A nova dieta

So what foods should you be adding to your shopping basket?
Butter and lard
Full fat yoghurts
Full fat milk
Pies
Cakes and biscuits (within reason, of course)
Fatty cuts of meat
Sausages
Bacon
Cheese and cream
Chocolate

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No big bang

YSICS

Quantum Equations Suggest Big Bang Never Happened

February 10, 2015 | by Stephen Luntz

photo credit: NASA. A new model of the universe suggests that spacetime recedes infinitely into the distance, rather than starting from a single event

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Two physicists are trying to revive one of the great debates of twentieth-century science, arguing that the Big Bang may never have happened. Their work presents a radically different vision of the universe from the one cosmologists now work with.

The term Big Bang was created by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle as a way to mock the theory. Hoyle thought of the universe as like an endlessly flowing river, saying “Things are they way they are, because they were the way they were.” However, the weight of evidence—particularly the discovery of the cosmic background radiation—led the scientific community to overwhelmingly favor the idea that the universe came into being from a single, infinitely dense point.

Nevertheless, the problem of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang has continued to trouble many scientists, along with questions about how it actually occurred.

"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," says Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt. In collaboration with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, Ali has created a series of equations that describe a universe much like Hoyle's; one without a beginning or end. Part of their work has been published in Physics Letters B, while a follow-up paper by Das and Rajat Bhaduri of Manchester University, Canada, is awaiting publication.

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Ensino online

The disruptive potential of online learning: Comparing the cost and quality of online and traditional education

David Deming, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, Noam Yuchtman 05 February 2015

With the potential to bring higher education to the masses, online learning has been hailed as revolutionary. The worry is that the quality of education will be diluted. This column presents evidence that online learning can bring substantial cost savings without much drop in quality – but employers do not value an online degree as highly, especially when coming from a private institution.

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Online learning has been viewed as the disruptive innovation in higher education today, with traditional classroom instruction at risk of being replaced by superstar professors teaching elabourate courses developed by teams – or by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offering instruction to students worldwide (see, e.g., Christensen and Eyring 2011, Cowen and Tabarrok 2014). Even if they do not revolutionise higher education, online courses are a potentially important source of cost savings in higher education, with the primary channel being reduced labour costs through larger class size and less face-to-face interaction (Bowen 2012).

The potential for disruption can be seen in the tremendous recent growth in the granting of online bachelor’s degrees – 2012 saw 23 large for-profit online campuses award nearly 75,000 bachelor’s degrees in the United States, more than 5% of the total and nearly twenty times as many online bachelor’s degrees as were granted just a decade before.  Although the growth of online education has until recently occurred mostly in the for-profit sector, public institutions are increasingly competing for students online – perhaps in response to cost pressures (Hoxby 2014).

What do we know about the performance of online education thus far? Scholars have been stymied in evaluating online education because:

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Distribuição de renda e patrimonio

Inequality, Mobility, and Being Poor in America

Steven Horwitz

St. Lawrence University
January 2, 2014

Forthcoming in Social Philosophy and Policy Spring 2015
Abstract:    

The conventional narrative that the last generation has seen the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while the middle class gets hollowed out has serious flaws. First, the claims of growing inequality overlook data on income mobility. It is not the same households who are rich and poor each year, and many poor households become richer over time. Second, the claim of middle class stagnation is largely a statistical deception based on an incomplete interpretation of median household income. The middle class has shrunk but so has the percentage of poor households as the percentage of rich households has grown significantly in the last few decades. Third, looking at consumption rather than income enables us to see both the absolute gains of poor US households and the narrowing of the gap with the wealthy. Poor US households are more likely to have basic appliances than the average household of the 1970s, and those appliances are of much higher quality. Together these three points offer a much more optimistic view of the degree of inequality and the ability of the poor to become rich. The picture is not all rosy and a final section discusses the relevance of housing, health care, and education costs to this argument.

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Patologia política

Escravidão

We can only be kept in the cages we do not see. A brief history of human enslavement - up to and including your own.

video palestra

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A
Veja também
A verdade sobre a escravidão
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31E1gHowYcA

Aquecimento global no passado

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A loucura da Primeira Guerra Mundial

Filmed at the Royal Geographical Society on 15th April 2014.

The First World War is not called the Great War for nothing. It was the single most decisive event in modern history, as well as one of the bloodiest: by the time the war ended, some nine million soldiers had been killed. It was also a historical full stop, marking the definitive end of the Victorian era and the advent of a new age of uncertainty. By 1918, the old order had fallen: the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia; the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had been destroyed; and even the victorious Allied powers had suffered devastating losses. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. And yet barely two decades later, the world was again plunged into conflict. Little wonder then that historians still cannot agree whether Britain's engagement was worth it.

