Word: methods
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Professor Jeff W. Lichtman and his team painstakingly craft their colorful masterpieces—but their paintbrush is the genome, and their canvass the brain. Lichtman and his colleague Joshua R. Sanes, both molecular and cellular biology professors at Harvard, are mapping neurons with a pioneering method, dubbed “brainbow” for its psychedelic appearance. Already, the technique—recently honored with a Nobel Prize in chemistry—is shedding light on the development of the human mind, and how disorders such as Alzheimer’s and even anxiety alter the brain...
...Ballet dancers, they became the embodiment of Kylián’s social critique.The Wang Theatre’s heavy curtains first opened to reveal a white dress and a male dancer. Amidst a tense silence, a spotlight rested on the ruffled costume. The lighting was simple, a method used by Joop Caboort throughout the show to emphasize the minimalist nature of Kylián’s choreography. A dancer, concealed behind another until this moment, shifted to the right quickly and almost imperceptibility, revealing that there are in fact two. Without regard for a definitive start...
Fine, now how do you determine whether artistic or scientific creations are original and exemplary? One method Simonton and others use is to add up the number of times an individual's publications are cited in professional literature - or, say, the number of times a composer's work is performed and recorded. Other investigators count encyclopedia references instead. Such methods may not be terribly sophisticated, but the answer they yield is at least a hard quantity...
Still, there's an echo-chamber quality to this technique: genius is what we all say it is. Is there a more objective method? There are IQ tests, of course, but not all IQ tests are the same, which leads to picking a minimum IQ and calling it genius-level. Also, estimates of the IQs of dead geniuses tend to be fun, but they are based on biographical information that can be highly uneven. (Read TIME's 1999 cover story about the "I.Q. Gene...
...trying to prove the existence of God. And, of course, religious people, and I think rightfully so, say, No, no, no, that's a matter of faith. You are now crossed over, and you are trying to take science into the realm of religion and use scientific method and methodology to say that my faith is right or wrong. That's just not going to work, and I'm going to push back on that as a religious person...