Music of the Year 2011

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/12/the-best-hip-hop-of-2011.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/12/the-best-music-of-2011-the-american-singers.html

Controversy of Screening Tests

Controversy about the role of medicine. It's not that we should abandon it, but that we should use it better and more effectively...

As one columnist suggests says...

In Canada, we like to pretend that overtreatment is a problem unique to the profit-driven U.S. system, but we have many of the same problems. They are driven by culture more than by greed.

In medicine, sometimes it’s better to do nothing

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/andre-picard/in-medicine-sometimes-its-better-to-do-nothing/article2235830/

Why the new breast cancer screening guidelines make sense

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/andre-picard/why-the-new-breast-cancer-screening-guidelines-make-sense/article2246955/

Confusion on the Hill over new breast screening guidelines

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/confusion-on-the-hill-over-new-breast-screening-guidelines/article2250616/

Histograms in Excel for Mac

Definitely more difficult compared to Excel for PC!!!!!

Note The formula in the example must be entered as an array formula. First, type the formula into cell A13 and then press RETURN. The single result is 1. Next, select the range A13:A16, press CONTROL+U, and then press ⌘+Z+RETURN.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

A B Data Bins 79 70 85 79 78 89 85 50 81 95 88 97

Formula	Description (Result)
=FREQUENCY(A2:A10,B2:B4)	Number of scores less than or equal to 70 (1)
	Number of scores in the bin 71-79 (2)
	Number of scores in the bin 80-89 (4)
	Number of scores greater than or equal to 90 (2)

Ontology and Epistemology - research

Source:

http://britbohlinger.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/exam-revision-epistemology-and-ontology/

Ontological and epistemological positions provide fundamental aspects of research as they concern the philosophical questions what counts as reality and how beings come into being as well as what constitutes knowledge and how knowledge comes to be established. Two core positions can be distinguished in either area: positivist and constructionist.

• positivist ontology: the world is ‘out there’, it operates in a systematic and lawful manner, discrete and observable events, reality is separate from human meaning-making;
• constructionist ontology: assumes the world we can study is a semiotic world of meanings, represented in signs and symbols, language is central to this position;

• positivist epistemology: knowledge can only be gained by gathering facts in a systematic and objective manner, predominantly by the experimental method and by testing of hypotheses in order to gradually build laws. The aim is to refine them and achieve applicability on a universal level;
• constructionist epistemology: knowledge is constructed rather than discovered, it is a representation of the ‘real world’ and interpreted by the researcher. Knowledge is subject to time-space configurations and a means of power (e.g. doctors as ‘architects of medical knowledge’). Scientists and their institutions shape the production of knowledge by their choices and values.

Introducing Students to the Generic Terminology of Social Research
Jonathan Grix

Ontology

Ontology is the starting point of all research, after which one’s epistemological and methodological positions logically follow.

Examples of ontological positions are those contained within the perspectives ‘objectivism’ and ‘constructivism’. Broadly speaking the former is ‘an ontological position that asserts that social phenomena and their meanings have an existence that is independent of social actors’. The latter, on the other hand, is an alternative ontological position that ‘asserts that social phenomena and their meanings are continually being accomplished by social actors. It implies that social phenomena and categories are not only produced through social interaction but that they are in a constant state of revision’ (Bryman, 2001, pp. 16–18).

If ontology is about what we may know, then epistemology is about how we come to know what we know.

1. You feel loved because someone gives you money

2. You feel loved because some wrote a little heart on a piece of paper

Epistemology

‘the possible ways of gaining knowledge of social reality…claims about how what is assumed to exist can be known’ Two contrasting epistemological positions are those contained within the perspectives ‘positivism’ and ‘interpretivism’. These terms can be traced back, and illuminated by reference to, specific traditions in the philosophy of social sciences. Broadly speaking, the former ‘is an epistemological position that advocates

the application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of social reality and beyond’. The latter, on the other hand, can be seen as an epistemological position that ‘is predicated upon the view that a strategy is required that respects the differences between people and the objects of the natural sciences and therefore requires the social scientist to grasp the subjective meaning of social action’

1. You repeatedly receive money from someone that says they love you.

2. You see different actions of "being there" of different circumstances, (eg. being picked up at the busstop, calling to see how you are feeling when you are sick, etc).

Example

Plato’s famous allegory of the cave is instructive for making us aware of the root of ontology and epistemology, for it shows how very different perceptions of what constitutes reality can exist. Prisoners in a cave are chained in such a way that they can only see forwards, to a wall, upon which shadows of artefacts, carried by people behind them, are reflected in the light of a fire. The prisoners give names and characteristics to these objects, which, to them, represent reality. Plato then imagines a scene in which one prisoner leaves the dark cave and sees that not only are the shadows reflections of objects, but also that the objects are effigies of reality.

