Word: causality
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...half of the variation in student opinion survey scores used by universities for promotion, tenure, and teaching award decisions may be due to the easiness of the course and the sexiness of the professor.” Felton mentioned that “correlations aren’t necessarily causal,” but pointed out that by taking into account the student comments that are posted alongside the ratings, it became clear that in most cases there was a causal relationship. “The obvious thing is that students are looking for an easy class...
...likely to start an argument is the author's novel proposition that the imperative to link cause and effect derived directly from our earliest hominid ancestors' discovery of tools as many as 2 million years ago. The ability to fashion a flint spear, he speculates, promoted a kind of causal thinking that was beyond other species: take a certain type of stone, hit it in just such a way, and it will leave a cutting edge. The later development of another tool, language, enabled early humans to explain the technology, and in the evolutionary twinkling of an eye we found...
...patterns fosters cognitive development. "Babies are very good at tracking statistical information in their environment," says Laura Schulz, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at M.I.T. "They're incredibly sensitive to human action and to intentional acts in the world. They watch what people are doing to learn causal connections." Babies will grab the same object over and over, replicating experiences, testing them out, conducting their own experiments. If I smile, will Mommy smile back? Providing babies with consistent actions and reactions helps them make sense of their world and the people...
...meant to recognize individuals who have played “critical roles in the public health arena,” but he added that “these critical roles are not without their attendant scientific controversies.”“There are always areas of causal uncertainty that take a long time to resolve, but there is often also an urgency to prevent harm and protect the health of people,” Bloom said. “The impetus from citizens and communities is necessary both to expose health problems and eventually to solve them...
...converge” is an inadequate, and indeed somewhat meaningless, descriptor for this rich story. Are the factors that participate in the triple convergence mutually reinforcing? Is the relationship among them linear and causal? How does the fall of the Berlin Wall, a singular historical event in 1989, “converge” with open-sourcing...