Research Proposal Quotes

In the same way that I tend to make up my mind about people within thirty seconds of meeting them, I also make up my mind about whether a business proposal excites me within about thirty seconds of looking at it. I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics.

Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men. Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them. I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

I have often asked myself, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Like modern loggers, did he shout "Jobs, not trees!"? Or: "Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood"? Or: "We don't have proof that there aren't palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering"? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment.

Science is pretty much the same. A conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers—the community of researchers—reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim.

Some researchers have proposed that experiencing empathy and compassion through the mirror neuron system is equivalent to having compassion for yourself. Thus, “giving is receiving ” is a brain-based truth. Insensitivity and selfishness are essentially bad for your brain and your mental health. In contrast, compassion and loving relationships are good for your brain and your mental health.

As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent.

As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.

An entrepreneur is a broker between ideas and resources. This is not confined to business; it is at least as much at home in academia. Faculty members write their dreams of undiscovered truths in research proposals addressed persuasively to foundations and government agencies.

It must not be forgotten that reason too needs to be sustained in all its searching by trusting dialogue and sincere friendship. A climate of suspicion and distrust, which can beset speculative research, ignores the teaching of the ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical enquiry.

Turing’s vision was shared by his fellow computer scientists in America, who codified their curiosity in 1956 with a now famous Dartmouth College research proposal in which the term “artificial intelligence” was coined.

State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.

I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould.

The man in the headdress nodded. “On that note, I’d like to quickly ask David if there’s been any headway in getting the air conditioning back online.” A slight murmur of discontent indicated the importance of this matter, directed at a blond young man with a tanning-bed complexion. “Well, Gary,” he sighed. “There isn’t much we can do without electricity, but my team has been researching alternatives. One of my engineers proposed a system of fans powered by dogs in giant hamster wheels, but the major issue there is our limited dog inventory. We’ll keep looking into it.

As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may well be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change. Recent research suggests he is right: Few climate solutions of this magnitude lie in the hands of individuals or are as close as the dinner plate.

No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp a shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing. Beside falling real wages, America's other economic problems pale into insignificance. The remedies lie in major public and private investments in research and development and in creating skilled workers to insure that tomorrow's high-wage, brain-power industries generate much of their employment in the United States. Yet if one looks at the weak policy proposals of both Democrats and Republicans, ‘it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To a certain extent, Ruef’s and Burt’s research is a validation of the celebrated “strength of weak ties” argument first proposed by Mark Granovetter,

On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the congressional research service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not screwed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And you and election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism. Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again, and that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everyone!

As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.” Later that year, a Harvard anesthesiologist named Henry Beecher published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that Southam’s research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a detailed list of the twenty-two worst offenders, including researchers who’d injected children with hepatitis and others who’d poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southam’s study was included as example number 17. Despite scientists’ fears, the ethical crackdown didn’t slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished. And much of it involved HeLa. 18

Kuhn argued that most research is “normal science”—studies that add more detail to existing knowledge and theories. Normal science, however, usually suppresses the contradictions, the observations that don’t fit the frameworks that the scientific community shares. Over time these discrepancies grow into crises until someone comes along to propose a paradigm shift, a new way to understand natural forces, a new set of questions, a new way to search and research. Kuhn described these paradigm shifts as scientific revolutions. They require paradigm destruction—the shedding of the previous paradigm. The new paradigm changes how scientists understand phenomena. It changes what scientists see and how they act in designing experiments. Paradigm shifts count as insights because the result is a shift from a mediocre frame to one that provides a better understanding of the same phenomenon.

Everyone in the room knew about leveraged buyouts, often called LBOs. In an LBO, a small group of senior executives, usually working with a Wall Street partner, proposes to buy its company from public shareholders, using massive amounts of borrowed money. Critics of this procedure called it stealing the company from its owners and fretted that the growing mountain of corporate debt was hindering America’s ability to compete abroad. Everyone knew LBOs meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich.

Kendler himself is the researcher who reported that when Walter Cassidy, the psychiatrist who first proposed diagnostic criteria for depression, was asked why he set the threshold at six out of ten symptoms, he responded, “It sounded about right

It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research succeeding was only one in a hundred. But here we are talking about odds of one in a billion. And yet . . . even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets—of which Earth, of course, is one.

During most election seasons, one group of researchers or another will generate a voter questionnaire highlighting planks from the Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian election platforms. Using excerpts from the party platforms, these pamphlets propose to present three alternative ways to address specific issues--without identifying which plank comes from which party. The people taking the survey merely have to choose the positions that most clearly mirror their own. Interestingly enough, the majority of those taking this blind test tend to favor positions taken from the Libertarian platform over those from the Democrats or Republicans.

Even if men and women in America spoke the same language, they would still live by much different standards. For example, if a man in a movie researches a woman’s schedule, finds out where she lives and works, even goes to her work uninvited, it shows his commitment, proves his love. When Robert Redford does this to Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal, it’s adorable. But when she shows up at his work unannounced, interrupting a business lunch, it’s alarming and disruptive. If a man in the movies wants a sexual encounter or applies persistence, he’s a regular everyday guy, but if a woman does the same thing, she’s a maniac or a killer. Just recall Fatal Attraction, King of Comedy, Single White Female, Play Misty for Me, Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Basic Instinct.

Research to date suggests silvopasture far outpaces any grassland technique. That is because silvopastoral systems sequester carbon in both the biomass aboveground and the soil below. Pastures that are strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless. Moreover, because the livestock yield on a silvopasture plot is higher

Elsewhere, statisticians were using similar approaches—called kernel methods—to analyze patterns in data sets. Back on Long Island, Henry Laufer was working on similar machine-learning tactics in his own research and was set to share it with Simons and others. Carmona wasn’t aware of this work. He was simply proposing using sophisticated algorithms to give Ax and Straus the framework to identify patterns in current prices that seemed similar to those in the past.

We propose that use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in memory for details directly contributes to removing the social context of abuse from research on memory for trauma. As the term “false memories” has increasingly been used to describe errors in details, the scientific weight of the term has increased. In turn, we see that the term “false memories” is treated as a construct supported by scientific fact, whereas other terms associated with questions about the veracity of abuse memories have been treated as suspect. For example, “recovered memories” often appears in quotations, whereas “false memories” does not (Campbell, 2003).The quotation marks suggest that one term is questioned, whereas the other is accepted as fact. Accepting “false memories” of abuse as fact reflects the subtle assimilation of the term into the cognitive literature, where the term is used increasingly to describe intrusions of semantically related words into lists of related words. The term, rooted in the controversy over the accuracy of abuse memories recalled during psychotherapy (Schacter, 1999), implies generalization of errors in details to memory for abuse—experienced largely by women and children (Campbell, 2003)." from: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior

The severity of the escape from reality being attempted here is legible in the final sentence of the 1964 Proposal on the Biological Aspects of Race, where the very call for scientists to “endeavour to prevent the results of their researches from being used in such a biased way that they would serve non-scientific ends” is itself an instance of science being utilized for nonscientific, specifically political, ends. UNESCO, Proposal on the Biological Aspects of Race, unesdoc.unesco.org.

Meanwhile Professor Binns, the ghost who taught History of Magic, had them writing weekly essays on the goblin rebellions of the eighteenth century. Professor Snape was forcing them to research antidotes. They took this one seriously, as he had hinted that he might be poisoning one of them before Christmas to see if their antidote worked. Professor Flitwick had asked them to read three extra books in preparation for their lesson on Summoning Charms. Even Hagrid was adding to their workload. The Blast-Ended Skrewts were growing at a remarkable pace given that nobody had yet discovered what they ate. Hagrid was delighted, and as part of their “project,” suggested that they come down to his hut on alternate evenings to observe the skrewts and make notes on their extraordinary behavior. “I will not,” said Draco Malfoy flatly when Hagrid had proposed this with the air of Father Christmas pulling an extra-large toy out of his sack. “I see enough of these foul things during lessons, thanks.” Hagrid’s smile faded off his face.

