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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- As schools across America close to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus, those of us in the homeschool community are a little giddy over our sudden mainstream status. Let me give you a few simple ideas, informed by decades of homeschool experience, that will help you and your kids make the most of your weeks at home together. 1. Don't Think You Have to Fill Your Day with Academics. 2. Make the World Your Classroom. 3. Read, Read, Read. Aloud. 4. Use This Time to Teach Life Skills. 5. Channel Your Inner '80s Parent One of the first things I tell new homeschoolers often surprises them: for young children, homeschooling doesn't take much time. When my kids were in kindergarten through ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- The very idea that cells proofread their genetic information makes intelligent design intuitively obvious. One doesn't proofread gibberish. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2015 went to three scientists who discovered DNA repair mechanisms. Cells inspect and correct their informational macromolecules at every stage: at transcription, at translation, and during post-translational modification. Roving molecular machines inspect other machines at work in the cell. When a cell divides, molecular machines check every letter as DNA strands are duplicated. Cells are in the "quality control" business. Does the cell check for typos? Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden found not just one, but two independent proofreading steps in the ribosome beyond the one that was already known. They occur ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- Repair systems and error-correction strategies exhibit backward monitoring: the ability to detect that a failure has occurred and take appropriate action. This assumes the ability to see what *should* have happened. There are numerous repair mechanisms in the cell. One was recently described in news from Lomonosov Moscow State University which explained that "during the transcription of information (its rewriting into RNA) the RNA polymerase enzyme 'rides' on the DNA chain, and stops when it finds the break. Like a proof-reader of a text, RNA polymerase after it is stalled, triggers a cascade of reactions, resulting in the repair enzymes fixing the damaged area." Damage response is a backward strategy for robustness, as we know by analogy from error-correcting algorithms in software. Entities don't have to ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- So far, six states and several city school districts have closed K-12 public schools for at least next week, affecting approximately 5 million children. So, what do the parents of these kids need to know to make the best out of a bad situation? 1. The most important factor is motivation. You can lead a child to learning, but you can't make him learn. A resistant, lazy, or distracted child in the best classroom will not learn anything. Teaching your child is ultimately about shepherding their soul. A true education equals moral formation. If your child is not generally obedient, or doesn't have a good work ethic or disposition, the best use of your time will be character training. 2. The second factor is content. If your child is ...

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[H/T SIMERG] -- GOV.SG -- GOVERNMENT OF SINGAPORE -- A collection of useful posters and videos on COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) ...

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FACEBOOK.COM -- CRISTINA HIGGINS -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: This post has been confirmed by NBC news as legitimate and by Cristina Higgins in Bergamo.] ARTICLE: I am writing to you from Bergamo, Italy, at the heart of the coronavirus crisis. The news media in the US has not captured the severity of what is happening here. Each of you, today -- not the government, not the school district, not the mayor -- each individual citizen, has the chance, today to take actions that will deter Italy from becoming your own country's reality. *The only way to stop this virus is to limit contagion. And the only way to limit contagion is for millions of people to change their behavior today.* Push for the entire office to work at home today, cancel birthday parties, and other gatherings, stay home as much as you can. Push for school closures, now. Anything you can do to stop the spread, because it is spreading in your communities. For those who say that this is just something that happens to old people, starting yesterday the hospitals here are reporting that younger and younger patients - 40, 45, 18, are coming in for treatment. There are 2 reasons why Coronavirus has brought Italy to it's knees. First ...

