2019

While we of UD have but little interest as a blog in 2020 US election campaign tactics etc and endorse no candidate, the research by Dr. Robert Epstein on How Big Tech’s Algorithms Can Impact Opinions and Votes speaks far more broadly. We have cause to be concerned (and no, it’s not just Wikipedia’s notorious biases): Let’s clip from the YT blurb, to help focus discussion: Just what are some of the methods that tech giants like Google and Facebook can [–> and per the discussion, sometimes DO] use to shift their users’ attitudes, beliefs [–> think, worldviews and policy/cultural agendas], and even votes? How do search engine rankings impact undecided voters? [–> strongly] How powerful of an impact can Read More ›

It seems, this issue is on the table here at UD again, and it needs to be publicly corrected for record. As a first step, I link a discussion in response to the oppression thesis used to try to discredit and marginalise the historical contribution of the Christian faith (and to create the false impression that due to “obvious” ethical failure, the gospel can be dismissed). It is also worthwhile to link my recently updated discussion on moral government, objectivity of ethics and law. (While we are at it, here is a summary response on the rhetorical challenge of evil.) Let me also again put up an infographic that has been featured several times here at UD in response to Read More ›

The entire history of Kettlewell’s Peppered Moth experiment is littered with problems: doctored photographs, wrong assumptions and slim evidence, followed by genetic analysis revealing that the protein exons coding for color were not changed, but, rather, a transposon (non-random) was inserted in an intron (“junk DNA”). And now there’s this paper. It seems that the “Caterpillars of the peppered moth perceive color through their skin.” From the Abstract: We previously reported that slow colourchange in twig-mimicking caterpillars of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) is a response to achromatic and chromatic visual cues. Here we show that the perception of these cues, and the resulting phenotypic responses, does not require ocular vision. Caterpillars with completely obscured ocelli remained capable of enhancing Read More ›

Here is a model of the top 15 “countries” across the span from the Agricultural Revolution onwards: Food for thought on trends and implications. Notice, the principle that trends (like pie-crusts) are made to be broken. To truly predict, we need dynamics and some reasonable idea of contingencies. Don’t forget to take reconstructions of the deep unrecorded past and future projections with a grain of salt. END

In the thread on Jonathan Bartlett and priorities for Math education, I raised two comments that I think it would be profitable to further reflect on. First, from 33 on how the US National Academy of Sciences tried to classify Mathematics as a “science”: https://services.math.duke.edu/undergraduate/Handbook96_97/node5.html The Nature of Mathematics (These paragraphs are reprinted with permission from Everybody Counts: A Report to the Nation on the Future of Mathematics Education. ©1989 by the National Academy of Sciences. Courtesy of the National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.) Mathematics reveals hidden patterns that help us understand the world around us. Now much more than arithmetic and geometry, mathematics today is a diverse discipline that deals with data, measurements, and observations from science; with inference, Read More ›