismissing scientific evidence), and kings that ruled arbitrarily by divine right, people began to want to create a barrier between the Church and political control.
A Western interpretation of this history, and one echoed in the other answers, is "religious involvement in politics is bad. Our history is universal, every culture will evolve the way we evolved from a religious frame of reference to a secular humanist frame of reference -- the problem is religion itself." This is also echoed in a lot of "modern" political theory, e.g. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The...).
An Islamic interpretation of this history would attribute this break between the church and the state to irresponsible/bad behavior by the Catholic Church, and kings because of the issue of having to resort to papal infallibility and divine right.
They did not have a well-preserved divine source of law to guide them. The Muslim response to the Fukuyaman view is: "The problem isn't religion, the problem was Christianity and monarchy. It was particular to Christianity and your history. We don't have that problem. Your experience is not as universal as you think it is."
اگر جوانان امروز بدانند که شخصیت ادبی آقای شاملو چگونه تشکیل شدهاست، هرگز اینگونه عمر خود را صرف شعر، آن هم شعر اینطوری – که در روزنامهها میبینیم – نخواهند کرد. تو بهتر از هر کسی میدانی که آنچه ا. بامداد یا احمد شاملو را میسازد اگر به صد جزء تقسیم شود، پنجاه تا شصت درصدش ربطی به شعر ندارد. این شهرت و اعتبار نتیجه پنجاه شصت سال حضور مستمر در روزنامهها است. مدتی حزب توده او را بزرگ میکرد، بعد سلطنتطلبها، بعد چریکها، حالا هم ناراضیان از اوضاع کنونی. و این بزرگ کردنها به هیچ وجه صددرصد به شعر او مربوط نیست، مربوط به موقعشناسی اوست و به قول خودش – با الهام از تعبیری از مایاکوفسکی - «سفارش زمانه» را پذیرفتن. نه اخوان، نه فروغ، نه نیما، نه سپهری، هیچ کدام این طوری سفارش زمانه را نتوانستند بپذیرند.
محمدرضا شفیعی کدکنی - ویکیپدیا October 14, 2013
“Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else..” (Ayn Rand)
(51) Philosophy: Would you agree that freedom means there should be no limits in any way? - Quora October 14, 2013
When it comes to your freedom in relation to other individuals, it is commonly held, even by staunch libertarians, that you cannot do anything that would infringe on other people's ability to be free. You may not use force on them in any way (unless in self-defence). This becomes muddled when people claim to have freedoms that they do not, in fact, have. The right to not be offended is one such case.
Note that once you (freely) agree to a binding contract, you cannot back out of it claiming it infringes on your freedom.
در ایران بسیاری از چیزها از جمله حجاب قانون محکمی وجود ندارد. من نمی توانم این موضوع را رد کنم. هر چیزی در جمهوری اسلامی ممکن است رخ بدهد. حتی زمانی می گفتند “مصلحت نظام” را که تشکیل دادند بر همین اساس بود. مثلا یک زمانی حج را تعطیل کردند، مصلحت نظام این بود که امر واجبی مثل حج را تعطیل کنند.
نوه آیت الله خمینی در گفتگو با شرق پارسی: می خواهم تابو شکن باشم | شرق پارسی، پنجره ای بسوی جهان ایرانی و دنیای عرب October 14, 2013
U.S. national defense spending has ranged widely, from less than 1 percent of GDP in 1929 up to 43 percent in 1944. These extremes illustrate that resource allocation to defense can increase rapidly when a war demands it. Focusing just on the post-World War II period, U.S. national defense spending as a percent of GDP has ranged from a high of 15 percent in 1952 (during the Korean War) to a low of 3.7 percent in 2000 (the period of relative tranquility preceding the terrorist attacks of the following year).
Trends in U.S. Military Spending - Council on Foreign Relations October 10, 2013
But after posting "God doesn't exist" on Facebook, the soft-spoken civil servant, 30, faces up to 11 years in jail for what is considered blasphemy in Indonesia.His case has stoked a debate in the world's most populous Muslim nation, whose 240 million citizens are technically guaranteed freedom of religion but protected by law only if they believe in one of six credos: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Hinduism. Those who question any of those face five years in prison for "insulting a major religion", plus an additional six years if they use the internet to spread such "blasphemy" to others.