For some, the war was a vitally important crusade against Prussian militarism. Had we stayed out, they argue, the result would have been an oppressive German-dominated Europe, leaving the British Empire isolated and doomed to decline. And by fighting to save Belgium, Britain stood up for principle: the right of a small nation to resist its overbearing neighbours.

For others, the war was a catastrophic mistake, fought at a catastrophic human cost. It brought Communism to power in Russia, ripped up the map of Europe and left a festering sense of resentment that would fuel the rise of Nazism. We often forget that, even a few days before Britain entered the war, it seemed likely that we would stay out. H. H. Asquith's decision to intervene changed the course of history. But was it the right one?
Assista
Veja também

O experimento de Milgram revisitado

If the Nazis were just following orders, then he had just proved that anyone at all could be a Nazi.
He and his colleague Alex Haslam, the third co-editor of The Journal of Social Issues’ Milgram edition and a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, have come up with a different answer. “The notion that we somehow automatically obey authority, that we are somehow programmed, doesn’t account for the variability [in rates of obedience] across conditions,” he said; in some iterations of Milgram’s study, the rate of compliance was close to 100 percent, while in others it was closer to zero. “We need an account that can explain the variability—when we obey, when we don’t.”


Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/#ixzz3RB37M6nW

História escondida - depois a liberalização

Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Largely lost to history, however, is the cruel reality of what “liberation” actually meant for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors discovered barely alive in the Nazi camps.

Even after the victorious American and Allied forces took control of the camps, the survivors — mainly Jews, but also small numbers of gays, Roma, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others — remained for months behind barbed wire and under armed guard in what became known euphemistically as displaced persons, or D.P., camps. Many Jews were left wearing the same notorious striped pajamas that the Nazis first gave them.

With the American forces overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of refugees under their control, underfed survivors lived for months in decrepit camps in Germany and Austria — a number of them on the same grounds as the concentration camps. Even after conditions improved, thousands of former prisoners remained inside and in limbo for as long as five years because the United States and most other nations refused to let them in.

In the early months after the war, thousands of survivors died from disease and malnutrition. Food was so scarce that rioting broke out at some camps, as Allied commanders refused to give extra food rations to Jewish survivors because they did not want to be seen as giving them preferential treatment over German P.O.W.s and other prisoners.

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Dieta

Want to lose 10lb in 2 weeks and never feel hungry? Eat plenty of FAT and exercise for just 12 minutes a day, new book claims 

• The High Fat Diet promises to avoid the dreaded diet hunger pangs
• Involves eating plenty of butter, oily fish, cream cheese, avocados, nuts
• Authors claim that fat does not cause a spike in insulin, unlike carbs
• And that eating fat will actually make you thin - and help keep weight off
• Plan is combined with just a few minutes of high intensity training a day 

By HELEN FOSTER and ANNA HODGEKISS FOR MAILONLINE

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2928482/Want-lose-10lb-2-weeks-never-feel-hungry-Eat-plenty-FAT-exercise-just-12-minutes-day-new-book-claims.html#ixzz3R6BS5Ynf
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Cruzadas

Estado brasileiro

Temor

"If you want to be awe inspired.." (Christopher Hitchens) 

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Advertência

O grande mito das Cruzadas

The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam
by Jonathan Riley-Smith
Columbia University Press, 136 pages, $24.50
"... That answer is now contained in a book, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, written by the most distinguished historian of the Crusades, the Cambridge University scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith. A transcription of the Bampton Lectures he delivered in October 2007 at Columbia University, it is a thin book, brimming with insights, approachable by anyone interested in the subject.
It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”
Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions.
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Cidade mais dilmista do Brasil

Cidade mais 'dilmista' do Brasil, Belágua enfrenta pobreza e fome

Na cidade, quase 94% dos votos foram dados à presidente reeleita.
População tira sustento de produção de farinha e assistência social.

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A língua da ciência

Absolute English

Science once communicated in a polyglot of tongues, but now English rules alone. How did this happen – and at what cost?

by Michael D Gordin 

The overwhelming majority of communication in the natural sciences today – physics, chemistry, biology, geology – takes place in English; in print and at conferences, in emails and in Skype-mediated collaborations, confirmable by wandering through the halls of any scientific research facility in Kuala Lumpur or Montevideo or Haifa. Contemporary science is Anglophone.

More significantly, contemporary science is monoglot: everyone uses English almost to the exclusion of other languages. A century ago, the majority of researchers in Western science knew at least some English, but they also read, wrote and spoke in French and German, and sometimes in other ‘minor’ languages, such as the newly emergent Russian or the rapidly fading Italian.

