![]() ![]() David Robert Grimes is a scientist with a keen interest in the public understanding of science. ![]() ![]() How critical thinking can positively impact all aspects of your life.ĭr.What critical thinking is, how it has saved the world in the past and can in the future.That to an extent, traditional media is regulated, but no such regulation exists for social media, which is clearly needed.That belief in one conspiracy theory usually leads to the belief in many.How ideology effects one's acknowledgment of scientific evidence.Origins of his interest in science, views on scientific endeavor, and why he chose physics as his primary focus of study.In this episode, Jonathan is speaking with David Robert Grimes about how critical thinking can save the world. ![]()
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![]() ![]() I was fortunate to learn from some incredibly talented children’s librarians-and from Muriel Koretz, a retired teacher who was an expert on the art and history of the picture book. ![]() It wasn’t until I started my career working in libraries that I began to understand the true power of picture books. Still, even with Ginny’s powerful voice strengthening the national reputation for the CCBC, I have almost no memory of looking at picture books during my time in library school, either. Horning, the current director of the CCBC, were early and vocal advocates for more diverse representation in children’s literature and picture books. White Hall, and Ginny Moore Kruse, who served as director of the CCBC for some 26 years (from 1976 to 2002) was a remarkable force for children’s literature. The renowned Wisconsin Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) was housed with the UW library school, in Helen C. It wasn’t until I attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Library School that I began to get a sense of the world of picture books. Yet, despite the enthusiasm for books and the high value placed on reading, I do not remember a single picture book from my early years. My mother, a voracious reader, was determined to raise her four children as readers, so we were surrounded by books and reading was always a part of our daily activity. ![]() There was no television permitted in my house until after dark during my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. ![]() ![]() ![]() For Francis Drake was a pirate, licensed by the Queen to steal, burn and destroy Spanish ships and colonies in the New World. If they do, I’m sure their history is taught differently to the way I learned it and to an extent, quite right too. ![]() ![]() I wonder if school children today learn anything about Francis Drake and John Hawkins. The environment is fashionable, the British Empire is nothing to be proud of. Look up Devon County Council on the web and what do you find? No ship – just a logo of two green leaves. The county sign for Devon was an Elizabethan galleon –Drake’s ship – sailing proudly across a blue sea. I was glad to live in the county where these men grew up. ![]() Drake was our national savior if ever England were in peril again all we had to do was to sound Drake’s Drum (which was hidden somewhere in Plymouth) and he would rise from the dead like King Arthur and sail back to our rescue. Everything they did, we were taught, was admirable. These men were pioneers, adventurers, founders of the British empire. Drake was the first Englishman to sail around the world, to return with untold riches and be knighted by Queen Elizabeth on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind Hawkins was the founder of the Royal Navy, the man who designed and built the fast, weatherly galleons which sailed rings around the Spanish Armada. When I was a boy, growing up in Devon, Francis Drake and John Hawkins were great Elizabethan heroes. ![]() ![]() ![]() There was hardly a plot to tie its disparate fragments together, essentially being a bundle of ideas, events, and prose bound together only by a theme. I then read her novel, Flights, which was a shockingly experimental work. She managed to blend prose and an intriguing story line at a perfect balance. She breathed life into a post-apocalyptic setting – often overused and dull in today’s literature, but lively and vibrant in her hands. The first piece I read from Tokarczuk was Borderland ( Granta). She refuses to abide by the standard norms of fiction and forges her own path, sometimes failing to captivate, but often presenting the reader with something unique and indispensable. ![]() Her prose is elegant yet readable, and her ideas can be both comical and deeply philosophical. