• About

opinions 101

~ the points that you have missed …

opinions 101

Monthly Archives: July 2014

Nation’s Top Colleges are Turning Our Kids into Zombies

31 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Education, Politics, Social

≈ Leave a comment

William Deresiewicz, … whose résumé includes two degrees from Columbia University and ten years of teaching at Yale, published an essay last week in The New Republic called “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” Subtitle: “The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.” Read more: http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/07/new-privilege-loudly-denouncing-privilege.html

“Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: They have mastered them all, and with a serene self-assurance that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. Read more: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

See also:
~ An Incubator for An American Ruling Elite
~ Universities Ranked By Billionaire Alumni
~ Harvard Billionaire Machine

Is the Recession Over?

30 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Markets, Politics, US Economy

≈ Leave a comment

dropping_out_of_labor_vs_find_job

civil_employm_ratio_84-14

car_house_to_GDP

miles_per_year_US_total

USelectricity_sales2000-14_

See also: U.S. Jobs Market: What’s Going On …

Poll: Wide Partisan Gap in Israel-Palestinian Sympathies

28 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Politics, Wars

≈ Leave a comment

… sympathies of the American public continue to lie with Israel rather than the Palestinians. And dating back to the late 1970s, the partisan gap in Mideast sympathies has never been wider.

Parties_Gap_Isr_Pal_growing_Pew

Pew_Age_Gender_educ_Isr_Pales
~Pew Research Center, July 15, 2014

Dems_for_Palest_GOP_support_Israel

Isr_Pal_close_look_or_not
~Gallup News

Leftist Billionaire Syndrome

27 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by silvalnews in Politics, Social

≈ Leave a comment

Why are names like Soros, Gates and Rockefeller associated with ultraliberal causes? … What makes so many smart billionaires gravitate to primitive liberal positions one would normally associate with…?
Read More: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0415/123.html

    Memo: From Nick Hanauer. To: My Fellow Zillionaires
    … like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries … Then I founded … And what do I see in our future now? … Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand…
    Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html

See also: Taking a look inside the secret leftist billionaires club By Tori Richards

How American Rank Religious Groups

26 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Politics, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

religious groups

BsrlI02IgAErj-V

There was a wider gap in ratings for Republican than for Democrat:

BN-DS392_DEMREL_G_20140716122720

BN-DS397_REPREL_G_20140716123058

Religious_groups_about_each_other

CNN Poll: Majority of Americans side with Israel in Gaza fighting

24 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Politics, Wars

≈ Leave a comment

Washington (CNN) – A majority of Americans say Israel’s military actions in Gaza are justified, with only four in 10 saying that Israel has used too much force, according to a new national poll:
~CNN Political Unit

CNN_POll_Isr_Gaz_071814_2

CNN_POll_Isr_Gaz_071814_4

CNN_POll_Isr_Gaz_071814

Read more: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/images/07/21/rel7b.pdf

From Global Smoking to Global Warming: Strong Alliance of Hollywood & Science

17 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Medical Trends, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

In the Beginning it was a Consensus Statement of the Medical Doctors of America:

12 health lies cigarette ads 5MD_with_Microscop_cigarett

Tobacco-consumption-historical

camels_fresh_blue2camels_doctors_whiteshirt

… and Hollywood Stars were completely agree with them:

hollywood_smoke

pare_smoking

See also: Hollywood cut secret deals to promote smoking .  Report: Tobacco companies paid Hollywood stars to promote smoking

____

Now there is the same “scientific consensus” on climate change

The “consensus” was built around the mystical graph that was called a  “global warming hockey stick“:

global_warming_hockey_stick

It does not matter that independent scientists “have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick“, because the Hollywood produced an impressive movie about this theory. It was called “An Inconvenient Truth” and promoted the “stick” as a truthful theory:

images

global-warming_medvedi_on_ice

Former vice president Al Gore, as a screenplay of this movie, nabbed an Academy Award for best (see above) documentary. Although the Oscar actually went to director Davis Guggenheim, Gore gave an acceptance speech:
Gore_Gets_Oscar_07

Secretary of State John Kerry declared, that according to his estimations “at Least 98, 99% of All Scientists in Our Country’ Believe in Climate Change“, and President of the United State concluded: “The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact“.

