Roxana

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

But What Use Is It – Judging the Value of New Ideas

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If you could transport yourself back to the 1840s and ask the people what might improve their lives, it’s unlikely anyone would have responded, ‘How about some blue sparks leaping between copper spheres?’ Yet, that’s what Michael Faraday presented in his experiments before a puzzled audience. When Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, having witnessed Michael Faraday’s demonstration of the newly discovered phenomenon of electromagnetic induction [a fundamental force of nature most commonly used to generate electricity], asked: ‘But what use is it? Faraday famously replied, …

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Changing the Face of War – Sir Harold Gillies and the Origins of Modern Reconstructive Surgery

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[Describing World War I] Only one village in all of France escaped without losing at least one of its citizens. This explains why, even in the tiniest of villages, there is a monument honouring those who were killed in the war. Every year, wreaths are laid, and ceremonies are held. Wherever we went, people kept returning to one theme: the extraordinary amount of blood that had been shed. “World War II,” they would say. “Oh, it was terrible, but it was nothing compared to …

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Tips and Tricks for Travelling with Kids

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Mommy, I have a feeling I have never felt before. It’s excitement, and joy, and anger that you never brought me here before, and unbelievability that something this beautiful can exist. A nine-year-old girl arriving in Venice, Italy Lawrence Cohen – The Opposite of Worry We’ve been home for a week after a long-awaited break, and I am still lingering in vacation mode. Here are some tips and tricks my husband and I use to make a family vacation enjoyable. Pre-Vacation Planning Learn from Previous …

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Integrating the Zone of Proximal Development, Deliberate Practice, and Flow into Child Education

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Lev Vygotsky introduced the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) during the 1930s as a groundbreaking and counter-educational theory to the child development theories proposed by Maria Montessori or Jean Piaget. Vygotsky acknowledged the benefits of curiosity-driven settings for motor and practical skills but argued that a teacher or a more knowledgeable individual was necessary for specific domains, such as mathematics or writing. He proposed that in such areas, there are learning tasks within a child’s grasp and other tasks that are too far ahead, …

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How Joseph Lister’s Visionary Approach Changed Modern Medicine

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Until the middle of the nineteenth century, surgery was nothing more than butchering services provided by barbers or people with no formal medical training (some were even illiterate), which performed tooth extractions, bloodletting, enemas, and amputations without a thorough understanding of either human anatomy or infection causes. No wonder hospitals were called Houses of Death, where mushrooms and maggots thrived in dirty sheets and, sometimes, the flesh of patients. Most patients were tortured in surgeries until they died or miraculously survived. As there were no …

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How Do People Change Their Minds? 

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In theory, the formula for changing our minds should be simple. We change our minds when we come across new information from credible and trustworthy sources that contradict our existing beliefs. But we tend to forget that Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings. Physicist Richard Feynman And so, because of the weight we give to our beliefs, feelings, or biases, changing a person’s mind can’t be solved through formulaic approaches. We may need help seeing what we can’t or …

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Letters to My Daughter: Let’s Talk about Gaslighting

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Sometimes, the best warning a parent can give their child is: watch this, watch this movie a hundred times. So it is the case with the 1944 movie Gaslight, a terrifying life lesson wrapped in less than two hours. Warning: Spoilers ahead! A husband viciously exploits his wife’s sweet naivety, leading her to doubt her own sanity. As a young girl, Paula witnessed the murder of her famous opera singer aunt (and guardian) in their London home. The murder isn’t solved, and Paula is sent …

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The Dangers of AI Fast Fashion Content

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The shock brought by the release of ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art chatbot from the AI research laboratory OpenAI, will redefine how we relate to writing. ChatGPT is an extensive language model trained on a dataset of billions of words and can generate human-like text. It was all good and fun to ask ChatGPT to rewrite Bohemian Rhapsody as the life of a postdoc, how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James version of the Bible, generate essays or Harvard applications in seconds. But the AI …

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