A burst of high-frequency TMS pulses applied over Broca’s area on the left side would shut down the ability to speak, Shirley told me. This wasn’t what they were doing in the autism study—what they proposed was a much subtler tweaking. But I was intrigued by her comment and didn’t let it go. “Did you actually try it yourself?” I asked her. It turned out that she had—in fact, quite a few of the researchers, as part of their training to work in the lab, had experienced the speech-suppression TMS. They offered to show me what it felt like.

In the late 1920s, a decade after Taft’s proposal had been tabled, cancer research found a new and unexpected champion—Matthew Neely, a dogged and ebullient former lawyer from Fairmont, West Virginia, serving his first term in the Senate. Although Neely had relatively little experience in the politics of science, he had noted the marked increase in cancer mortality in the previous decade—from 70,000 men and women in 1911 to 115,000 in 1927. Neely asked Congress to advertise a reward of $5 million for any “information leading to the arrest of human cancer.

The suggestion had been made by some of my colleagues that I should participate in the marking of the summer examinations which in Oxford we refer to as Schools. Much as I was honoured by the proposal, I had felt obliged to decline: who am I to sit in judgement on the young? Moreover, the marking of examination scripts is among the most tedious of occupations. I had accordingly explained that the demands of scholarship – that is to say, of my researches into the concept of causa in the early Common Law – precluded any other commitment of my time and energies.

Valentine’s concept of introversion includes traits that contemporary psychology would classify as openness to experience (“thinker, dreamer”), conscientiousness (“idealist”), and neuroticism (“shy individual”). A long line of poets, scientists, and philosophers have also tended to group these traits together. All the way back in Genesis, the earliest book of the Bible, we had cerebral Jacob (a “quiet man dwelling in tents” who later becomes “Israel,” meaning one who wrestles inwardly with God) squaring off in sibling rivalry with his brother, the swashbuckling Esau (a “skillful hunter” and “man of the field”). In classical antiquity, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen famously proposed that our temperaments—and destinies—were a function of our bodily fluids, with extra blood and “yellow bile” making us sanguine or choleric (stable or neurotic extroversion), and an excess of phlegm and “black bile” making us calm or melancholic (stable or neurotic introversion). Aristotle noted that the melancholic temperament was associated with eminence in philosophy, poetry, and the arts (today we might classify this as opennessto experience). The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton wrote Il Penseroso (“The Thinker”) and L’Allegro (“The Merry One”), comparing “the happy person” who frolics in the countryside and revels in the city with “the thoughtful person” who walks meditatively through the nighttime woods and studies in a “lonely Towr.” (Again, today the description of Il Penseroso would apply not only to introversion but also to openness to experience and neuroticism.) The nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer contrasted “good-spirited” people (energetic, active, and easily bored) with his preferred type, “intelligent people” (sensitive, imaginative, and melancholic). “Mark this well, ye proud men of action!” declared his countryman Heinrich Heine. “Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” Because of this definitional complexity, I originally planned to invent my own terms for these constellations of traits. I decided against this, again for cultural reasons: the words introvert and extrovert have the advantage of being well known and highly evocative. Every time I uttered them at a dinner party or to a seatmate on an airplane, they elicited a torrent of confessions and reflections. For similar reasons, I’ve used the layperson’s spelling of extrovert rather than the extravert one finds throughout the research literature.

Through the theories they embody, paradigms prove to be constitutive of the research activity. They are also, however, constitutive of science in other respects, and that is now the point. In particular, our most recent examples show that paradigms provide scientists not only with a map but also with some of the directions essential for map-making. In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture. Therefore, when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions.

…the third article we discovered was by Linda Hartling, who ties together research from several areas to propose a model explaining how humiliation can lead to violence. Hartling suggests that humiliation can trigger a series of reactions, including social pain, decreased self-awareness, increased self-defeating behavior, and decreased self-regulation, that ultimately lead to violence. Hartling and colleagues state that “humiliation is not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes of political instability and violent conflict…perhaps the most toxic social dynamic of our age.” This connection between humiliation and aggression/violence explains much of what we’re seeing today. Amplified by the reach of social media, dehumanizing and humiliating others are becoming increasingly normalized, along with violence. Now, rather than humiliating someone in front of a small group of people, we have the power to eviscerate someone in front of a global audience of strangers. I know we all have deeply passionate and cultural beliefs, but shame and humiliation will never be effective social justice tools. They are tools of oppression. I remember reading this quote from Elie Wiesel years ago and it’s become a practice for me-even when I’m enraged or afraid: “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For example, in order to gauge the true shape of the earth, we can observe the sun, the moon and the planets from various locations across the world. Once we have amassed enough observations, we can use trigonometry to deduce not only the shape of the earth, but also the structure of the entire solar system. In practice, that means that scientists seek knowledge by spending years in observatories, laboratories and research expeditions, gathering more and more empirical data, and sharpening their mathematical tools so they could interpret the data correctly. The scientific formula for knowledge led to astounding breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, medicine and countless other disciplines. But it had one huge drawback: it could not deal with questions of value and meaning. Medieval pundits could determine with absolute certainty that it is wrong to murder and steal, and that the purpose of human life is to do God’s bidding, because scriptures said so. Scientists could not come up with such ethical judgements. No amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.

Swanson saw opportunity. He realized he could make discoveries by connecting information from scientific articles in subspecialty domains that never cited one another and that had no scientists who worked together. For example, by systematically cross-referencing databases of literature from different disciplines, he uncovered “eleven neglected connections” between magnesium deficiency and migraine research, and proposed that they be tested. All of the information he found was in the public domain; it had just never been connected. “Undiscovered public knowledge,” Swanson called it. In 2012, the American Headache Society and the American Academy of Neurology reviewed all the research on migraine prevention and concluded that magnesium should be considered as a common treatment.

She zips out the Congressional Record from February 24, 1972, and reads the testimony of Dr. Jose Delgado from Yale University, who was arguing against the proposed discontinuation of research into psychosurgery:            We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.

Even working within the laws of physics, researchers with an anti-God bias often make blind leaps of faith to escape any evidence of God’s involvement in the universe. For centuries Christians were criticized for their God-of-the-gaps arguments. Sometimes that criticism was deserved. Christians tended to use gaps in understanding or data to build a case for God’s miraculous intervention. Then, when scientific discoveries uncovered a natural explanation for the “divine phenomenon,” ridicule was heaped not only on those proposing the divine explanation but also on belief in God’s existence. In the twenty-first century we see the reverse of the God-of-the-gaps arguments. Nontheists, confronted with problems when ample research leads to no natural explanations and instead points to the supernatural, utterly reject the possibility of the supernatural and insist on a natural explanation even if it means resorting to absurdity. For example, steady state models were supported by an imagined force of physics for which there was not one shred of observational or experimental evidence. The oscillating universe model depended on an imagined bounce mechanism for which there was likewise not one shred of observational or experimental evidence. Similar appeals to imagined forces and phenomena have been the basis for all the cosmological models proposed to avoid the big bang implications about God (see chs. 8 and 9). The disproof of these models and the ongoing appeal by nontheists to more and more bizarre unknowns and unknowables seem to reflect the growing strength of the case for theism (see chs. 8, 9, 13, and 16).