Student Loan Debt: Scale of Problem and its Main Sources

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Education, Justice, Politics, Science, Social, Tech

≈ Leave a comment

Members of Occupy Wall Street stage a pr

Economic Scale of the U.S. Student Loan Debt Problem
types of debt

Sources of Student Loan Debt:

costvstuitionv2

cost_of_education_1960-2015

text-book_prices_1970-2014

Social_sciences_main_source

Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. By Catherine Hill, Ph.D. Christianne Corbett Andresse St. Rose, Ed.D. “Just not interested”. Many girls and women report that they are not interested in science and engineering. In a 2009 poll of young people ages 8–17 by the American Society for Quality, 24 percent of boys but only 5 percent of girls said they were interested in an engineering career. Another recent poll found that 74 percent of college-bound boys ages 13–17 said that computer science or computing would be a good college major for them compared with 32 percent of their female peers (WGBH Education Foundation & Association for Computing Machinery, 2009). From early adolescence, girls express less interest in math or science careers than boys do (Lapan et al., 2000; Turner et al., 2008). Even girls and women who excel in mathematics often do not pursue STEM fields. In studies of high mathematics achievers, for example, women are more likely to secure degrees in the humanities, life sciences, and social sciences than in math, computer science, engineering, or the physical sciences; the reverse is true for men (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006)… Among first-year college students, women are much less likely than men to say that they intend to major in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM). By graduation, men outnumber women in nearly every science and engineering field, and in some, such as physics, engineering, and computer science, the difference is dramatic, with women earning only 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Women’s representation in science and engineering declines further.

File Apr 06, 1 19 54 AM

Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015 Population Characteristics By Camille L. Ryan and Kurt Bauman Current Population Reports. P20-578 March 2016:

File Apr 06, 1 18 31 AM

See also: College Majors Ranked by Lifetime Earnings

Scientists Discovered the Social Reasons to Build Pyramids of Egypt …

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Politics, Religion, Social

≈ Leave a comment

… and some of them now propose the same approach to resolve the future global problems. For instance, Lawrence Summers, Former Treasury Secretary says that the future global scale problem will not be producing enough. It will be providing enough work because a generation from now a quarter of middle-aged men will be out of work at any given moment.

It had taken centuries for many thousands of people to build Egypt’s pyramids. What was the social objective of constructing Egyptian pyramids? The main goal was to keep social stability and comprehensive employment with a high spiritual objective that would more than compensate for the absence of any direct obvious materialistic kind of objectives; in other words, inspired labor as an objective unto itself.

There seems to be a basic principle that works on all social and perhaps biological levels: if you cannot put earlier created processes and resources to rational use, then you conserve the system at least in a neutral “engaged condition”.

In each such case taken separately the question is the cost of such conservation, or the amount of social energy. We are talking about the cost that a society is prepared to pay for such stabilization, for tying up this social energy in a “reserve” with an eye towards using it more intelligently in the future.
____
PS. We can’t know exactly what Former Treasury Secretary had in mind when warning of the above-quoted future global problem, but it seems that the scientists have finally discovered the social reasons to build pyramids of Egypt and are now gaining a better understanding of the main global problem in the nearest future.

Mauboussin Law: “Greater Skill Doesn’t Decrease the Dependence on Luck, It Increases It.”

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Politics, Science, Social, Tech

≈ Leave a comment

~The Paradox of Skill. By Michael J. Mauboussin
____

U.S. Religious Groups’ Political Preferences

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Politics, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

religions_politics_preferences

gallup_religios_obama

What is the Basic Difference Between Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter?

12 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Social, Tech

≈ Leave a comment

  • Typical social networks have been built around ideas like who you already know (Facebook) and where you’ve worked (LinkedIn).

  • We’ve made Twitter into a tool that allows us to connect with and interact with people based on the kinds of stuff we share.

    ~A new kind of network, by David Aron Levine

David Aron Levine further wrote: “However, it wasn’t built around this concept exactly. It was really built around the idea of making it easy to share quick updates with people we know. (Remember: the concept of a “re-tweet”, an @ reply, and “hashtags” came from the community). The fact that we’ve collectively hacked it for the purpose of sharing and connecting with a new group of people might say more about our demands than it does about the service itself.”

Yes, there was a demand, but the main question still exists: how did it happen? The answer is … characters’ limitation.

We can’t express ourselves by more than 140 per twit. As Charles IX wrote in this context about half thousand years ago, “horses and poets should be fed not fattened“.

In other words, the Twitter’s basic feature – that David Aron Levine is discussing – appeared as one of the side effects of the above meant technical limitation.

15 Most Powerful Militaries in the World

12 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Politics, Wars

≈ Leave a comment

global_fire_power_sm2
Sources: Global Firepower, Center for Arms, Control and Non-Proliferation. By Amanda Macias, Jeremy Bender and Skye Gould. “Business Insider“.

Fostering Creativity: Hard and Soft Thinking

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by silvalnews in Other

≈ Leave a comment

‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ thinking are terms often associated with creativity and they reflect the neurological processes associated with different hemispheres of the brain. Research suggests that the right side of the brain is visual and processes information in an intuitive and simultaneous way, looking first at the whole picture then the details (soft thinking). The other hemisphere – the left brain – is verbal and processes information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole (hard thinking) …The distinction between hard and soft thinking can be illustrated in the following way. 

