This website includes over 150 interactive quizzes about basic sentence parts, verbs, prepositions, phrases and clauses,punctuation, pronouns, spelling and much more! In addition, clicking on the NUMBER immediately before the quiz's name will take you to the section of the Guide pertaining to the grammatical issue(s) addressed in that quiz.
A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash by Amy Harmon -NYTimes
ORANGE PARK, Fla. -- David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote "Evolution" in the rectangle of light on the screen.
He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.
"If I do this wrong," Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, "I'll lose him."
Infant Transplant Procedure Ignites Debate
Ethicists Question Strategy in Which Hearts Are Removed Minutes After They Stop Beating
By Rob Stein -Washington Post
Surgeons in Denver are publishing their first account of a procedure in which they remove the hearts of severely brain-damaged newborns less than two minutes after the babies are disconnected from life support, and their hearts stop beating, so the organs can be transplanted into infants who would otherwise die.
The Boundaries of Organ Donation after Circulatory Death
The New England Journal of Medicine
In the August 14, 2008 issue of the Journal, Boucek et al. report on three cases of heart transplantation from infants who were pronounced dead on the basis of cardiac criteria. Moderator Atul Gawande, of Harvard Medical School; George Annas, of the Boston University School of Public Health; Arthur Caplan, of the University of Pennsylvania; and Robert Truog, of Harvard Medical School discuss key ethical aspects of organ donation after cardiac death.
Perspective Roundtable: Organ Donation after Cardiac Death (Flash Video)
1. Introduction
2. Criteria for Death
3. Dying vs. Dead
4. Rethinking the Dead Donor Rule
5. Public Trust
6. Consent and Prognosis
7. Conclusions
Bring Clarity to Writing | ThinkSimpleNow.com
Have you ever read an email from someone that was too wordy, lacked focus, and left you confused? How can we learn from reading such emails to improve our own communication? How do we compose emails and writings that others will actually want to read?
The ability to write clearly is crucial to getting your message across no matter what you're writing, whether it's an email, a blog post, a magazine article, or a letter to a friend. Clear and concise writing is vital to having your words read and understood.
English wiki browser by chainofthoughts.com
Type in a subject you would like to research and this generates a list (you choose its length) of related keywords and topics. You can visit a Wikipedia page at any time or continue navigating through the related keywords until you find what you want. It is a very cool way of diversifying a research effort.
Ever wonder where your donations go when you give to charity by mail or over the phone? On average, commercial fundraisers deliver just 46 cents of each donated dollar to the charity. Some charities enjoy much better success, but in other cases ineffective fundraisers can take all the money that's raised.
To see how your favorite charities or causes did from 1997-2006, search our database. You can look up individual causes like St. Jude's Hospital and The Heritage Foundation, browse by charity types like animal welfare and disaster relief, or just page through the whole list.
THE BERTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY
Writings by Russell on the Web
A list of electronic texts of Russell's books and essays.
See also: Another excellent resource for texts east and west:
The Philosophy Pages at www.davemckay.co.uk
...a chronological list of Russell's books and essays.
From Big Bang to Us - Made Easy -A recently completed youtube series on Science and the history of the Universe. The 'Made Easy' series is designed to explain the evidence that shows how we got here, from the Big bang to human migration out of Africa. A better quality version will soon be available for free download from a website -- details to be announced. I will be happy to send DVDs free of charge to schools after the series is finished. (Full 11-part series)
By Potholer54 - I've been a journalist for 20 years, 14 years as a science correspondent. My degree is in geology, but while working for a science magazine and several science programs I had to tackle a number of different fields, from quantum physics to microbiology. My particular talent was my ignorance. By not understanding half of what I was assigned to cover, I had to reduce scientific discoveries from the complex to the simple. If I wrote it in a way that I could understand it, then my readers could understand it.