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Petrobras

SARDENBERG: A bagunça na Petrobras é tal que perda de mais 2,7 bilhões com projetos que não decolaram virou coisa pequena

Graça Foster: há pelo menos dois anos sabia que os projetos das refinarias Premium eram furados (Foto: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

Artigo de Carlos Alberto Sardenberg publicado no jornal O Globo
Há menos de seis anos, em 17 de setembro de 2009, o então presidente Lula apresentou-se triunfante em uma entrevista ao jornal Valor Econômico. Entre outras coisas, contou, sem meias palavras, que a Petrobras não queria construir refinarias e ainda apresentara um plano pífio de investimentos em 2008. “Convoquei o conselho da empresa”, contou Lula.
Resultado: não uma, mas quatro refinarias no plano de investimentos, além de previsões fantásticas para a produção de óleo.

Duas seriam refinarias Premium, uma no Maranhão, com previsão de refino de 600 mil barris/dia, a maior do país, e outra no Ceará, para 300 mil barris/dia.
Ainda na madrugada de terça para quarta da semana passada, a presidente da Petrobras, Graça Foster, informou que a companhia simplesmente desistiu dos projetos Premium. Disse que a estatal não encontrou parceiros e que o negócio, afinal, não era viável economicamente.
Parece que não tem nada de mais.
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Teoria das instituições

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1993
Robert W. Fogel, Douglass C. North

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Prize Lecture*

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1993

Economic Performance through Time

I
Economic history is about the performance of economies through time. The objective of research in the field is not only to shed new light on the economic past but also to contribute to economic theory by providing an analytical framework that will enable us to understand economic change. A theory of economic dynamics comparable in precision to general equilibrium theory would be the ideal tool of analysis. In the absence of such a theory we can describe the characteristics of past economies, examine the performance of economies at various times, and engage in comparative static analysis; but missing is an analytical understanding of the way economies evolve through time.
A theory of economic dynamics is also crucial for the field of economic development. There is no mystery why the field of development has failed to develop during the five decades since the end of the second World War. Neo-classical theory is simply an inappropriate tool to analyze and prescribe policies that will induce development. It is concerned with the operation of markets, not with how markets develop. How can one prescribe policies when one doesn't understand how economies develop? The very methods employed by neo-classical economists have dictated the subject matter and militated against such a development. That theory in the pristine form that gave it mathematical precision and elegance modeled a frictionless and static world. When applied to economic history and development it focused on technological development and more recently human capital investment, but ignored the incentive structure embodied in institutions that determined the extent of societal investment in those factors. In the analysis of economic performance through time it contained two erroneous assumptions: one that institutions do not matter and two that time does not matter.
This essay is about institutions and time. It does not provide a theory of economic dynamics comparable to general equilibrium theory.¹ We do not have such a theory.' Rather it provides the initial scaffolding of an analytical framework capable of increasing our understanding of the historical evolution of economies and a necessarily crude guide to policy in the ongoing task of improving the economic performance of economies. The analytical framework is a modification of neo-classical theory. What it retains is the fundamental assumption of scarcity and hence competition and the analytical tools of micro-economic theory. What it modifies is the rationality assumption. What it adds is the dimension of time.
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Brasil atual

Adeus às ilusões

A maior realização desse governo foi a desmontagem da Razão

Arnaldo Jabor

A academia cultiva a “desigualdade” como uma flor. A miséria tem de ser mantida in vitro para justificar teorias velhas e absolver incompetência. Orgulham-se de um maniqueísmo esquemático, como se a verdade morasse no mais raso reducionismo. O capitalismo explica tudo e é tratado como uma pessoa: “Ihh... Parece que hoje o capitalismo acordou de mau humor” ou “esse capitalismo é mesmo cruel e incorrigível — não para de explorar os pobres”.

Leia mais sobre esse assunto em http://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/adeus-as-ilusoes-15222378#ixzz3Qjp6qP8m
© 1996 - 2015. Todos direitos reservados a Infoglobo Comunicação e Participações S.A. Este material não pode ser publicado, transmitido por broadcast, reescrito ou redistribuído sem autorização.

Transgênicos

Transgênicos evitaram desmatamento de 132 milhões de hectares

A adoção de biotecnologia colaborou diretamente para que a agricultura usasse menos terras para cultivar mais alimentos. É o que aponta relatório divulgado pelo Serviço Internacional para a Aquisição de Aplicações em Agrobiotecnologia (ISAAA). Os cultivos geneticamente modificados (GM) geraram 441,4 milhões de toneladas adicionais de alimentos e fibras em todo o mundo entre os anos de 1996 e 2013. Sem essa produção, seriam necessários 132 milhões de hectares a mais. Para se ter uma ideia, a área é igual à soma dos maiores produtores no Brasil: Mato Grosso, Paraná e Rio Grande do Sul.

