Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: futurism – Page 1,276

The Status Quo of Aging

Rejuvenation challenges the status quo, but that’s only good.

One of the reasons why the idea of rejuvenating people isn’t all that easy to sell is that it challenges the status quo. For good or bad, we’re used to the fact that our health goes south on us as time goes by, ultimately killing us if nothing else does.

That’s not a nice certainty to have, but our species is one of planners; we tend to prefer bad certainties to uncertainty. For example, some people want to be certain that, at some point, they won’t be fit for work anymore and will need to retire; they prefer this over the uncertainty of not knowing how they’d make a living at age 150.

That’s not the only reason. Radical change requires radical rethinking of anything affected by the change itself; as rejuvenation would affect our social contracts, the job market, future planning, our idea of life milestones, of family, what it means to be old, and many other things, it would take a lot of rethinking—which is something humanity generally does only grudgingly and on its own sweet time.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos launches a $2 billion ‘Day One Fund’ to help homeless families and create preschools

The fund will launch with a $2 billion commitment, split between the Day 1 Families Fund — helping homeless families — and the Day 1 Academies Fund — creating a “network of new, non-profit, tier-one preschools in low-income communities,” Bezos said.

As CEO of Amazon, founder of rocket company Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post, Bezos is the wealthiest man in modern history, with a net worth of at least $150 billion.

Critics have long called for him to put his billions toward philanthropic efforts.

In June, Bezos teased that he had identified two areas of focus for future charitable endeavors.

SpaceX President talks BFR and Mars exploration in laid-back Madrid Q&A session

Speaking at a Q&A session hosted for a Madrid university’s Master’s of Business Administration students, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell talked for nearly an hour about the launch company’s next-generation BFR rocket, the reality of long-term life on Mars, and more, revealing a number of interesting tidbits in the process.

Almost entirely led by questions from the unusually well-informed audience, the graduate students and professors predominately kept the famous SpaceX exec more or less focused on the company’s future, delving into the reasoning behind BFR. Shotwell had only praise for the next-generation launch vehicle, which is targeting initial hop tests in late 2019 and its first full launches as early as 2021, a delay of several months from previous schedule estimates targeting hops in early 2019 and orbit by 2020.

Inside the ‘shadowy world’ of China’s fake science research black market

But Dr Oransky and colleagues are also calling for better peer review after research is published.

“We should reward people who come forward about problems in other people’s work, not in a punitive way, but actually looking at it and saying, ‘hey, that’s a problem, we should do something about it’, and give people the chance to correct the record,” he said.

In China, there’s a growing black market peddling fake research papers, fake peer reviews, and even entirely fake research results to anyone who will pay. Does the rise of fake and fraudulent science threaten the future of research?

Prompting people to listen to each other reduces inequality and improves group performance

A small but impactful shift in the way a group assignment is presented can significantly reduce racial inequality within the group, as well as lead to better work, according to new research by Bianca Manago, assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. Groups, Inequality and Synergy, co-authored with Jane Sell at Texas A&M University and Carla Goar at Kent State University, appears online in the September 2018 issue of Social Forces.

Previous research has shown that groups often diminish the contributions of minorities, by dismissing their opinions more often, for example, or by being less likely to adopt their ideas. Manago and her colleagues sought to discover whether reframing the parameters of a task could reduce that , and how that would impact the quality of the group’s work.

“Past research shows that people with different skills working together is good for , but relatively little research has been done on how superficial differences that shouldn’t matter, like race, affect group performance,” Manago said. “We found that when people are more willing to listen to the minority group member, the group does better.”

/* */