Art vs. science? The battle that never was | NASA's Michelle Thaller

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Fernando, I think you’re doing something that has been a real passion part of my life and that is that you’re combining science and art. And I think it was a mistake in our culture to ever separate the two. There’s a lot of mythology around that. People often talk about, for example, “right brain” versus “left brain” and a lot of people don’t realize that there’s really no scientific evidence of that at all; it’s more of an analogy than anything else. There isn’t one part of your brain that’s logical and scientific and another that creative and artistic. And I find that there’s as much reality and profound exploration of the universe that can be done through art as is done through science. I think they are different ways of humans exploring and pushing the boundaries of what we know and what we can do. And one of the things that I’ve been very proud in my life is collaborating with artists trying to actually add science into their art. And at NASA we actually have many, many artists that work for us. Some of them do things that are fairly routine in the sense that we have lots of data coming in from the Hubble Space Telescope and the artists may help us get the images looking beautiful, help us frame them right. We may have data coming in from earth science satellites just in the form of numbers, and artists help us make that into beautiful maps and simulations that help us understand the atmosphere. But it might surprise you to know that we actually have conceptual artists at NASA too. Artist that aren’t tasked with dealing with imagery or data, but they’re asked simply to interpret discoveries through their art. And one of the most amazing people at NASA is a man named Dan Goods of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and you can find him on the Internet and he’s done TED Talks on this as well. And Dan simply is a conceptual artist trying to make people understand viscerally how profound some of the discoveries we make are. He’s done art installations about planets around other stars. There’s one that gets me every time, it’s very simple: you walk into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and there’s a floor to ceiling series of just clear plastic columns and they have little LED lights inside them. And Dan has linked this—in real time—to when we are uploading instructions to our spacecraft in space and when we are downloading the data, and you actually see that as lights, little lights in the LEDs in the columns moving up towards space in a beautiful pattern. And then when we’re downloading data say from a spacecraft around Jupiter, when we’re receiving it you see the lights coming down as new information comes down from space. And as you walk around during your day at JPL you see the pulse of discovery right in front of you, and it’s real, it’s actually linked to the commands coming to and from the spacecraft. So it makes you pause and think about what you’re doing, and this is to me the real core of art to make you stop, question the reality around you, think about what’s really going on and how you can view it differently. So, many organizations take this very seriously: there are workshops, there are conferences on the intersection of arts and science, there’s even a new acronym. You may have heard of the acronym STEM in education, which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And a lot of people across the discipline across the world are trying to change that to STEAM, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. They’re not separate. They should be presented as a whole. People learn science differently. People’s minds work differently. Art can help people learn science. So there is really this wonderful synergy that can exist between art and science. So there isn’t a single institution I can point you to in terms of these people specialize in that, but know that there really is a very serious inclusion of art in the science that’s going on right now and that needs to continue, I think even for the survival of science. We have to make something relevant to our culture and relevant to people, and art is going to help us do that.

Vaccine revolution: Curing Alzheimer's from the inside | Lou Reese

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Humanity has always been propelled by dramatic innovation. In the 20s and 30s we knew that we would run out of food by the 70s. We invented a nitrogen phosphorus potassium based fertilizer and that created the green revolution that now can feed everybody on the planet. These are always solutions that create, like that are driven by an unbelievable ecosystem, an unbelievable need and the unending and unyielding spirit of innovation that defines humanity. So those things combined are what make it so exciting. So if we look at the cost of Alzheimer’s, if we look at the cost of – and this isn’t all neurological disorders, this is just Alzheimer’s—if we look at those costs direct and indirect we’re spending as much taking care of people with Alzheimer’s every year as an Iraq war. So the magnitude of these numbers is astronomical. So like these numbers are devastating and we could all be pretty morose about it. The reality is that I’ve never felt more optimistic to be alive. I’ve never felt better about the environment that we’re in in terms of solving problems, being able to identify them, being able to direct resources to them. This year for the first time since the Spanish flu we’ll have three years in a row of decreasing longevity in the United States. We will live less long three years in a row. Less long than ever and everybody else believes that we’re living longer and longer and longer. It’s driven primarily by two things, and primarily Alzheimer’s is the number one driver in this. And the secondary driver unfortunately is drug overdoses and suicides. It’s related to the opioid epidemic. We’re actually developing products for both of those primary problems, for both of those decreasers in longevity. So we’re working on a suite of non-opioid pain alternatives but our lead compound is a vaccine for Alzheimer’s. And what that does is it means that we can really turn on the body’s immune system and enable it to fight toxic proteins that it’s generating itself. And what’s special about that to me is that the largest gains, back to this longevity idea, the largest gains in human longevity ever are debatably attributed to vaccine technology. Now some people you can also argue, sanitation was very important. The antibiotic revolution was very important. But vaccine technology is—currently over 6.2 billion people in the world have been vaccinated right now. These are the most widely distributed medications and solutions that have ever been brought to mankind. And the consequence was that we really dramatically improved our quality of life and our longevity. We gave people better, healthier, long lives. And now the big problem with vaccines is that you could never use them against non-external targets. So they worked great with viruses whether it was Ebola or Zika, polio, smallpox. We actually can solve those problems pretty fast for the external targets. But now what’s killing us more than everything external are actually for the first time this year the bar crossed and internal things are killing us more. So the agents of chronic illness. So it’s no longer fighting bacteria and viruses and these other external causes of death or causes of suffering or causes of disease. Instead it’s internal ones. It’s things that are causing atherosclerosis and heart disease and stroke. Things that are causing cancers. Things that are causing diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s. All of these different chronic illnesses. Now why don’t we vaccinate against chronic illness? Well the idea is that you’d be fundamentally targeting something that’s in your own body, right? Like you’d be targeting something your body was making. And so what does that sound like? It sounds like an autoimmune disease. It sounds like if you made your body do that it could trigger an autoimmune disease. And it turns out that that’s one of the big challenges in making vaccines against things your body generates. And they call that the self-barrier, or breaking self-tolerance, or all of these like different things that describe this phenomena.