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, Saga University in Japan, and the University of California, Davis, proposed creating an artificial inorganic leaf modeled on the real thing. They took a leaf of Anemone vitifolia, a plant native to China, and injected its veins with titanium dioxide-a well-known industrial photocatalyst. By taking on the precise branching shape and structure of the leaf's veins, the titanium dioxide produced much higher light-harvesting ability than if ti was used in a traditional configuration. The researchers found an astounding 800 percent increase in hydrogen production as well. The total performance was 300 percent more active than the world's best commercial photocatalysts. When they added platinum nanoparticles to the mix, it increased activity by a further 1,000 percent.

decade after the first edition of this book was published, Yan Wong and I met in the fitting surroundings of the Oxford Museum of Natural History to discuss the possibility of producing a new, tenth anniversary edition. Yan, once my undergraduate pupil, had been employed as my research assistant during the writing of the original edition, before he left for his lecturing position in Leeds and his career as a television presenter. He played an enormously important part in the conception and execution of the first edition, and he was credited as joint author of several of the chapters. During the course of our discussion ten years on, we realised that much new information had come in, especially from the molecular genetics laboratories of the world. Yan undertook the bulk of the revision and I proposed to the publisher that this time he should be properly credited as joint author of the whole book.

The person who discovered the answer was a retiring, self-funded scientist named Peter Mitchell who in the early 1960s inherited a fortune from the Wimpey house-building company and used it to set up a research center in a stately home in Cornwall. Mitchell was something of an eccentric. He wore shoulder-length hair and an earring at a time when that was especially unusual among serious scientists. He was also famously forgetful. At his daughter’s wedding, he approached another guest and confessed that she looked familiar, though he couldn’t quite place her. “I was your first wife,” she answered. Mitchell’s ideas were universally dismissed, not altogether surprisingly. As one chronicler has noted, “At the time that Mitchell proposed his hypothesis there was not a shred of evidence in support of it.” But he was eventually vindicated and in 1978 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry—an extraordinary accomplishment for someone who worked from a home lab. The

Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been. I’d thought there was a general agreement that Facebook didn’t use these underhand tactics and we certainly didn’t admire them. Uber weaponizes their drivers and riders, creating strikes, protests, and transportation chaos, forcing authorities to the table. They’re sponsoring the soccer teams of the children of key Brazilian senators responsible for decisions that impact their business, insisting on having UBER plastered across their kids’ uniforms. They propose compiling opposition research on journalists. It’s dirty. But what becomes clear the more Mark speaks is that not only does he not judge what Uber is doing, he’s judging us for not doing it. Mark believes Facebook could have a lot more leverage with politicians than Uber ever could, and we’re failing him by not using these tactics.

A third objection is that Easter Islanders surely wouldn’t have been so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them. As Catherine Orliac expressed it, “Why destroy a forest that one needs for his [i.e., the Easter Islanders’] material and spiritual survival?” This is indeed a key question, one that has nagged not only Catherine Orliac but also my University of California students, me, and everyone else who has wondered about self-inflicted environmental damage. I have often asked myself, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment.

As with Dalton and the atom, neither Bateson nor Johannsen had any understanding of what a gene was. They could not fathom its material form, its physical or chemical structure, its location within the body or inside the cell, or even its mechanism of action. The word was created to mark a function; it was an abstraction. A gene was defined by what a gene does: it was a carrier of hereditary information. “Language is not only our servant,” Johannsen wrote, “[but] it may also be our master. It is desirable to create new terminology in all cases where new and revised conceptions are being developed. Therefore, I have proposed the word ‘gene.’ The ‘gene’ is nothing but a very applicable little word. It may be useful as an expression for the ‘unit factors’ . . . demonstrated by modern Mendelian researchers.” “The word ‘gene’ is completely free of any hypothesis,” Johannsen remarked. “It expresses only the evident fact that . . . many characteristics of the organism are specified . . . in unique, separate and thereby independent ways.

Legasov had his faults, but fundamentally he was a good, conscientious man who pushed against, and felt guilty about, both his own inaction before the disaster and the official, half-honest approach he was forced to adopt afterwards. It was too late. Both the pretence and his willingness to criticise a Soviet system that had gestated a belief in invulnerability had damaged his reputation. While reporting to his peers at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in October 1986, he stated, “I did not lie in Vienna; but I did not tell the whole truth.”256 Legasov decided to take a firm stance against the official explanation and penned several papers on the subject. In them, he criticised the underlying problems with the RBMK, the poor quality of training for nuclear operators, the complacency entrenched within the Soviet scientific community and nuclear industry in particular (one plant director was quoted as saying that a nuclear reactor is like a kettle, “and much simpler than a conventional plant”), and proposed further research into safer reactor types.257

What would fly researchers discover at the tips of the reproductive structures? In the immediate environment in which the GSC (germline stem cells) sit? Shangri-La. [...] The experimental biologist J.J. Trentin proposed in 1970 that within the bone marrow and other home locations, there exists 'hematopoietic inductice microenvironment' with the unique ability to serve as a home location for blood stem cells. In the later 1970s, another blood cell expert, R. Schofield, referred to this specialized microenvironment as a 'niche', introducing the term that would stick and eventually, become widely applied to describe the microenvironment surrounding any type of stem cell. Fly biologist H. Lin describes a stem cell niche as 'the Shangri-La, the idyllic hideaway' in which these cells reside. Nestled in the niche, Lin states, stem cells 'thrive to self-renew and to produce numerous daughter cells that will differentiate and age as they leave the paradise'. In other words, the niche is the place that a stem cell is granted its two wishes - allowing it both to remain and to become something else.

Thiel, the PayPal cofounder who had invested in SpaceX, holds a conference each year with the leaders of companies financed by his Founders Fund. At the 2012 gathering, Musk met Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist, video-game designer, and artificial intelligence researcher with a courteous manner that conceals a competitive mind. A chess prodigy at age four, he became the five-time champion of an international Mind Sports Olympiad that includes competition in chess, poker, Mastermind, and backgammon. In his modern London office is an original edition of Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which proposed an “imitation game” that would pit a human against a ChatGPT–like machine. If the responses of the two were indistinguishable, he wrote, then it would be reasonable to say that machines could “think.” Influenced by Turing’s argument, Hassabis cofounded a company called DeepMind that sought to design computer-based neural networks that could achieve artificial general intelligence. In other words, it sought to make machines that could learn how to think like humans.

Von Neumann, in his thought experiment about self-replication, had written that he had avoided the “most intriguing, exciting, and important question of why the molecules or aggregates that in nature really occur … are the sorts of thing they are, why they are essentially very large molecules in some cases but large aggregations in other cases.”20 Pattee suggested that it is the very size of the molecules that ties the quantum and classical worlds together: “Enzymes are small enough to take advantage of quantum coherence to attain the enormous catalytic power on which life depends, but large enough to attain high specificity and arbitrariness in producing effectively decoherent products that can function as classical structures.”21 Quantum coherence basically means that subatomic particles sync together to “cooperate” to produce decoherent products, which are particles that do not have quantum properties. Pattee notes that there is now research that supports his proposal that enzymes require quantum effects22 and that life would be impossible in a strictly quantum world.23 Both are needed: a quantum layer and a classical physical layer.

