Adam Clare

Yes, You Have Changed

You have changed. The person you are today is not the same person you were years ago. Being able to change your mind is the mark of a smart person because you can re-frame how you think based on new information. Indeed, we can rethink our personalities too, more and more researchers are discovering that we can indeed alter our personalities whenever we want to.

A growing batch of recent studies suggests that adult personality can be altered at any age â€“ though, as Bleidorn and her co-authors show in a 2017 study, the magnitude of such shifts is by far the greatest for people in their 20s. And after we hit our 80s, the general pattern of change is no longer for the better. In one Scottish study which followed people for six years after the age of 81, their extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness all declined significantly as they grew older. â€œAs a system, we tend to deteriorate as we get closer to dying, and personality traits are a kind of indirect indicator of our overall functioning,â€ says Roberts.
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If youâ€™d like to change at least some part of your personality, youâ€™re in good company. A staggering 87 to 97 percent of people said they would too, in a 2014 survey with 200-plus participants published in the Journal of Research in Personality. Conscientiousness topped the wish list of desired traits. Luckily, given the proper tools, says Roberts, people can indeed alter their personality.

Exposing Exxon’s Elaborate Escapades in Eluding the Electorate

Exxon (and other oil companies) knew all about the harm their products cause to the environment 40 years ago, yet they kept making profits despite threatening all life on Earth. This is some real-life cartoon villain stuff that sounds made up, but it’s real and it happened. In fact, it’s still happening. Without a doubt it’s bad that oil companies are profiting off of the death of the planet. The good news is that people are exposing the evil behaviour of these massive corporations then using this information to fight the corporations. Remember protesting works.

Unearthed reporters posed as recruitment consultants looking to hire a Washington DC lobbyist for a major client and approached McCoy and Easley for meetings over Zoom. During the meetings, the undercover reporter asked about Exxonâ€™s current and historical lobbying on environmental issues.

It is important to note that neither McCoy nor Easley were necessarily seeking a new job, but each was willing to talk and provide information to the purported recruiters.

Over the coming days, Unearthed, will also reveal:

Claims that Exxon covertly fought to prevent a ban on toxic chemicals

How Exxon is using its playbook on climate change to head-off regulations on plastic

California Congressman, Rep. Ro Khanna, told Unearthed: â€œFor decades, fossil fuel companies have lied to the public, to regulators, and to Congress about the true danger posed by their products. Todayâ€™s tape only proves our knowledge that the industryâ€™s disinformation campaign is alive and well. In the coming months, I plan to ask the CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies to come testify before my Environment subcommittee. We can no longer allow Exxon, or any other companies, to prevent our collective action on the climate crisis.â€

A Startup Wants to Help Predict Floods

For years engineers tried to prevent flooding, then they realized they can’t stop nature. Now instead of trying to stop it, we try to mitigate flooding by creating spaces that can absorb a lot of water (parks along rivers are an example of this). Still, these attempts don’t always work and with increasing instability in our climate it’s getting harder to deal with more extreme flooding instances. This is where a new startup, Floodmapp, fits in. They are using machine learning and AI to improve how we understand flooding instead of the traditional physics-driven modelling.

The companyâ€™s premise is simple: We have the tools to build real-time flooding models today, but we just have chosen not to take advantage of them. Water follows gravity, which means that if you know the topology of a place, you can predict where the water will flow to. The challenge has been that calculating second-order differential equations at high resolution remains computationally expensive.

Murphy and Prosser decided to eschew the traditional physics-based approach that has been popular in hydrology for decades for a completely data-based approach that takes advantage of widely available techniques in machine learning to make those calculations much more palatable. â€œWe do top down what used to be bottoms up,â€ Murphy said. â€œWe have really sort of broken the speed barrier.â€ That work led to the creation of DASH, the startupâ€™s real-time flood model.

Real time.

Philosophers Help Scientists do Better Work

Some empiricists argue that science is a separate discipline from philosophy, and those thinkers may want to rethink their stance. The debate isn’t philosophy or science, the debate is actually how much philosophical rigour should be applied within a certain field of research. In order to effectively advance scientific fields scientists practice philosophical processes and patterns of thinking.

This hopefully comes to no surprise to many readers as we often see on this site that cross disciplinary practices usually provide the best approach. Plus, historically science and philosophy are one.

The researchers identified a substantial body of work by philosophers of science that used â€œphilosophical tools to address scientific problems and provide scientifically useful proposals.â€ They call such work philosophy in science. So what kind of tools do philosophers use that can be applied to science? The study authors donâ€™t offer an exhaustive list, but point to activities such as making distinctions and proposing definitions, critiquing scientific methods, and combining multiple scientific fields as examples of typical philosophical tools. And while scientists use these methods too, they donâ€™t tend to do so as often or as rigorously as philosophers.

How To Make North American Homes Climate Friendly

Everyone is well aware that low density, sprawling, and energy inefficient is bad for the planet. Years of mindless development have left us with homes which are not well built for the current climate. It’s imperative that we get these homes to be climate friendly, here’s how. The Guardian has a nice article on the various ways people can convert their inefficient housing into a climate-friendly structure.

Deep reductions in emissions will involve revamping the major appliances in the home, such as the water heater, furnace and air conditioning unit. As these items become older, they become wasteful and they will need to be replaced by more efficient appliances that run off clean electricity.

Some of these replacements will be relatively innocuous, such as the installation of heat pumps, which will be in the basement or on the side of the house. Heat pumps work on principles similar to a refrigerator, shifting heat from outdoors indoors and vice versa. They can heat and cool your home and can also heat your water with an efficiency rate four times greater than a gas-powered version.