BBC/OU Open2.net - Ethics Bites Podcast - Practical ethics
We make decisions all the time. Some of these can be trivial (should I wear the white or the blue shirt?) and some can be important (should we operate or leave the patient to die?). Some of these decisions will involve thoughts about ourselves and what we want (where should we go for the weekend?) and some thoughts about other people (should we close the firm and make everyone redundant?). Some of these decisions will involve tastes and appetites (which chocolate?) and others questions of morals and ethics (should I tell my partner about my affair?)...
In the Ethics Bites you'll hear some of the leading contemporary philosophers talking about a whole range of issues. Some of these deal directly with ethical theory - for example, Miranda Fricker talking about making moral judgements about people6 distant from us in time or space - and some with issues of immediate practical relevance - for example, Peter Singer on the treatment of animals1.
Justice In The Brain: Equity And Efficiency Are Encoded Differently -Science Daily
Which is better, giving more food to a few hungry people or letting some food go to waste so that everyone gets a share" A study appearing in Science finds that most people choose the latter, and that the brain responds in unique ways to inefficiency and inequity.
The study, by researchers at the University of Illinois and the California Institute of Technology, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of people making a series of tough decisions about how to allocate donations to children in a Ugandan orphanage.
The researchers hoped to shed light on the neurological underpinnings of moral decision-making, said co-principal investigator Ming Hsu, a fellow at the U. of I.'s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
"Morality is a question of broad interest," Hsu said. "What makes us moral, and how do we make tradeoffs in difficult situations?"
Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions By Michael Le Page - New Scientist
If you think you understand it, you don't know nearly enough about it
It will soon be 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book ever written. In it, Darwin outlined an idea that many still find shocking - that all life on Earth, including human life, evolved through natural selection.
Darwin presented compelling evidence for evolution in On the Origin and, since his time, the case has become overwhelming. Countless fossil discoveries allow us to trace the evolution of today's organisms from earlier forms. DNA sequencing has confirmed beyond any doubt that all living creatures share a common origin. Innumerable examples of evolution in action can be seen all around us, from the pollution-matching pepper moth to fast-changing viruses such as HIV and H5N1 bird flu. Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.
THEOI GREEK MYTHOLOGY:, Exploring Mythology & the Greek Gods in Classical Literature & Art
The site now contains more than 1,500 pages profiling the Greek gods and other characters from Greek mythology and 1,200 full sized pictures.
The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all.
Was there a time or place in history in which censorship did not exist? Was there ever a group of human beings that was able to survive without censure? These questions precede and introduce The File Room, and locate censorship as a complex concept ingrained in our conscious/subconscious reality. Despite the impossible nature of attempting to define censorship, The File Room is a project that proposes to address it, providing a tool for discussing and coming to terms with cultural censorship.
Welcome to the largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet. The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship, and has the largest readership of any similar site on the web.
The Skeptic's Dictionary provides definitions, arguments, and essays on subjects supernatural, occult, paranormal, and pseudoscientific. I use the term "occult" to refer to any and all of these subjects. The reader is forewarned that The Skeptic's Dictionary does not try to present a balanced account of occult subjects. If anything, this book is a Davidian counterbalance to the Goliath of occult literature. I hope that an occasional missile hits its mark. Unlike David, however, I have little faith, and do not believe Goliath can be slain. Skeptics can give him a few bumps and bruises, but our words will never be lethal. Goliath cannot be taken down by evidence and arguments. However, many of the spectators may be swayed by our performance and recognize Goliath for what he often is: a false messiah. It is especially for the younger spectators that this book is written. I hope to expose Goliath's weaknesses so that the reader will question his strength and doubt his promises.
How to Write Faster, Better, and Easier
If you are a writer, you've probably wished that you could write faster, better, and easier. I have too. I've been writing for many years now and I've found some tricks that help. They just may help you too! Everyone has their own system, but sometimes learning about another person's system can flip a switch that enables you to improve your writing.
The Online Books Page -- University of Pennsylvania.