OUR ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE FAMILIAR THINGS At first glance our ability to recognize familiar things may not seem so unusual, but brain researchers have long realized it is quite a complex ability. For example, the absolute certainty we feel when we spot a familiar face in a crowd of several hundred people is not just a subjective emotion, but appears to be caused by an extremely fast and reliable form of information processing in our brain. In a 1970 article in the British science magazine Nature, physicist Pieter van Heerden proposed that a type of holography known as recognition holography offers a way of understanding this ability. * In recognition holography a holographic image of an object is recorded in the usual manner, save that the laser beam is bounced off a special kind of mirror known as a focusing mirror before it is allowed to strike the unexposed film. If a second object, similar but not identical * Van Heerden, a researcher at the Polaroid Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually proposed his own version of a holographic theory of memory in 1963, but his work went relatively unnoticed. to the first, is bathed in laser light and the light is bounced off the mirror and onto the film after it has been developed, a bright point of light will appear on the film. The brighter and sharper the point of light the greater the degree of similarity between the first and second objects. If the two objects are completely dissimilar, no point of light will appear. By placing a light-sensitive photocell behind the holographic film, one can actually use the setup as a mechanical recognition system.7 A similar technique known as interference holography may also explain how we can recognize both the familiar and unfamiliar features of an image such as the face of someone we have not seen for many years. In this technique an object is viewed through a piece of holographic film containing its image. When this is done, any feature of the object that has changed since its image was originally recorded will reflect light differently. An individual looking through the film is instantly aware of both how the object has changed and how it has remained the same. The technique is so sensitive that even the pressure of a finger on a block of granite shows up immediately, and the process has been found to have practical applications in the materials testing industry.

When scientific proposals are brought forward, they are not judged by hunches or gut feelings. Only one standard is relevant: a proposal's ability to explain or predict experimental data and astronomical observations. Therein lies the singular beauty of science. As we struggle toward deeper understanding, we must give our creative imagination ample room to explore. We must be willing to step outside conventional ideas and established frameworks. But unlike the wealth of other human activities through which the creative impulse is channeled, science supplies a final reckoning, a built-in assessment of what's right and what's not. A complication of scientific life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that some of our theoretical ideas have soared past our ability to test or observe. String theory has for some time been the poster child for this situation; the possibility that we're part of a multiverse provides an even more sprawling example. I've laid out a general prescription for how a multiverse proposal might be testable, but at our current level of understanding none of the multiverse theories we've encountered yet meet the criteria. With ongoing research, this situation could greatly improve.

If you want to know the real reasons why certain politicians vote the way they do - follow the money. Arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg (a.k.a. JackOff Grease-Smug) stands to make billions via his investment firm - Somerset Capital Management - if the UK crashes unceremoniously out of the European Union without a secure future trade deal. Why ? Because proposed EU regulations will give enforcement agencies greater powers to curb the activities adopted by the sort of off-shore tax havens his company employs. Consequently the British electorate get swindled not once, but twice. Firstly because any sort of Brexit - whether hard, soft, or half-baked - will make every man, woman and child in the UK that much poorer than under the status quo currently enjoyed as a fully paid up member of the EU. Secondly because Rees-Mogg's company, if not brought to heel by appropriate EU wide legislation, will deprive Her Majesty's Treasury of millions in taxes, thus leading to more onerous taxes for the rest of us. It begs the question, who else in the obscure but influential European Research Group (ERG) that he chairs and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) that he subscribes to, have similar vested interests in a no-deal Brexit ? It is high time for infinitely greater parliamentary and public scrutiny into the UK Register of Members' Financial Interests in order to put an end to these nefarious dealings and appalling double standards in public life which only serve to further corrode public trust in an already fragile democracy.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34 Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed. The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35 Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt. Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period: Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis… Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36 It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37 Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38

I've asked a number of analytic metaphysicians whether they can distinguish their enterprise from naïve naïve naive auto-anthropology of their clan, and have not received any compelling answers. The alternative is sophisticated naïve anthropology (both auto- and hetero-)-- the anthropology that reserves judgment about whether any of the theorems produced by the exercise deserve to be trusted--and this is a feasible and frequently valuable project. I propose that this is the enterprise to which analytic metaphysicians should turn, since it requires rather minimal adjustments to their methods and only one major revision of their raison d'être : they must rollback their pretensions and acknowledge that their research is best seen as a preparatory reconnaissance of the terrain of the manifest image, suspending both belief and disbelief the way anthropologists do when studying an exotic culture: let's pretend for the nonce that the natives are right, and see what falls out. Since at least a large part of philosophy’s task, in my vision of the discipline, consists in negotiating the traffic back and forth between the manifest and scientific images, it is a good idea for philosophers to analyze what they are up against in the way of focus options before launching into their theory-building and theory-criticizing. One of the hallmarks of sophisticated naïve anthropology is its openness to counterintuitive discoveries. As long as you're doing naïve anthropology, counterintuitiveness (to the natives) counts against your reconstruction; when you shift gears and begin asking which aspects of the naïve “theory” are true, counterintuitiveness loses its force as an objection and even becomes, on occasion, a sign of significant progress. In science in general, counterintuitive results are prized, after all.

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

Modern electrical power distribution technology is largely the fruit of the labors of two men—Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Compared with Edison, Tesla is relatively unknown, yet he invented the alternating electric current generation and distribution system that supplanted Edison's direct current technology and that is the system currently in use today. Tesla also had a vision of delivering electricity to the world that was revolutionary and unique. If his research had come to fruition, the technological landscape would be entirely different than it is today. Power lines and the insulated towers that carry them over thousands of country and city miles would not distract our view. Tesla believed that by using the electrical potential of the Earth, it would be possible to transmit electricity through the Earth and the atmosphere without using wires. With suitable receiving devices, the electricity could be used in remote parts of the planet. Along with the transmission of electricity, Tesla proposed a system of global communication, following an inspired realization that, to electricity, the Earth was nothing more than a small, round metal ball. [...] With $150,000 in financial support from J. Pierpont Morgan and other backers, Tesla built a radio transmission tower at Wardenclyffe, Long Island, that promised—along with other less widely popular benefits—to provide communication to people in the far corners of the world who needed no more than a handheld receiver to utilize it. In 1900, Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted the letter "S" from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland and precluded Tesla's dream of commercial success for transatlantic communication. Because Marconi's equipment was less costly than Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower facility, J. P. Morgan withdrew his support. Moreover, Morgan was not impressed with Tesla's pleas for continuing the research on the wireless transmission of electrical power. Perhaps he and other investors withdrew their support because they were already reaping financial returns from those power systems both in place and under development. After all, it would not have been possible to put a meter on Tesla's technology—so any investor could not charge for the electricity!

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration.

In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.

Congress also saw how Ronan and his contemporaries stretched the truth in order to obtain federal funding for their rail projects. In 1989, a US Department of Transportation researcher, Don Pickrell, meticulously compared project sponsors’ initial forecasts with the actual costs and benefits of projects after they were completed. Pickrell found that transit agencies grossly overestimated the number of passengers their proposed rail lines would carry. In fact, nearly all recently built projects were carrying less than half the number of forecasted riders. Likewise, nearly all the projects cost more than expected. Because of this, the 1991 federal transportation law that authorized about $800 million per year for large transit projects mandated a rigorous review process to evaluate the cost effectiveness of proposed projects.16

The third phase of the work plan is to draft the introduction. The draft should consist of an analytical commentary related to the table of contents: “With this work we propose to demonstrate this thesis. The previous research has left many questions unanswered, and the data gathered is still insufficient. In the first chapter, we will attempt to establish this point; in the second chapter we will tackle this other point. In conclusion, we will attempt to demonstrate a, b, and c. We have set these specific limits for the work. Within these limits, we will use the following method.

Indeed, some medical researchers propose that syphilis has always existed worldwide, but manifested itself differently in different places.

