Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr says that he is not thinking the way he used to think. He says that he notices it the most when he reads; that immersing himself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy, and that’s rarely the case anymore. He says his concentration often drifts away from what he’s reading, gets fidgety and starts looking for something else to do and that he has to force his brain back on the text. He also says that the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. Carr Nicollas noticed that for over a decade now he spends a lot of time online, searching and surfing. He says the Web has been a godsend to him as a writer.Carr believes the Net is lessening his capacity for concentration and contemplation, that his mind simply just takes in the information the way the Net has it. He says that once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. He notices similar experiences with his friends and acquaintances. Most believe the more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some think this phenomenon has occurred because since reading online has become more convenient, the way people read has not changed but maybe the way they think has changed.

A recently published study of online research concluded that it is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of reading are emerging as users power browse horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist believes we may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology. That when we read online, we tend to become mere decoders of information. Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. A British mathematician Alan Turing believes that the Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. Carr says that the kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. Carr believes ultimately that as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

I agree with nicholas Carr, because internet makes everything easy and that' s why we get to forget about what we learned easily. Internet makes people not reading books anymore because they feel like it' s taking forever, and also boring. People can' t stand reading books anymore, because internet has the summary almost for every book. I also agree that info on the Web may lead to the lack of a persons ability to make mental connections to text and think deeply about what they are reading. With access to all kinds of sources online it is easy to find an article etc, skim it, form a understanding of it, then move on to the next article and do the same, only to forget it later because its so easy to obtain that there is no mental connections being made to the text. But Internet is a new technology, i think it' s the same as a book, it' s just shorter maybe or quiker to find a new information. I think everybody believes in new technology.

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?

John Donohue and Steven Levitt wrote a paper about legalization of abortionin 1970s to reduce crime in the 1990s. The purpose of the study is to better understand the reasons for the sharp decline in crime during this decade, which, prior to their research, had largely eluded explanation.
The theoretical justification for their argument rests on two assumtions: 1)Legalized abortion leads to fewer "unwanted" babies being born, and 2) unwanted babies are more likely to suffer abuse and neglect and are therefore at an increased risk for criminal involvement later in life. At that point, the question merely becomes: Is the magnitude of the impact large or small?

Their preliminary research suggests that the effect of abortion legalization is large. According to their estimates, as much as one-half of the remarkable decline in crime in the 1990s may be attributable to the legalization of abortion. They based their conclusions on four separate data analyses.
First, they demonstrate that crime rates began to fall 18 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion across the nation, just the point at which babies born under legalized abortion would be reaching the peak adolescent crime years. Steven levitt thinks this is the weakest of their data analyses. He says the world is a complicated place and it would be simplistic to believe that legalized abortion could overpower all other social determinants of crime. Second, they show that the five states that legalized abortion in 1970--three years before Roe vs. Wade--saw crime begin to decrease roughly three years earlier than the rest of the nation. But to him this is still far from conclusive. Third, they demonstrate that states with high abortion rates in the mid-1970s have had much greater crime decreases in the 1990s than states that had low abortion rates in the 1970s. And this is the evidence that really starts to convince him. Fourth, they show that the abortion-related drop in crime is occurring only for those who today are under the age of 25. According to Steven Levitt they can make no judgment as to whether legalized abortion is good or bad. In no way does their paper endorse abortion as a form of birth control. In no way does their paper suggest that the government should restrict any woman's right to bear children. Their paper actually has very little to say on such topics. He thinks the crux of the misinterpretation of their study is that critics of their work fail to see the distinction between identifying a relationship between social phenomena and endorsing such a relationship. To him it has been both fascinating and disturbing how the media have insisted on reporting this as a study about race, when race really is not an integral part of the story.

I definitely agree with Stven Levitt, because as he said in this world we can not make any judgement whether legalized abortion is good or bad. I do believe that abortion is bad because God made as and he is the only who can make any judgement about our lifes. But abortion should be legalized not because it decreases crimes but because in some cases it should be. Also in some points Steven Levitt could give more of his opinion about why he thinks abortion should be or shouldn' t be legalized so the readers could be able to give him better feedback.

Mothers Killing Their Newborns

Why they kill their newborns? By Steven Pinker, we should try to understand the reasons why they do this. According to him killing a baby is immoral can understand why without forgiving, also its motives are not always moral. Humans invest most care in babies out of all nammals, and mothers are the ones who choose how much energy to invest in babies based on what they have. And according to Pinker poor young unmaried isolated women are more likely to kill their kids. Also even mothers who kill their newborns have feeling, in HG cultures, babies aren' t considered people at births. He gives some examples by comaparing the penalities in different contries. For example, in USA and Britain no women spent more that a night in jail. But in Europe, their laws prescribed less- sever penalities for neonaticide that for adult homocides. He also copmpares AbortionRights, Birth Control, IUD and Lame Fethuses. He also compared the difference between animals world as they were born ready, and humans world as we have to be nutured into the personhood. In the end he said, we need a "Crispinageration of person hood". Mother hood is natural instinctive- Every living has the right to live-neonnates could become mothers.

Bruce Chapman was talking about Pinker' s Essay. He says that Pinker is twisting evidence by saying that neonative isn' t immoral, and that he didn' make it clear enought that neonaticide is wrong. But actually Bruce Champman didn' t understand what Pinker said, he didn' t really read good enought all the details and examples he gave.

I definitly agree with Steven Pinker. He was so clear by all the examples and compaires he gave the readers. He gave us a biological explanation about neonaticide-why mothers kill their newborns.