A Random Walk with Serendip

This past summer, I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship, which funded an NGO internship in Oaxaca, Mexico for four weeks. I worked at a school that taught children of all ages (infants to teenagers) who have been diagnosed with Down syndrome. Because my Spanish was not exactly comprehensible at first, I had a hard time communicating with the students. However, one of the students sensed my timidity with the language and would occasionally strike up a conversation...

By 9 a.m. on Mon, Nov. 16, please post here  a one-paragraph analysis of the findings of your initial research into the dimensions of choosing a college (or its curriculum). Support that analysis with an annotated bibliography of three web sources.

Is human cognition the same everywhere? Or do styles of cognition differ depending on geographic or cultural boundaries? Richard Nisbett explores these questions in his 2003 book “The Geography of Thought.”  Nisbett primarily focuses on differences between Eastern and Western thought, defining Westerners as people of European culture and Easterners as East Asian (including China, Korea, and Japan). He proposes that Easterners and Westerns have markedly different styles of thought, using...

One of the things "Generosity" continually makes me think about is how genetics and ethics are becoming so interwoven.  For instance, if a method for introducing a happiness gene (or any kind of gene, really) in to a person was discovered, should every newborn just have that gene?  It's a difficult question, as technology fast approaches the point where we could, theoretically, design our children with traits that were more desirable.  I get the sense that there is something...