The passage cited above mirrors how some people can come to think in certain ways, which are bound by certain cultural and social norms and parameters, for example those established by disciplines in academia. Any premises built upon the experience of the cave dwellers are certain to differ from those who are on the outside. It is for this reason that we need to be aware of, and understand, that different views of the world and different ways of gathering knowledge exist.

Who does America owe its debt to?

From the Toronto Star, David Olive columnist article.

There’s lots we can do to fix the debt crisis

America has averted a first-ever default in its 235-year history, only to have its triple-A debt rating stripped from it by Standard & Poor’s. This prompted panicky investors to dump $1 trillion worth of stock last Monday alone.

Japan, mired in a two-decade-long economic malaise, has taken a turn for the worse after the deadly tsunami earlier this year. And China, after a decade of double-digit GDP growth, has abruptly throttled back on its industrial revolution, fearing a bout of double-digit inflation.

Obviously America is having an especially rough time of it, coping with a record deficit and debt; 9.1 per cent unemployment; and hundreds of thousands of home foreclosures on the horizon. A record 46 million Americans are on food stamps, or 15 per cent of the population. Consumers are on a spending strike, in the major world economy most reliant on domestic consumer spending.

Yet in their “flight to safety,” panicky investors have piled into, of all things, U.S. Treasury bills. Demand for Treasuries was so great this week that yields on the benchmark 10-year note actually fell to 2.3 per cent. That compares with the more than 5 per cent yield insisted upon by buyers of riskier Italian and Spanish bonds.

That’s no irony. America owes most of its debt to itself, after all. Only 31 per cent is held by offshore investors, compared with as much as 83 per cent for Europe’s most debt-impaired countries. America’s debt-to-GDP ratio has climbed to a supposedly perilous 99 per cent. Well, the Japanese ratio is 204 per cent, pretty much where it’s been for years. But just seven per cent of that debt is held by non-Japanese lenders.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, already has injected $2.5 trillion of liquidity into the global economy since the 2008-09 financial meltdown. Bernanke has a printing press and is independent of the gridlocked White House and Congress. He can pump more money into his domestic economy if the discomfort of current malaise strikes him as a bigger risk to the U.S. social fabric than an outbreak of punishing inflation.

Just letting the fiscally ruinous U.S. tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 lapse would scare up $1 trillion or so, enough to cover two thirds of the deficit. And the long-term threat to the solvency of Social Security and Medicare? America’s population, in contrast with expected declines in most advanced economies, is forecast to surge 41 per cent by mid-century to 438 million. That’s 127 million new taxpaying Americans to the rescue.

Debilitating dogmatism has characterized U.S. politics of late. But bipartisan comity was the rule as recently as the late Ted Kennedy’s shepherding of then-president George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation through the Senate in the early 2000s. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the notion of Tea Partiers or aliens taking America’s public-policy agenda hostage was unthinkable, Democratic legislators working with Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and G.H.W. Bush refinanced Social Security, agreed on the post-Cold War closing of hundreds of military bases, and forged the budget that laid the groundwork for the surpluses Bill Clinton posted in the last years of his tenure.

The challenge in Europe, of course, is overcoming fractious relations among policymakers within countries — as in the U.S. — and also between nations. Which will make difficult the necessary task of creating a sustainable funding mechanism for Europe’s elaborate array of social programs. Americans notoriously hate taxes, yet the U.S. has one of the highest rates of tax compliance in the world, at 84 per cent. The figure for Italy is 62 per cent. In Greece, paying income taxes is widely regarded as silly.

Europe’s common currency region, or eurozone, must be reinvented. Which is not as challenging as it sounds. At 11 years of age, the eurozone is hardly bred in the bone, and it has failed its first test. Its architects assumed no eurozone member nation would face insolvency, so there is no coordinated mechanism for rescue missions.

That has to change, perhaps as part of a long overdue conversion of the eurozone into a genuine fiscal union. One whose members are held to strict spending limits. Greece will have to emulate Germany, the strongest economy in Europe, in the latter’s zealous pursuit of tax evaders. Germany, for its part, will have to drop its resistance to the introduction of Eurobonds. These would be backed by the collective might of Europe’s $16-trillion economy, rather than that of Ireland or Portugal alone.

The West’s debt crisis is man-made, not an act of God. It is amenable to man-made solutions. This will require shedding some ideological fixations. But the alternatives are a U.S. that someday does default. And the shattering of a European union whose existence not coincidentally has marked the continent’s longest period of uninterrupted peace.

There’s no telling when an outbreak of political will and common sense will occur. But it will. This too shall pass.

Maya Angelou on love

Love recognizes no barriers, it jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls, to arrive at a destination full of hope.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry, to get my work done, and to try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.


Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/maya_angelou_2.html#ixzz1HD4D9AjT

Bitter Fruit - Kim, Claire Jean - Yale University Press

I am putting this book on my reading list! It talks about race relations between Koreans and Haitians in the United States. Specifically how they are pitted against each other by the dominant White culture.

Bitter Fruit - Kim, Claire Jean - Yale University Press