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless. ![]() This example should raise the spirits of people like us. But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. ![]() ![]() ![]() She writes: ‘I wanted to show the side of autism that I have lived through, the side you don’t find in books and on Facebook groups. How To Be Autistic challenges narratives of autism as something to be ‘fixed’, as Poe believes her autism is a fundamental aspect of her work. ![]() ![]() For an autistic person, they will find that they are having to use back roads and cut across fields and explore places neurotypicals would never even imagine visiting’. If a neurotypical person wants to get from A to B, then they will most often find their way unobstructed, without road works or diversions. Poe writes about her memoir: ‘The best way to describe it is to imagine a road trip. How To Be Autistic charts Charlotte Amelia Poe’s journey through schooldays and young adulthood, with chapters on food, fandom, depression, body piercing, comic conventions, and technology. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This quest reached a climax during the Enlightenment when philosophers and political scientists rejoiced over the discovery of a new model depicting the relationship between the individual and the State: the social contract.Īccording to the theory of the social contract, individuals may leave an anarchic “state of nature” by voluntarily transferring some of their personal rights to the “community” in return for security of life and property. ![]() Political theorists have long attempted to find a plausible rationale for the existence of the coercive State. ![]() Bobby Taylor is a senior at Sullivan South High School in Kingsport, Tennessee. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I think my favourite aspect of the book has got to be the characters and the way they each influence Kambili in a unique way. Until, that is, life throws Kambili and her brother into the life of their Aunty, the brilliant Ifeoma, and her spirited children. Her father is the sun around which her family revolves and having an identity of her own isn’t just something she isn’t allowed, it’s a concept that would never even have occurred to her. I describe her in this decidedly non-feminist way because this is how she appears to see herself for much of the book. ![]() One of the most engaging, vivid and interesting books I’ve read for a long time, Purple Hibiscus is an incredible ‘coming-of-age’ story about fifteen year old Kambili, daughter of a wealthy Nigerian businessman. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Despite the fundamental importance of the New Science, there has been no philosophical commentary of the text in any language, until now. ![]() Controversial at the time of its publication in 1725, the New Science has come to be seen as the most ambitious attempt before Comte at a comprehensive science of human society and the most profound analysis of the philosophy of history prior to Hegel. Book Synopsis Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is best remembered for his major work, the New Science (Scienza nuova), in which he sets forth the principles of humanity and gives an account of the stages common to the development of all societies in their historical life. About the Book Written by the noted Vico scholar Donald Phillip Verene, this commentary can be read as an introduction to Vicos thought or it can be employed as a guide to the comprehension of specific sections of the New Science. ![]() ![]() ![]() Shrek: the 2001 film’s use of Hallelujah led to many cover versions. ![]() ![]() ![]() Yes, it’s obscure – like a bird flying round the room.” skip past newsletter promotion But it is such a riddle such a symbolic poem. He would play different versions in front of me. She recalled: “We’d have coffee together in the morning before he’d start work on it. Lines such as “When David played, his fingers bled” are shown as abandoned.Ĭohen recorded the date of his first encounter with Issermann in his notebooks. Later versions were more spiritual, and sometimes sexual. Hallelujah began its life with a religious slant, reflecting Cohen’s Jewish heritage, with allusions to King David and Bathsheba (“The secret chord that David played”) as well as Samson and Delilah. While Cohen never spoke vitriolically about the blow in public, in one clip in the film he talks of being told by Columbia: “We know you are great, but don’t know if you are any good”. “He was absolutely crushed,” says French photographer Dominique Issermann, who lived with Cohen while he was writing the album and had sat in on the studio recording. Photograph: Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images Cohen in 2009 in Los Angeles: Hallelujah became ‘an international hymn – religious or otherwise’. ![]() ![]() And not just any part of the modern age: this book takes place in Brooklyn as the long-term residents of one particular neighbourhood face up to its increasing gentrification and the all too real prospect that they may be forced out of their homes by new neighbours and ever-rising rents.Īll the familiar characters are here in various guises – mostly instantly recognisable – and the situations and challenges they face are at once familiar to Austen fans and also perfectly modern. I’m a great fan of stories that take their inspiration from the works of Jane Austen, Bridget Jones sequels not withstanding, so I was very excited to learn of a young adult novel that claimed to be dragging Pride and Prejudice firmly into the 21st Century. ![]() Contemporary Young Adult Romance published by Balzer + Bray 18 Sep 18 ![]() |