How correcting for cognitive biases makes life more fair | Michael Li

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Michael Li: A sort of interesting fact is that, while today programming is viewed as an extremely male dominated field, it was totally the opposite at the dawn of computing. So if you look at who the original programmers were, they were actually women! All programmers from the very beginning were women and it was because this job was seen as being “beneath” men. And so somehow in the interceding 30, 40, 50 years, that gender of dynamics has completely shifted around. But what we’re seeing now is that sometimes it’s the implicit biases that we have which are holding back women and minorities from entering the workforce, either as data scientists or as computer engineers and software engineers. And we’ve seen a lot of research in this area that’s shown that there can be some implicit biases in how we judge people once we know their name, their gender or their race. And what we do when we assess the people who are going to be working for us is we are completely blind to these things. We actually strip away the name when we consider people’s applications. We just look at how they perform on a series of challenges that we give them that really try to test their ability to be data scientists and test their understanding of these kind of core fundamental mathematical programming concepts. And when we do that I think it actually becomes a much more fair process and it actually can help increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities who sort of make it through the screening process. Just to give you one sort of quick anecdote about this there’s a famous story about music auditions in the 1970s where orchestras had a very, very tiny percentage of their members or their players there – the people who were playing in the orchestra as women. And what happened is at some point they decided to try to break free from this and they would put down a curtain between the performer, that is the auditioner, and the judging panel that was trying to determine whether she or he should be allowed to play in the orchestra. And when they did the results were night and day. There’s a famous study that’s up on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website published by two famous researchers from Harvard talking about this. It’s called “orchestrating diversity” and it talks about how the results were a night and day difference: the fraction for women who made it past the screening round shot up something like sevenfold between not having the curtain down and having the curtain down. And it just goes to sort of show that at this time there was an implicit bias that women weren’t really the kind of caliber of musician that you needed to be able to perform at Carnegie Hall, right? At these kind of top level symphonic performance. And when you put down a curtain and you just listened to them as opposed to being able to see whether they were a man or a woman, you then—without that kind of knowledge you suddenly were forced to make judgments just based on the music, just based on their ability and you saw that you were much more willing to let in women than before.

CHALLENGE YOURSELF TODAY | Stefan James Motivation

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How the mind makes new ideas: Bending, breaking, blending | David Eagleman

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Elon Musk is fulfilling Thomas Edison's energy dreams | Michio Kaku

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Kirdar (Character) Wala, Meri Nazar Mein Koun ? | Qasim Ali Shah

In this video, Qasim Ali Shah talking about on the topic "Kirdar Wala". He is also sharing his experience, wisdom and knowledge that will be helpful for all of those who want to know more about character. ===== ABOUT Qasim Ali Shah ===== Qasim Ali Shah is a Public Speaker- Teacher- Writer- Corporate Trainer & Leader for every age group- Businessmen- Corporate executives- Employees- Students- Housewives- Networkers- Sportsmen and for all who wish everlasting Success- Happiness- Peace and Personal Growth. He helps people to change their belief & thought pattern- experience less stress and more success in their lives through better communication- positive thinking and spiritual knowledge. ===== FOLLOW ME ON THE SOCIALS ===== - Qasim Ali Shah: https://goo.gl/6BKcxu - Google+: https://goo.gl/uPyGvT - Twitter: https://goo.gl/78MVoA - Website : https://goo.gl/Tgjy6u ===== Team Member: Waqas Nasir =====