Hughes has put forward a number of promising policy proposals to remain competitive. These include collaboration between the U.S. private and public sectors to increase competitiveness; fiscal and monetary reform; technological innovation; the creation of a lifelong learning culture;3 and increased U.S. civilian research and development.

Sheep and Goats One way of independently checking the results suggested by the hypnosis studies is to examine another form of suggestion, one that is in some ways stronger than conventional hypnotic induction. These are the subtle suggestions induced in us by our culture, our personal experiences, and the beliefs we learned from parents and schools. Together, culture, experience, and beliefs are potent shapers of our sense of reality. They are, in effect, hidden persuaders, powerful reinforcers of our sense of what is real. Our deep beliefs determine what we view as logically reasonable and what we consider to be morally and ethically self-evident. As we’ll explore in more detail in chapter 14, the hidden “hypnosis” of belief actually determines to a greater degree than is commonly known what we can consciously perceive. The hypnosis experiments showed that a slight tweaking of these beliefs resulted in a different performance. Thus, we would expect that people who accept the existence of ESP—for reasons of culture, experience, or belief—will score higher, on average, than people who do not. This turns out to be one of the most consistent experimental effects in psi research. It was whimsically dubbed the “sheep-goat” effect by psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler, who in 1943 proposed that one reason that confirmed skeptics do not report psi experiences is because they subconsciously avoid them.37 People who do report such experiences Schmeidler called the “sheep,” and the skeptics she called the “goats.” These studies typically had people fill in a questionnaire asking about their degree of belief in ESP and about any psi experiences they may have had. On the basis of their responses, participants were classified as either sheep or goats. All participants then took a standardized psi test, like an ESP card test, after which the results of the sheep and goats were compared. The idea was that the performance of the sheep would be significantly better than that of the goats. In 1993, psychologist Tony Lawrence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, reported a meta-analysis of all sheep-goat forced-choice experiments conducted between 1943 and 1993. Lawrence found seventy-three published reports by thirty-seven different investigators, involving more than 685,000 guesses produced by forty-five hundred participants. The overall results were strongly in favor of the sheep-goat effect, with believers performing better than disbelievers with odds greater than a trillion to one.

This is leading to the expectation that there are deeper theories than quantum mechanics, and that when those are developed entirely new forms of postquantum spookiness will be found at all scales. As I described in a previous book, Entangled Minds, the direction that physics is headed is becoming increasingly compatible with the kind of physical reality that is required to support psi phenomena. That is, common sense tells us that the everyday world is fixed in space and time. Our watches remind us of this, and we have to physically lug our bodies around to get from one place to the next. But within physics it is well established that beneath the appearances of common sense, space and time are relationships and not absolutes. We may be on the threshold of even more refined theories that redefine relationships as side effects arising out of a spaceless, timeless, informational reality. If we didn’t know better, we could imagine that this is what the yogis have been trying to tell us about the holistic nature of reality that they’ve experienced in samadhi. They just didn’t have the technical language to describe it. As physicist Vedral says, Space and time are two of the most fundamental classical concepts, but according to quantum mechanics they are secondary. The entanglements are primary. They interconnect quantum systems without reference to space and time. If there were a dividing line between the quantum and the classical worlds, we could use the space and time of the classical world to provide a framework for describing quantum processes. But without such a dividing line—and, indeed, without a truly classical world—we lose this framework. We must explain space and time as somehow emerging from fundamentally spaceless and timeless physics.358 (page 43) A half century ago, psi researchers were already proposing models based on quantum concepts.1, 2, 295, 360, 361 It appears that the rest of the scientific world is beginning to catch up.

In a callous response to this complaint, one politician argued that supplying bodies for research was the least the poor could do. After all, look at all the free meals and medical care they’d enjoyed on the public dime during their lives. (A rival politician countered that he too supported the dissection of those who were sucking the public teat dry. He proposed starting with the royal family.)

survey companies in Myanmar, with various respectable organizations arising as central members on the lookout. Among these organizations, Myanmar Study Exploration (MSR), Kantar TNS Myanmar, and Knowledge Myanmar Exploration stand apart as driving suppliers of statistical surveying and review administrations in the country. Myanmar Overview Exploration (MSR) has set up a good foundation for itself as an unmistakable review organization, offering a large number of examination and counseling administrations to homegrown and worldwide clients. With a solid spotlight on information exactness and unwavering quality, MSR has gained notoriety for conveying smart market knowledge and significant proposals to its clients. Kantar TNS Myanmar, one more key part in the overview business, brings an abundance of involvement and skill to the Myanmar market. As a component of the worldwide Kantar organization, the organization offers state of the art research strategies and a profound comprehension of buyer conduct, empowering clients to pursue informed choices and gain an upper hand in the commercial center. Knowledge Myanmar Exploration is likewise transforming the review business, giving top notch research arrangements custom fitted to the particular necessities of organizations working in Myanmar. The organization's obligation to conveying significant experiences and vital direction has added to its progress in serving a different cluster of clients across different areas. These study organizations assume a vital part in assisting organizations and associations with exploring Myanmar's dynamic market scene. By utilizing their skill in information assortment, examination, and translation, these organizations enable clients to acquire a more profound comprehension of customer inclinations, market patterns, and industry elements. Also, the presence of legitimate study organizations like MSR, Kantar TNS Myanmar, and Knowledge Myanmar Exploration mirrors the developing interest for solid and far reaching statistical surveying administrations in Myanmar. As the nation keeps on starting up to worldwide business open doors, the requirement for exact and noteworthy bits of knowledge has never been more prominent. As well as serving the necessities of organizations, these overview organizations likewise add to the improvement of survey companies in Myanmar overall. Through their obligation to maintaining elevated requirements of impressive skill and moral lead, they set a positive model for different players in the business and assist with raising the general nature of examination and counseling administrations accessible in the country. Besides, these organizations effectively draw in with neighborhood networks, giving work open doors and cultivating the improvement of nearby ability in the field of statistical surveying and information examination. By supporting a talented labor force and advancing information trade, they add to the structure of a vigorous and maintainable exploration biological system in Myanmar. All in all, the development of review organizations, for example, Myanmar Overview Exploration (MSR), Kantar TNS Myanmar, and Understanding Myanmar Exploration mirrors the rising significance of dependable statistical surveying and study administrations in Myanmar. With their obligation to greatness and their commitments to industry improvement, these organizations are ready to assume a critical part in forming the fate of survey companies in Myanmar.

NIH pulled the grant and never again gave Duesberg a single research dollar. Prior to 1987, NIH had never rejected a single one of Peter Duesberg’s proposals. After 1987, Duesberg wrote over thirty research proposals; NIH refused every one.