+ Leia mais

Alemanha. Revisionismo histórico

The Myth of German Villainy [Kindle Edition]

Benton L. Bradberry

Benton L. Bradberry (Author)

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(Author)

3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews 

As the title "The Myth of German Villainy" indicates, this book is about the mischaracterization of Germany as history's ultimate "villain." The "official" story of Western Civilization in the twentieth century casts Germany as the disturber of the peace in Europe, and the cause of both World War I and World War II, though the facts don't bear that out. During both wars, fantastic atrocity stories were invented by Allied propaganda to create hatred of the German people for the purpose of bringing public opinion around to support the wars. The "Holocaust" propaganda which emerged after World War II further solidified this image of Germany as history's ultimate villain. But how true is this "official" story? Was Germany really history's ultimate villain? In this book, the author paints a different picture. He explains that Germany was not the perpetrator of World War I nor World War II, but instead, was the victim of Allied aggression in both wars. The instability wrought by World War I made the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia possible, which brought world Communism into existence. Hitler and Germany recognized world Communism, with its base in the Soviet Union, as an existential threat to Western, Christian Civilization, and he dedicated himself and Germany to a death struggle against it. Far from being the disturber of European peace, Germany served as a bulwark which prevented Communist revolution from sweeping over Europe. The pity was that the United States and Britain did not see Communist Russia in the same light, ultimately with disastrous consequences for Western Civilization. The author believes that Britain and the United States joined the wrong side in the war.

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Economia nazista

The Economic Doctrine of the Nazis | Hans-Hermann Hoppe 

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Latino lynchings - história escondida

(Warning: this article contains images that some may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.)
The following is a summary & analysis of Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review article, “Law of the Noose: A History of Latino Lynching” by Richard Delgado.
SUMMARY
Delgado attempts to shed light on a largely unknown history of Latinos, particularly Mexican-Americans in the Southwest U.S., who were lynched between the years of 1846 and 1925. This is roughly the same time that many Blacks were lynched in the U.S., as well. While many know of the ominous and horrific fate that Blacks and African-Americans saw in the U.S., few know of the lynchings that Latinos were met with. Delgado challenges scholars and institutions by trying to unveil the truth on this shameful past, while exploring the history of these lynchings and explaining that “English-only” movements are a present-day form of lynchings.
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Guerra civil brasileira

Mais de 42 mil jovens devem morrer antes dos 19 anos no Brasil, diz estudo

Hanrrikson de Andrade

Do UOL, no Rio

O IHA (Índice de Homicídios na Adolescência), estudo divulgado nesta quarta-feira (28) e produzido com base em dados de 2012, estima que mais de 42 mil adolescentes de 12 a 18 anos correm risco de serem assassinados nos municípios brasileiros com mais de cem mil habitantes.
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Distribuição de patrimônio

Nós Somos os 99% ?

Publicado: 19 de janeiro de 2015 em Politica e Economia
Tags:1% dos mais ricos do mundo, concentração de riquezas, nós somos 99%

A crise mundial de 2009  pulverizou riquezas com a queda acentuada do preço dos imóveis nos EUA e Europa, trouxe medidas politicas que cercearam os direitos trabalhistas e previdenciários, levou a uma alta do desemprego e diminuição do estado do bem estar social em diversos países.
Contudo, poucos anos após a crise, a concentração de riquezas aumentou!
Em 2009, 1% da população mais rica do planeta detinha 44% do PIB mundial.
Em 2014, o 1% mais rico do mundo detém 50% do PIB mundial  e cerca de 1 bilhão de pessoas vivem com menos de R$ 100,00 ao mês ou U$ 1,25 ao dia (fonte aqui)... Tecnicamente, quem possui patrimônio de R$ 1,6 milhão  (ou U$ 753 mil) está enquadrado no 1% mais rico do mundo (fonte aqui). Parece estratosférico, mas isso inclui o valor de imóveis e atualmente nas grandes metrópoles do Brasil um apartamento de médio padrão já custa metade disso.
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Mentiras comfortaveis

Escepticismo

História esquecida

The Great Leap Forward

By Kallie Szczepanski

Elderly man dead of starvation.  Keystone / Getty Images

The Great Leap Forward was a push by Mao Zedong to change China from a predominantly agrarian (farming) society to a modern, industrial society - in just five years.
Between 1958 and 1960, millions of Chinese citizens were moved onto communes. Some were sent to farming cooperatives, while others worked in small manufacturing. All work was shared on the communes; from childcare to cooking, daily tasks were collectivized.
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