Hard thinking Soft thinking

certain

close down

one right answer

exact

fast

looking

black and white

analysis

logic

differences and categories

rational

precise

serious

familiar

doubtful

open up

many right answers

approximate

slow

waiting

many shades of grey

hunches

intuition

similarities and connections

dreamlike

diffuse

playful

new

Roger Von Oech (1990) believes that creative thinking must be recognised as a process that involves both hard and soft thinking and that it is important to know when each is appropriate. He argues that every person has a ‘judge’ and an ‘artist’ within, and both are required in order to be creative. Even those who are very inventive, and thrive on spontaneity and uncertainty, also need to seek order and be analytical if they are to be successful.  It is now believed that the most powerful creative thinking occurs when the left and right hemispheres of the brain combine to apply both generative and evaluative processes.  Read more: http://www.journeytoexcellence.org.uk/resourcesandcpd/research/summaries/rsfosteringcreativity.asp

“Data & analysis don’t matter — we KNOW the truth”

06 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Other

≈ Leave a comment

Gullivers_travels

      Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS. CHAPTER V: The Author permitted to see the Grand Academy of Lagado.
By Jonathan Swift, 1726.
lineleft

      Step 1: Decide on ideological argument and proposed policy remedies;
      Step 2: Manipulate data as needed to justify;
      Step 3: Publish book…
      Step 4: Ideological allies receive book rapturously, say it cannot be challenged due to quantitative rigor of underlying data analysis…
      Step 5: Data analysis carved up by outside analysts;
      Step 6: Response from allies = “Data & analysis don’t matter — we KNOW the truth.”

– The overwhelming initial reception of the book was, “See? Rigorous proof of what we have always believed and said!”
By Marc Andreessen, 2014.

Mark_Andrees_how_to create the next science movement

      gullivers_travels_2

The first professor … said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations. But the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted thought never sprang in any other man’s head. JONATHAN SWIFT, 1726

      After all, the “logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge” ~Stendhal

Reasons Behind the Last 20 years Decline of Violent Crime

04 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by bunchofopinions in Justice, Politics, Social

≈ Leave a comment

US_murder_rate_1993-2012

Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993.

Pew_Firearms_Violence

~Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware … Pew Research Center, May 7, 2013
_______

U.S. firearm homicides peaked in 1993 at 7.0 deaths per 100,000 people. But by 2010, the rate was 49% lower [3.6], and [generally speaking] firearm-related violence — assaults, robberies, sex crimes — was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993, the study found. Those drops parallel an overall decline in violent non-fatal crime, with or without a gun, the study said. In fact, gun-related homicide rates in the late 2000s were “equal to those not seen since the early 1960s,” the study found.

~ Study: Gun homicides, violence down sharply in past 20 years. By CNN Staff, May 9, 2013

What is Behind the Violent Crime Decline?

prison_population_US

At the Root of these efforts are states’ legislators:

1993_Right_to_Carry

2011_Right_to_Carry

See also the above trend in some more details (1986-2013):

permit_history 1986-2013

Meanwhile, the media does a great job to hide this inconvenient truth:

Americans_Unaware_of_drop

Source: Pew Research Center, May 7, 2013

Long story short:

firearm-JPG_background-chec

Recent Posts

  • Medical Imaging Radiation as a Factor of Epidemic of Cancer
  • Half Century Trend of Declining Lethality of the Heart Disease, Stroke and Cancer
  • Impact of Vaccines on the Morbidity Rate
  • World Meat Consumption: Pork, Fish, Beef, Poultry
  • Food as a Percent of Household Expenditures

Recent Comments

collectivistduck on 200 Years of Deadly Spiral…
mikeyb3000 on As The War Drums Are Getting L…

Archives

  • August 2015
  • April 2015
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014

Categories

  • Economics (8)
    • US Economy (4)
  • Education (5)
  • Justice (3)
  • Markets (22)
  • Other (14)
  • Politics (54)
  • Religion (11)
  • Science (23)
    • Medical Trends (6)
  • Social (28)
  • Tech (26)
  • Wars (21)

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • Medical Imaging Radiation as a Factor of Epidemic of Cancer
  • Half Century Trend of Declining Lethality of the Heart Disease, Stroke and Cancer
  • Impact of Vaccines on the Morbidity Rate
  • World Meat Consumption: Pork, Fish, Beef, Poultry
  • Food as a Percent of Household Expenditures

Recent Comments

collectivistduck on 200 Years of Deadly Spiral…
mikeyb3000 on As The War Drums Are Getting L…

Archives

  • August 2015
  • April 2015
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014

Categories

  • Economics (8)
    • US Economy (4)
  • Education (5)
  • Justice (3)
  • Markets (22)
  • Other (14)
  • Politics (54)
  • Religion (11)
  • Science (23)
    • Medical Trends (6)
  • Social (28)
  • Tech (26)
  • Wars (21)

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • opinions 101
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • opinions 101
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...