Though energy fields are invisible, they shape matter. Albert Einstein said that, “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Many studies show that human beings are influenced by the energy fields of others. In a series of 148 1-minute trials involving 25 people, trained volunteers going into heart coherence were able to induce coherence in test subjects at a distance. They didn’t have to touch their targets to produce the effect. Their energy fields were sufficient. When you are in a heart coherent state, your heart radiates a coherent electromagnetic signal into the environment around you. This field is detectable by a magnetometer several meters away. When other people enter that coherent energy field, their heart coherence increases too, producing a group field effect. Not only are we affected by the fields of other people; we’re affected by the energies of the planet and solar system. A remarkable series of experiments, conducted by a research team led by Rollin McCraty, director of research at the HeartMath Institute, has linked individual human energy to solar cycles. McCraty and his colleagues track solar activity using large magnetometers placed at strategic locations on the earth’s surface. Solar flares affect the electromagnetic fields of the planet. The researchers compare the ebbs and flows of solar energy with the heart coherence readings of trained volunteers. They have found that when people are in heart coherence, their electromagnetic patterns track those of the solar system. 8.15. The heart coherence rhythms of a volunteer compared to solar activity over the course of a month. A later study of 16 participants over 5 months found a similar effect. McCraty writes: “A growing body of evidence suggests that an energetic field is formed among individuals in groups through which communication among all the group members occurs simultaneously. In other words, there is an actual ‘group field’ that connects all the members” together. The results of this research confirm a hypothesis McCraty and I discussed at a conference when I was writing Mind to Matter: Not only are these heart-coherent people in sync with large-scale global cycles, they’re also in sync with each other. McCraty continues, “We’re all like little cells in the bigger Earth brain—sharing information at a subtle, unseen level that exists between all living systems, not just humans, but animals, trees, and so on.” When we use selective attention to tune ourselves to positive coherent energy, we participate in the group energy field of other human beings doing the same. We may also resonate in phase with coherent planetary and universal fields. 8.16. The brain functions as receiver of information from the field. The Brain’s Ability to Detect Fields The idea of invisible energy fields has always been difficult for many scientists to swallow. Around 1900, when Dutch physician Willem Einthoven proposed that the human heart had an energy field, he was ridiculed. He built progressively more sensitive galvanometers to detect it, and he was eventually successful.

My failure as an artist led me to you, with your bird wrists, twig fingers, you, with your efficient days making lists, researching, you, who can make a spreadsheet about almost anything. You make everything better than when you found it, even me.

FIELD EFFECTS Emotional contagion is just one explanation for the growth of meditation. Another is field effects. Everything begins as energy, then works its way into matter. Though energy fields are invisible, they shape matter. Albert Einstein said that, “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Many studies show that human beings are influenced by the energy fields of others. In a series of 148 1-minute trials involving 25 people, trained volunteers going into heart coherence were able to induce coherence in test subjects at a distance. They didn’t have to touch their targets to produce the effect. Their energy fields were sufficient. When you are in a heart coherent state, your heart radiates a coherent electromagnetic signal into the environment around you. This field is detectable by a magnetometer several meters away. When other people enter that coherent energy field, their heart coherence increases too, producing a group field effect. Not only are we affected by the fields of other people; we’re affected by the energies of the planet and solar system. A remarkable series of experiments, conducted by a research team led by Rollin McCraty, director of research at the HeartMath Institute, has linked individual human energy to solar cycles. McCraty and his colleagues track solar activity using large magnetometers placed at strategic locations on the earth’s surface. Solar flares affect the electromagnetic fields of the planet. The researchers compare the ebbs and flows of solar energy with the heart coherence readings of trained volunteers. They have found that when people are in heart coherence, their electromagnetic patterns track those of the solar system. 8.15. The heart coherence rhythms of a volunteer compared to solar activity over the course of a month. A later study of 16 participants over 5 months found a similar effect. McCraty writes: “A growing body of evidence suggests that an energetic field is formed among individuals in groups through which communication among all the group members occurs simultaneously. In other words, there is an actual ‘group field’ that connects all the members” together. The results of this research confirm a hypothesis McCraty and I discussed at a conference when I was writing Mind to Matter: Not only are these heart-coherent people in sync with large-scale global cycles, they’re also in sync with each other. McCraty continues, “We’re all like little cells in the bigger Earth brain—sharing information at a subtle, unseen level that exists between all living systems, not just humans, but animals, trees, and so on.” When we use selective attention to tune ourselves to positive coherent energy, we participate in the group energy field of other human beings doing the same. We may also resonate in phase with coherent planetary and universal fields. 8.16. The brain functions as receiver of information from the field. The Brain’s Ability to Detect Fields The idea of invisible energy fields has always been difficult for many scientists to swallow. Around 1900, when Dutch physician Willem Einthoven proposed that the human heart had an energy field, he was ridiculed. He built progressively more sensitive galvanometers to detect it, and he was eventually successful.

The entirety of Facebook’s staff working on integrity and societal issues was now literally reporting to Marketing, and the effects weren’t subtle. Social scientists had to seek approval not just to conduct research that touched on politics, climate change, bias, health, or user well-being, but even to propose studying those subjects or summarizing their past work.

The organization presented here, however, works for many student research projects. Keep in mind that advisors, committee members, and potentially external reviewers will evaluate the final proposal on clarity, content, and whether specified guidelines are met. The following is the content and organization I recommend: 1.   A cover page, which contains the title, your name, committee member names, and the date 2.   An introduction to the problem describing the general scope of the project and why it is important 3.   A literature review synthesizing prior research and describing the theoretical framework of your research 4.   Specific objectives or research questions and hypotheses (when appropriate) your proposal addresses 5.   A detailed description of your research methods, including data collection and analytical approaches 6. Project significance and implications 7.   An annotated time line for the anticipated completion of the research 8. An alphabetized list of references 9. Appendix (optional)

Research Proposal Writing Our team of specialists at Ondezx is ready to craft a compelling research proposal highlighting the feasibility and significance of your study. Work with us to turn your research dreams into a reality. For more info: Mail: info@ondezx.com Mob No: +91 9791191199

Tiller’s research has led him to state the following about subtle energies: •​They are manifested by people, as revealed in experiments that show subtle energies can increase electron sizes and numbers. •​A person can direct the flow of this energy through intention. •​This mind-electron interaction is effective even over great distances. Subtle energies follow a different set of laws than do physical energies, and radiate their energy with unique characteristics. There is not just one type of subtle energy, however. Tiller postulates several subtle substances, each of which occupies a different time-space domain. These domains are different levels of reality. Subtle energy flows downward from the highest, which Tiller calls “the Divine.” Each level provides a template for the level below. As the subtle energy enters the next domain, it adapts—but also instructs. The laws differ on each of these levels because the energy gets denser. Tiller’s levels of subtle reality range from the most to the least dense: •​Physical •​Etheric (also called bioplasmic, prephysical, or energy body) •​Astral •​Three levels of the mind: ​Instinctive ​Intellectual ​Spiritual •​Spirit •​The Divine The etheric level is just above the physical level. According to Tiller, etheric subtle energy penetrates all levels of material existence, and through the polarity principle forms atoms and molecules that make matter. Our mind interacts with the etheric energy (and above) to create patterns in the physical dimension. These patterns act like a force field that links us to the adjacent energy level. Tiller’s explanation of the physical level versus the etheric is similar to that proposed by the experts featured in “The Structure of the Subtle Anatomy”. He suggests that the physical realm occupies a positive time-space frame that is mainly electrical, in which opposites attract; over time, potential decreases, and entropy (chaos) increases. The etheric realm, conversely, is a negative time-space domain that is highly magnetic: like attracts like. As time passes in this realm, potential increases and entropy decreases; therefore, more order is established. We might suggest that communication in the physical realm is accomplished through the five senses; to reach into the etheric level (and above), we must use our intuition—the sixth sense. Within Tiller’s model, the meridians and chakras operate like antennae that detect and send signals from the physical into the upper domains. These subtle structures interact between the physical body and the etheric (and other) realms, illuminating higher orders so that we can perceive them from the physical plane.

In any case, why adopt methodological naturalism? You might say that we have no choice in this matter, if we wish to do science, for invoking God as a cause of a natural phenomenon is a science-stopper and so would impede science. This fear strikes me as quite unjustified. The proponent of a theistic hypothesis, like the proponent of any scientific hypothesis, will seek to state conditions which would serve to falsify his hypothesis, and then he will propose experiments to test his hypothesis by trying to replicate such conditions. Thus, far from being a science stopper, a theistic hypothesis can serve to generate an ongoing research programme. There’s no reason at all to think that the attitude of the proponent of a theistic hypothesis must be, 'We can't explain this and we never will.' Quite the contrary, he may hold his hypothesis very tentatively and be prepared to give it up if the experimental evidence should falsify his hypothesis.