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APKMETRO.COM -- VIA THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- More and more we see a harmful and antiscientific pattern towards the outright denial of organic intercourse. In people, as in most animals or crops, a person's reproductive anatomy corresponds to one of two distinct varieties that manufacture small or massive intercourse cells: eggs and sperm. In people, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at delivery greater than 99.98% of the time. The evolutionary function of those two anatomies is to assist in replication through the fusion of sperm and ova. No third sort of intercourse cell exists in people, and subsequently there isn't any intercourse "spectrum" or extra sexes past female and male. Organic intercourse is binary. There's a distinction, nevertheless, between the statements that ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- MEDIUM.COM -- NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1986: "For me the most important word is accountability. We must be accountable at all times to the organisations we serve and to the people we serve."] ARTICLE: Skin in the Game is about balancing incentives and disincentives: people should be penalized if something for which they are responsible goes wrong and hurts others. Skin the game provides a clear answer to the current riot against self-congratulatory "experts": the public has viscerally detected that some "educated experts" have no skin in the game and will never learn from their mistakes. Until very recent times, owning one's risk was an unescapable moral code for past four millennia. War mongers were required to be warriors. Fewer than a third of Roman emperors died in their bed (assuming those weren't poisoned). Status came with increased exposure to risk. Courage is the only virtue that can't be faked (or gamed like metrics). This primacy ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- FS.BLOG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2008: "An important thing is looking forward across time ... The reactive mode is a tremendous liability. Being in an anticipatory mode changes the whole nature of things ..."] ARTICLE: First-level thinking is simplistic and superficial, and just about everyone can do it. All the first-level thinker needs is an opinion about the future. First-order thinking is fast and easy. It happens when we look for something that only solves the immediate problem without considering the consequences. Second-order thinking is more deliberate. It is thinking in terms of interactions and time. The ability to think through problems to the second, third, and nth order. Second order thinkers ask themselves the question "And then what?" This means thinking about the consequences. The road to out-thinking people can't come from first-order thinking. It must come from second-order thinking. Extraordinary performance comes from seeing things that other people can't see. Often when we solve ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah,1956: "The young Waezin should each try and find new arguments based on the discoveries in all branches of science ..."] ARTICLE: Parents and educators might feel the safest way to take shelter from claims by scientists and other academics that undermine faith is to just dismiss or hide from those claims. However, that just sets a trap for young people. What happens when they become immersed in university or secular cultures, and realize how unprepared to handle arguments against their family's religious tradition they are? The yearly Westminster Conference on Science and Faith exposes parents, teachers, and students to the responsible science that increasingly supports faith. The 2020 conference will be held Friday and Saturday, April 3-4, in the Philadelphia area. The deadline for the early-bird discount ends today, March 1st! Register today to save! Adult: $70 Student (with valid ID): $35 Youth (under 18): $20 ...

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MACLEANS.CA -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: For those unaware, Macleans is Canada's "Time Magazine."] ARTICLE: Not long ago, Dr. Leonard Sax was at a restaurant and overheard a father say to his daughter, "Honey, could you please do me a favour? Could you please just try one bite of your green peas?" To many this sounds like sophisticated parenting -- gentle coaxing formed as a question to get the child's co-operation without threatening her autonomy. To Sax the situation epitomized something much worse: the recent collapse of parenting. The scene is a prime example of parents relinquishing authority, losing confidence in themselves and defering to kids. A rule such as "No dessert until you eat your broccoli" has morphed into "How about three bites of broccoli, and then you can have dessert?" The command has become a question capped with a bribe. "When parents ...

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KIRKDURSTON.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah, 1952: "Islam is a natural religion in which *God's miracles are the very law and order of nature*."] ARTICLE: To try and avoid Stephen Hawking's potential for God, atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss published "A Universe from Nothing." In it, he attempts to explain how the universe might have come out of "nothing". But Krauss' "nothing" is not absolutely nothing at all. His "nothing" is actually "something". Krauss' "nothing" still requires the existence of *laws of physics* ... It fails to provide a rational explanation how these came into existence in the first place. Cosmologist Don Page closes his review of Krauss' book by stating, "To me, as a fellow scientist, it appears Krauss has swung far wide of the goal, striking only the air with his philosophical speculations that do not address the truly deep questions of existence." As Page also points out ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- VIA SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah,1956: "The young Waezin should each try and find new arguments based on the discoveries in all branches of science ..."] When I was young, physics seemed to offer answers to all of the mysteries of the universe. It felt authoritative and unequivocal in its explanations of nature and the origin of the universe. In that sense it was the perfect religion for my teenage self as I went through an atheist phase, probably provoked by popular physics books such as Hawking's "A Brief History of Time." Those books were always so dogmatic like the Catholic Sunday school I went to. Over the years my view of physics has evolved significantly. At the end of the day, the existence of multiverses and the anthropic principle are really religious viewpoints wrapped up in scientific jargon. This is not science, not testable, with no more legitimacy than believing that God created the universe. ...

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THEATLANTIC.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: A long, but outstanding article, although we feel experiments with new forms of communal, family-like living -- "forged families" -- to replace what we have lost, are best suited for special situations rather than as alternatives to traditional, familial relationships and bonds.] ARTICLE: If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We've made life better for adults but worse for children. We've moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children). The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor. This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought. It's time to find ways to bring back the big tables. ...