Listing over 25,000 free books on the Web
Recent studies of college students' attitudes toward religion suggest that the academy is no longer the bastion of secularism it was once assumed to be. And these studies further reveal that the spiritual landscape on today's college campuses is virtually unrecognizable from what we've seen in the past. Evangelicalism--often in the form of extra-denominational or parachurch campus groups--has eclipsed mainstream Protestantism. Catholicism and Judaism, too, are thriving, as are other faiths.
To help make sense of these changes, the SSRC offers this online guide, which was derived from a series of essays it commissioned from leading authorities in the field of religion and higher education.
The Best Online Research Apps/Sites You've Never Heard Of | OEDb
Research can be a time consuming and sometimes tedious task. How can you make it easier for yourself? While there is no complete substitute for a good old-fashioned trip to the library, you can find a wide variety of information with many research tools. Here are a few sites listed in alphabetical order. You might not be familiar with some of the resources, but they can help supplement and improve your research.
A buffet sure to leave you hungry
Among the most unlikely residents of Christchurch, a New Zealand city of 414,000, is a philosophy professor whose work reaches every corner of the planet, a man Time magazine described as one of the most influential media personalities anywhere. Denis Dutton, born in Los Angeles 63 years ago, sits down at his computer every day and carefully begins explaining the world to itself through Arts & Letters Daily, a great intellectual magazine that could have existed at no previous moment in history.
Paul Halsall/Fordham University: Internet History Sourcebooks Project
The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.
MagPortal.com - Magazine Article Search Engine, Directory, and News Feeds
Make your website more dynamic and
more useful with feeds from MagPortal.com.
Headline feeds with full-text article search allow your site users to find magazine articles on topics tailored for your website. Whether you operate a public website or an intranet site to keep your employees informed, news feeds can:
Keep users coming back to your site for fresh content.
Make your site more dynamic without the hassle of constantly updating your pages.
Provide a central location for finding relevant information.
Aid users in research with access to several years' worth of articles.
US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud - Chirag Mehta : chir.ag
This is the first I've seen of Tag Clouds. Interesting way to get a visual sense of prominent ideas in speeches.
See Tagcloud.com
BBC - Religion & Ethics - Ethics
The BBC site includes excellent coverage of many ethical issues (abortion, same sex marriage, war, sporting ethics, animal rights, capital punishment, lying, etc). The material is very good.
BBC - Religion & Ethics - Reasons
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/
Reasons
By BBC Team
Intellectual
Most atheists would offer some of the arguments on the following pages as their reason for deciding that God doesn't exist
Non-Intellectual
Many people are atheists not because they've reasoned things out like that, but because of the way they were brought up or educated, or because they have simply adopted the beliefs of the culture in which they grew up. It's the same for many believers. So someone raised in Communist China is likely to have no belief in God, because they rarely if ever, meet a believer, and because the education system and pressure from the people they meet make being an atheist the natural thing to do.Other people are atheists because they just feel that atheism is right. In the same way, many people of faith hold their beliefs because they just seem right to them.
BBC - Religion & Ethics - Atheism
Atheists are people who do not believe in a god or gods (or other immaterial beings), or who believe that these concepts are not meaningful.
Some atheists put it more firmly and believe that god or gods do not exist.
With Ken Taylor and John Perry of Stanford University. Produced by Ben Manilla.
Philosophy Talk originates live, Sundays at 10am, Pacific Time, from the studios of KALW, 91.7 FM, Information Radio, San Francisco. Check the Past Programs link!
Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing - lifehack.org
Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing
Update (24/07/2006): Replaced the links with archive.org.
Roy Peter Clark from Poynter Institute has posted up 50 tools that can help you when you do any kinds of writing. This is a extensive list of writing tools, but by no mean you need to apply all of them when you do any writing. There are the Writing Tool links:
Collection: All 6,288 Smithsonian Images
A collection of 6,288 images from smithsonianimages.si.edu which appear to be overwhelmingly in the public domain. See our memo for more information.
Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Main Page
The Internet Modern History Sourcebook now contains thousands of sources and the previous index pages were so large that they were crashing many browsers.
Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.