Hoping to escape those associations and underscore the spiritual dimensions of these drugs, some researchers have proposed they instead be called “entheogens”—from the Greek for “the divine within.

There is a perhaps understandable reluctance to come to grips scientifically with the problem of race differences in intelligence—to come to grips with it, that is to say, in the same way the scientists would approach the investigation of any other phenomenon. This reluctance is manifested in a variety of ‘symptoms’ found in most writings and discussions of the psychology of race differences. These symptoms include a tendency to remain on the remotest fringes of the subject, to sidestep central questions, and to blur the issues and tolerate a degree of vagueness in definitions, concepts and inferences that would be unseemly in any other realm of scientific discourse. Many writers express an unwarranted degree of skepticism about reasonably well-established quantitative methods and measurements. They deny or belittle facts already generally accepted—accepted, that is, when brought to bear on inferences outside the realm of race differences—and they demand practically impossible criteria of certainty before even seriously proposing or investigating genetic hypotheses, as contrasted with with extremely uncritical attitudes towards purely environmental hypotheses. There is often a failure to distinguish clearly between scientifically answerable aspects of the question and the moral, political and social policy issues; there is tendency to beat dead horses and set up straw men on what is represented, or misrepresented I should say, as the genetic side of the argument. We see appeals to the notion that the topic is either too unimportant to be worthy of scientific curiosity, or is too complex, or too difficult, or that it will be forever impossible for any kind of research to be feasible, or that answers to key questions are fundamentally ‘unknowable’ in any scientifically accepted sense. Finally, we often see complete denial of intelligence and race as realities, or as quantifiable attributes, or as variables capable of being related to one another. In short, there is an altogether ostrich-like dismissal of the subject.

In Robert Noyce’s office there hung a black-and-white photo that showed a jovial crew of young scientists offering a champagne toast to the smiling William Shockley. The picture was taken on November 1, 1956, a few hours after the news of Shockley’s Nobel Prize had reached Palo Alto. By the time that happy picture was taken, however, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories was a chaotic and thoroughly unhappy place. For all his technical expertise, Shockley had proven to be an inexpert manager. He was continually shifting his researchers from one job to another; he couldn’t seem to make up his mind what, if anything, the company was trying to produce. “There was a group that worked for Shockley that was pretty unhappy,” Noyce recalled many years later. “And that group went to Beckman and said, hey, this isn’t working. . . . About that time, Shockley got his Nobel Prize. And Beckman was sort of between the devil and the deep blue sea. He couldn’t fire Shockley, who had just gotten this great international honor, but he had to change the management or else everyone else would leave.” In the end, Beckman stuck with Shockley—and paid a huge price. Confused and frustrated, eight of the young scientists, including Noyce, Moore, and Hoerni, decided to look for another place to work. That first group—Shockley called them “the traitorous eight”—turned out to be pioneers, for they established a pattern that has been followed time and again in Silicon Valley ever since. They decided to offer themselves as a team to whichever employer made the best offer. Word of this unusual proposal reached an investment banker in New York, who offered a counterproposal: Instead of working for somebody else, the eight scientists should start their own firm. The banker knew of an investor who would provide the backing—the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, which had been looking hard for an entrée to the transistor business. A deal was struck. Each of the eight young scientists put up $500 in earnest money, the corporate angel put up all the rest, and early in 1957 the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation opened for business, a mile or so down the road from Shockley’s operation.

Studies have proposed that children implicitly support belief in an afterlife, as it is impossible for the human brain to comprehend non-existence. There is tantalizing research on humans being “implicit” or “intuitive” theists—that is, primates programmed to interpret design in disorder, patterns in nothingness, order in ambiguity. We are set to attribute intention to natural objects. Humans are “promiscuous” teleologists, interpreting natural phenomena as being there for us. The world revolves around Homo sapiens, and any perceived design is surely the consequence of supernatural forces choosing to single out humanity.

The multiverse idea is so common now in the world of physics that physicists have proposed not just one but many types of multiverses. The one that was most interesting to me, given my previous research into simulation theory, was the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, also known as the parallel universe theory, or the quantum multiverse for short. It is a well-respected explanation for the mystifying phenomenon of quantum indeterminacy by many physicists. In this interpretation, the universe is spinning off new branches every time a quantum measurement is made, resulting in an almost infinite number of parallel universes with some level of shared history.

[Grantly] Dick-Read proposed a theory in his 1942 book Childbirth Without Fear to explain what causes the pain that we're not supposed to feel: the fear-tension-pain cycle. The three evils, as he calls them, are antithetical to the body's design but have been "introduced in the course of civilization by the ignorance of those concerned with preparations for an attendance at childbirth." He concludes that "the more civilized the people, the more pain of labour appears to be intensified." The book can feel pejorative and coddling. Dick-Read believes that women's purpose is to give birth. I found this Madonna complex hard to stomach. But women weren't really Dick-Read's audience. He was speaking to his obstetric colleagues. Other men. He wanted them to stop drugging, cutting, and manipulating the birthing body when it was awesomely capably of ushering out a baby without those painful interventions. He anticipated contemporary research finding that such abuses threaten women and their bodies. He was so focused on reaching medical doctors that he even dedicated the book to Joseph DeLee, father of the "drug them and cut the baby out" school of obstetrics. It was a challenge and a plea: women can give birth and, in the right conditions, avoid pain.

I remember when a PMM colleague had completed copious amounts of research and decided upon a new product positioning that she was going to present to our management team the next week. A few days before the meeting, she and I were engaged in a conversation with a salesperson who articulated his own version of the positioning in a much more effective way than what she had prepared. I watched her ego struggle with adopting that last minute change even though it had the potential to vastly improve her presentation. I was proud to see her accept the suggestions and her final proposal was indeed enthusiastically received by the management team. Keeping your ego in check is easier if you constantly remind yourself that as a PMM, it is your job to discover, compile, and propose new positioning and messaging, regardless of its source.

Research Proposal Writing Our team of specialists at Ondezx is ready to craft a compelling research proposal highlighting the feasibility and significance of your study. Work with us to turn your research dreams into a reality. For more info: Mail: info@ondezx.com Mob No: +91 9791191199

And by doing so they launched a soft drinks brand that would indeed go on to be a worthy rival to Coca-Cola: that drink was Red Bull. When I say that Red Bull ‘tastes kind of disgusting’, this is not a subjective opinion.* No, that was the opinion of a wide cross-section of the public. Before Red Bull launched outside of Thailand, where it had originated, it’s widely rumoured that the licensee approached a research agency to see what the international consumer reaction would be to the drink’s taste; the agency, a specialist in researching the flavouring of carbonated drinks, had never seen a worse reaction to any proposed new product.

Other research shows that women who have suffered abuse were 60 percent more likely to have a child with autism. The researchers propose that the long-lasting effects of abuse on women’s biological systems, such as the immune system and stress-response system, are responsible for increasing their likelihood of having a child with autism.20 These women were victims of toxic thinking and the stress it causes—and the abuse will therefore impact the next generation as well, and potentially the next three. This is why there are often family histories of autism. I tell you this study to highlight the responsibility we have in not only getting our own minds right but also helping others, especially victims of trauma, get their minds right.

the theory that sugar can induce hyperactivity or any other kind of high isn’t supported by the research. The notion that sugar intake could lead to what was then called “the neurotic child” was first proposed in the medical literature in 1922, and later gained popularity during the 1970s, when researchers were first studying attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But these early studies failed to control for many other factors that we know now can play a role in a child’s ADHD management, including their sleep schedule, parents’ stress levels, and genetics.