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IFSTUDIES.ORG -- David Brooks' masterful essay on the history and state of the American family is so good that I am making it required reading in my family ethics class. However, Brooks' "forged family" can already be found in the local church -- not the abstract "the church." Families need families, but research shows that parents nestled in a church community are more likely to thrive, endure, and promote an ecology of personal and social flourishing. This is not coincidental: the Genesis portrait of marriage is one of culture-formation, not just home-formation. It's why faith and healthy marriage go together. Furthermore, the church can also be called the forged family for the unmarried, for single parents, and for the fatherless. There is much ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah, 1956: "The young Waezin should each try and find new arguments based on the discoveries in all branches of science for keeping the human soul like [sic] the ocean with the Divine wisdom and power."] ARTICLE: During my undergraduate years, I read The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. That book incited a quest to determine whether I was an accident of nature or created by God? Many religious leaders attempt to harmonize evolutionary theory with their faith, but they fail to realize that evolution, as taught in most academic settings, denies any possibility of guidance or intentionality. Then, in 2016, I attended the Summer Seminars and a turning point in my career. Even more striking was evidence from multiple disciplines demonstrating that scientific materialism is hopelessly inadequate. I can never forget participants' shock at the disparity between what the public is told about the state of evolutionary science and what leading researchers now know to be true about the actual data from ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- The deadline for U.S. applications to the "Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design" is March 4. The Seminars is a FREE, week-long program (July 10 to 18, 2020), held in Seattle, for current undergraduates and graduate students. It includes course materials, lodging, and most meals for accepted students. Travel scholarships are also available. A previous graduate, Beth, wrote how her life was changed. "I was 19 and a junior at my university when I was accepted to The Seminars, a gathering of philosophers, paleontologists, biologists, and astronomers all in the same room. If you want to discuss the great questions of biology, I strongly encourage you to apply for this all-expense-paid event. I haven't met one alum who wasn't grateful to come. Set aside a couple hours for the application. You won't regret it." Learn with the star scientists and scholars of the ...

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NEWYORKER.COM -- The lesson from, New York Times bestselling author, Philip Tetlock's book, "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?", is that experts on television or quoted in newspapers are no better at making predictions than the rest of us. Specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. In fact, those who spend their lives studying the world are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys. And the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. Tetlock teaches at Berkeley and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began 20 years ago. He got a statistical handle on his task and measured his experts on two ...

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LARVATUS.COM -- My topic for today is speculation in media. Why is it so ubiquitous? Is it because people want it? I don't think so. Consider the advantages of speculation from a media standpoint. Speculation shows are the cheapest thing you can put on television. Almost as cheap as running a test pattern. Speculation requires no research, no big staff. Just get the talking host, book the talking guests and you're done! Instant show. No reporters around the world, no film crews on location. No deadlines, no footage to edit, no editors...nothing! Just talk. You can't lose. You are never accountable. The audience does not remember yesterday, let alone last week, or last month. And it's not confined to the media. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- How can serious scientists or philosophers convince themselves that their own consciousness "doesn't exist" or is a "mistaken construct"? What, exactly, is thinking the thought that their consciousness doesn't exist? I want to understand what makes the consciousness of an intelligent human being deny, with a straight face, its own existence. What kind of conscious inner dialogue do these people engage in to convince themselves that they have no conscious inner dialogue? Short of assuming that they are insane, fantastically stupid or dishonest we have an authentic and rather baffling mystery in our hands. My present opinion is that materialists are so fanatically committed to materialism that they ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- When the history of modern materialism is written, it will be a catalogue of almost incomprehensible folly. The striking irony is that many of the most strident claims by materialists are not merely empirical and logical nonsense; much of materialism is self-refuting. The widespread assertion by educated public "intellectuals," like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, that we are meat-sacks without free will is self-refuting gibberish. Consider his assertion that free will doesn't exist and that all human actions are fully determined by material processes--biochemistry, neurophysiology, evolution, and such. Meat can metabolize and secrete, but it can't argue. Meat has no opinions. Meat is neither right or wrong. Denying free will is denying the ability to deny. Yet Coyne's assertion ...

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NYTIMES.COM -- America's public schools are still promoting devices with screens -- even offering digital-only preschools. The rich are banning screens from class altogether.... Parents say there is a growing technological divide between public and private schools even in the same community. While the private Waldorf School of the Peninsula, popular with Silicon Valley executives, eschews most screens, the nearby public Hillview Middle School advertises its 1:1 iPad program. ...

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