Lifeboat Foundation

‘’Durkheim’s profound insight was that despite the negative risks associated with the sacred, humans cannot live without it. He asserted that a lack of social solidarity within society would not only lead individuals to experience anomie and alienation, but might also encourage them to engage in extremist politics. Why? Because extremist politics would satiate their desperate desire to belong.

Globally, we are currently experiencing tremendous social and political turbulence. At the institutional level, liberal democracy faces the threat of rising authoritarianism and far-right extremism. At the local level, we seem to be living in an ever-increasing age of anxiety, engendered by precarious economic conditions and the gradual erosion of shared social norms. How might we navigate these difficult and disorienting times?

Emile Durkheim, one of the pioneers of the discipline of sociology, died 101 years ago this month. Although few outside of social science departments know his name, his intellectual legacy has been integral to shaping modern thought about society. His work may provide us with some assistance in diagnosing the perennial problems associated with modernity.

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If you think you’ve got a bad case of the travel bug, get this: Dr. John Halamka travels 400,000 miles a year. That’s equivalent to fully circling the globe 16 times.

Halamka is chief information officer at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing emergency physician. In a talk at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine last week, Halamka shared what he sees as the biggest healthcare problems the world is facing, and the most promising technological solutions from a systems perspective.

“In traveling 400,000 miles you get to see lots of different cultures and lots of different people,” he said. “And the problems are really the same all over the world. Maybe the cultural context is different or the infrastructure is different, but the problems are very similar.”

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By Leah Crane

There’s a new state of matter — and it’s weird. It’s made from light and is somewhere between a solid and a superfluid. It can’t be stirred, rotated, or even pushed.

“If you have some water in a pipe and you start pushing it, it will flow a little faster,” says Marzena Szymańska at University College London. “Whereas this fluid is so rigid that even pushing it will not change its velocity.”

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Nov. 12 (UPI) — A group of shocked cyclists captured video of the moment a drone operator nearly pulled off a high-tech bike theft.

The video, recorded in Hustopece, Moravia, Czech Republic, shows the cyclists climbing a local landmark known as Lookout Tower and taking video of a drone flying nearby.

The cyclists start scrambling down the tower when the drone lowers down to the ground and picks up one of the bicycles.

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Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S.

The American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, who have medical experts from around the nation on the writing committee, have released updated guidelines on managing cholesterol to minimize the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death. The new guidelines advocate for more aggressive treatment with statin therapy and getting LDL cholesterol counts, commonly referred to as “bad cholesterol” to your target level –- in general, less than 100mg/dL; for those with risk factors, less than 70mg/dL.

Fires creeping in on daily life are becoming the new terrifying norm.

Multinational engineering and electronics giant Bosch recently highlighted a new device connectivity method which will work with the Iota marketplace, among other things, for real-time IoT (Internet of Things) data collection and sales.

Data Collection for the IOTA Marketplace

In a recent blog post the firm opened with a quote from 1999 from Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman extolling the virtues of anonymously transferring funds on the internet, way before cryptocurrencies were even conceived. It continued to elaborate on the Iota ecosystem, its advantages over Bitcoin, and why it has been chosen as a partner.

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Duh.