Indonesia's atheists face battle for religious freedom | World news | theguardian.com October 9, 2013
That’s the liberal “metropolitan” line, but as its critics see it, it overlooks a crucial aspect of the human personality: we are not a random jumble of individuals who just happen to inhabit the same small island. We are a nation, they say: and our sense of identity with nation is, or should be, central to who we are. And while no civilised nation, least of all Britain, should be opposed to immigration, we should be opposed to the unprecedented scale on which it has been occurring. It’s the numbers, stupid. Immigrants have undoubtedly enriched our culture, but for there to be such a thing as British culture, for there to be a sense of nationhood and national pride, it is essential that the newcomers be absorbed into British life rather than form distinct cultural colonies. There’s nothing racist about this. Nothing racist in feeling apprehensive about the next influx from Eastern Europe, for example. It’s not just a matter of what that might mean for our overstrained services and for British citizens competing for low-paid jobs: it’s the damage done to our sense of belonging to the same community.
Let Them Come: we have nothing to fear from high levels of immigration : Intelligence Squared October 9, 2013
For example, we can get a glimpse into the age structure of Islamic élites through the computational analysis of age statement that often occur in biographies. Analyzing most frequent types of such statements in Taʾrīkh al-islām, my experimental algorithm yields ages for over 5,100 individuals and shows that during the period of almost seven centuries the average lifespan fluctuated between 67 and 80 lunar years (Age Statements, left), clearly going down when age statements become more and more frequent, after c. 350/962 CE (Age Statements, right). Onomastic and toponymic synsets that allow re-grouping data using social, religious and geographical parameters may shed light on the age structure of different social groups and local communities. With minor modifications, this analytical algorithm can be applied to other sources as well. For example, the Hadīyat al-ʿārifīn offers age data on about 1,650 Islamic authors (out of approximately 8,800) and a very cursory glance at the results shows that the longevity was indeed characteristic of religious scholars,1 while most of the short-lived authors are usually found in the field of poetry and fine literature, where talent and audacity seem to have been more important than networks and perseverance.
Prospects of Computational Reading | Maxim Romanov October 9, 2013
That October, she was the lead author on a paper published in Nature that laid out her discovery’s “profound implications for the study of human history and for medicine.” For the first time, researchers could look for evidence of positive selection by testing common haplotypes even if they didn’t have “prior knowledge of a specific variant or selective advantage.” By applying this approach to pathogens, there was the possibility of identifying how diseases had evolved to outwit the human immune response or develop drug resistance—knowledge that would open up new avenues to combating disease.
Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine October 9, 2013
Pardis Sabeti was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1975, where her father, Parviz, was a high-ranking official in the shah’s government. Two years later, on the cusp of the Iranian revolution, the Sabeti family fled to the United States, eventually settling in Florida. “My father took one of the toughest jobs in the government because he cared about his nation more than himself,” Pardis says. “His courage and conviction have always driven me to want to make a difference.”
Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine October 9, 2013
“I have no innate sense of flux or flow or spatial cadence,” she says, explaining why the melodies in Thousand Days songs “go all over the place.” (Still, the band, which can sound like a spikier, more energetic version of 10,000 Maniacs, received an honorable mention in a Billboard World Song Competition.) “I have no sense of structure.” What she unquestionably does have is a fierce determination to succeed. Her single-mindedness has led to a groundbreaking tool to determine whether a specific variation of a given gene is widespread in a population as a result of having been favored by natural selection.
Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine October 9, 2013
The music industry is and has always been a business. And pop music especially has always been about the make-money mentality. Put something out there that's ephemeral, lacks substance, and is extremely catchy, and people will buy it for $00.99 and love it for a summer. They'll listen to it on the radio. They'll dance to it.
Henry Rollins offers an incisive take on the state of modern music. "It's like corporate food — the guy at the kitchen at Olive Garden really doesn't care if you love his linguine. It's just order 37, and he hates his job." : Music October 8, 2013
“We asked them to form impressions of a candidate based solely on their Facebook page,” says one of the study author’s, Don Kluemper, of Northern Illinois University. This involved looking at what was publicly available on those pages (photos, status updates, and conversations with friends) and then assigning each person a score for a number of qualities important to being a good employee, such as their degree of emotionally stability, conscientiousness, extroversion, intellectual curiosity and agreeableness. (In other words, will they flip out on you, care about completing tasks, be fun to work with, be creative in problem solving, and be willing to kiss up when necessary?)
Facebook Can Tell You If A Person Is Worth Hiring - Forbes October 7, 2013
Anything that is percieved as "upscale" from a blue-collar point of view. 'Bougie' (pronounced boo'-she) is a hacked truncation of the word Bourgeoisie, which refers to the middle-class in Europe, but refers to a more affluent class level in the United States.
Urban Dictionary: bougie October 7, 2013
From Wikipedia.org:
In the United States, which lacks strict social classes, Bourgeoisie is sometimes used to refer to those seen as being upper class.You can sit there and drink your bougie-ass microbrewed beer, but I still prefer my ice cold Coors original.