RAND proved formative. Some of its employees joked that it stood for “Research And No Development,” and its intellectualism was inspiring to the young economist. The think tank’s ethos was to work on problems so hard that they might actually be unsolvable.9 Four days of the week were dedicated to RAND projects, but the fifth was free for freewheeling personal research. Ken Arrow, a famous economist, and John Nash, the game theorist immortalized in the film A Beautiful Mind, both consulted for RAND around the time Sharpe was there. The eclecticism of RAND’s research community is reflected in his first published works, which were a proposal for a smog tax and a review of aircraft compartment design criteria for Army deployments.

Many have been supposedly foolproof but zany formulae that have made no one rich but the hucksters who sold them to the gullible. But over the years there have been some approaches that have enjoyed at least a modicum of success. These range from the Dow Theory first espoused by Wall Street Journal founder Charles Dow—essentially using technical indicators to try to identify and profit from different market phases—and David Butler’s CANSLIM system, to the value investing school articulated by Benjamin Graham. The earth-shattering suggestion of the research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s was that the code might actually be unbreakable, and efforts to decipher it were expensive and futile. Harry Markowitz’s modern portfolio theory and William Sharpe’s CAPM indicated that the market itself was the optimal balance between risks and return, while Gene Fama presented a cohesive, compelling argument for why that was: The net effect of the efforts of thousands upon thousands of investors continually trying to outsmart each other was that the stock market was efficient, and in practice hard to beat. Most investors should therefore just sit on their hands and buy the entire market. But in the 1980s and 1990s, a new round of groundbreaking research—some of it from the same efficient-markets disciples who had rattled the investing world in the 1960s and 1970s—started revealing some fault lines in the academic edifice built up in the previous decades. Perhaps the stock market wasn’t entirely efficient, and maybe there were indeed ways to beat it in the long run? Some gremlins in the system were always known, but often glossed over. Already in the early 1970s, Black and Scholes had noted that there were some odd issues with the theory, such as how less volatile stocks actually produced better long-term returns than choppier ones. That contradicted the belief that return and risk (using volatility as a proxy for risk) were correlated. In other words, loopier roller coasters produce greater thrills. Though the theory made intuitive sense, in practice it didn’t seem to hold up to rigorous scrutiny. This is why Scholes and Black initially proposed that Wells Fargo should set up a fund that would buy lower-volatility stocks (that is, low-beta) and use leverage to bring the portfolio’s overall volatility up to the broader stock market.7 Hey, presto, a roller coaster with the same number of loops as everyone else, but with even greater thrills. Nonetheless, the efficient-markets hypothesis quickly became dogma at business schools around the United States.

So here we are today, where we have toxicologists and experts in food safety who disagree with the AHA’s position on the safety of polyunsaturated fats, and, because the AHA’s vast influence gives it control over nutrition thought, these professionals have trouble getting necessary work funded. Meanwhile, the AHA continues to actively promote seed oils, and it continues to support those, like Dr. Walter Willett, who dismiss or discredit experts like Dr. Chris Ramsden who are producing evidence to the contrary. In other words, the AHA is effectively blocking progress in medical science, and, perhaps most egregiously, it is promoting a diet that’s actively harming our cardiovascular health. In the beginning, however, the association’s culture was very different. When the AHA was founded in 1924, it was supported only with annual dues from a small collection of doctors concerned about the growing problem of heart disease. Heart attacks skyrocketed after World War I, and the organization felt the pressure of knowing there was so much to learn but such little funding to do the necessary research. In 1942, AHA executive director H. M. “Jack” Marvin, a New Haven, Connecticut, cardiologist, made an ambitious proposal to solve the AHA’s “chronic fiscal problems.” Lack of funds stood in the way of two of the organization’s highest-priority goals: sponsoring research and establishing public health and lay education programs. Without fundraising, the organization would be limited to utilizing the small pool of government funds to achieve its goals. And that pool had just grown a little too crowded for the AHA’s tastes.

Adding variability increased the frequency of the pigeons completing the intended action. Skinner’s pigeons tell us a great deal about what helps drive our own behaviors. More recent experiments reveal that variability increases activity in the nucleus accumbens and spikes levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, driving our hungry search for rewards.[lxxiv] Researchers observed increased dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens in experiments involving monetary rewards as well as in a study of heterosexual men viewing images of attractive women’s faces.[lxxv] Variable rewards can be found in all sorts of products and experiences that hold our attention. They fuel our drive to check email, browse the web, or bargain-shop. I propose that variable rewards come in three types: Tribe, hunt and self (figure 20). Habit-forming products utilize one or more of these variable reward types.

That was around 2002, and I was then a doctoral researcher at MIT. I proposed to Habitat for Humanity an idea for a home that would be 100 percent made of living matter (shaped trees and woody plants), entitled Fab Tree Hab.  

The watershed came from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, the brainchild of Bill Borucki, another longtime denizen of Ames Research Center. Bill had been advocating for this planet-hunting mission for decades, seemingly forever. I remember him doggedly pushing the concept when I was a postdoc at Ames, twenty years before Kepler became a reality. His concept was to launch a small telescope into orbit just to obsessively stare at one little area of sky. He proposed that if we could precisely monitor the brightness of a large number of stars in one random area of the galaxy, watching for any flickering, we could tell if planets ever passed in front of any of them. A

Second Week Of June 2012 I agreed to be Dr. Arius’ case study. In my reply to the psychiatrist, I wrote: Good Day Dr. A. I’m surprised and flattered that you consider me an appropriate candidate to conduct a case study on my unique E.R.O.S., Bahriji, elite Arab Household, and secondary school experiences. As much as I am delighted to agree to your proposed challenge and to answer your questionnaires to the best of my abilities, I also have questions for you for which I would like answers before being an active participant in the survey. * Are you planning to publish professional psychiatric papers and publications to your findings? Or are you working on this project solely for your personal interest? * If your research reveals a positive alternative to the current accepted educational norm, are you planning to actively advocate for change? As you are aware, I can only provide you with my personal opinion on my educational experiences. I cannot speak for other  E.R.O.S. members. Before I agree to undergo this case study, I wish to make it very clear that I only speak for myself. Under no circumstances will I undermine to reveal the actual names of people and places, or jeopardize their society and individual standing in any way. I am obligated to honor my oath of confidentiality and pledge never to reveal the true identity of the clandestine society. As long as you are aware of my pledge, I am happy to answer your questions to the best of my ability. Although I have not known you for very long, I consider you a trusted friend. My intuition tells me you are a man of integrity. I have always trusted my inner voice and it has never failed me. I look forward to your next correspondence and your answers to my questions. I hope all is going splendidly in your part of the world. Keep me posted on the progress of your gay organization. It is good to receive your emails as always. Yours truly, Young.

Without free speech one cannot claim other liberties, or defend them when they are attacked. Without free speech one cannot have a democratic process, which requires the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms. Without free speech one cannot have a due process at law, in which one can defend oneself, accuse, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one. Without free speech there cannot be genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehood, questioning of governments, proposal and examination of opinion. Without free speech there cannot be a free press, which...is necessary...as one of the two essential estates of a free society (the other being an independent judiciary).

In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.

Someone in authority had dismissed, undermined, or distorted their research plan because it failed to honor one or all elements of the blessed trinity. Their proposed research, said the authority, was not theory driven, hypothesis testing, or generalization producing.