12 Reasons Why Apple Cider Vinegar Will Revolutionize Your Health

Recently, one of my good friends shared with me her story of how she cured her eczema naturally using apple cider vinegar (ACV).

Since she was a young girl, her skin would break out in painful, itchy rashes which she would treat with doctor prescribed and recommended steroid creams.        

Noam Chomsky - a rebel with a cause

Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/GlobalConversationYT/

Croatian President Kolinda Grabar- Kitarovic from peace, recession to feminism

Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/GlobalConversationYT/

Donald Trump has reached a deal with a manufacturer to keep jobs from going to Mexico

By Jim Tankersley and Danielle Paquette

An Indiana-based manufacturer of air conditioners said Tuesday evening that it has reached an agreement with President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, to keep nearly 1,000 jobs in the state that had been slated to move to Mexico.

A Trump transition official confirmed that Trump and Pence will travel to the state this week to announce the agreement with the company, Carrier, one which hands the incoming administration an early symbolic victory as it seeks to boost U.S. manufacturing employment.

Google’s AI Reads Retinas to Prevent Blindness in Diabetics

GOOGLE’S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE can play the ancient game of Go better than any human. It can identify faces, recognize spoken words, and pull answers to your questions from the web. But the promise is that this same kind of technology will soon handle far more serious work than playing games and feeding smartphone apps. One day, it could help care for the human body.

Demonstrating this promise, Google researchers have worked with doctors to develop an AI that can automatically identify diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause blindness among adults. Using deep learning—the same breed of AI that identifies faces, animals, and objects in pictures uploaded to Google’s online services—the system detects the condition by examining retinal photos. In a recent study, it succeeded at about the same rate as human opthamologists, according to a paper published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“We were able to take something core to Google—classifying cats and dogs and faces—and apply it to another sort of problem,” says Lily Peng, the physician and biomedical engineer who oversees the project at Google.

But the idea behind this AI isn’t to replace doctors. Blindness is often preventable if diabetic retinopathy is caught early. The hope is that the technology can screen far more people for the condition than doctors could on their own, particularly in countries where healthcare is limited, says Peng. The project began, she says, when a Google researcher realized that doctors in his native India were struggling to screen all the locals that needed to be screened.

In many places, doctors are already using photos to diagnose the condition without seeing patients in person. “This is a well validated technology that can bring screening services to remote locations where diabetic retinal eye screening is less available,” says David McColloch, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Washington who specializes in diabetes. That could provide a convenient on-ramp for an AI that automates the process.

Pronouns {Johnson: Singular they}

FACEBOOK made quite a splash last week. Not with a new service or the announcement of some smashing financial results. Instead, the company will allow users to choose something besides “Male” or “Female” for the gender on their profile. It's a change that transgender people and others who do not feel 100% male or female have greeted with joy and relief.

Facebook’s radical move—radical in the best sense—was accompanied by another, but altogether less radical, change. If someone doesn’t want to be known as either male or female, that same person will not want to see, on others’ Facebook pages, the message “Wish him a happy birthday!” or “Wish her a happy birthday!” How should they be referred to?

When to Use “Which” and “Who”

Did you know that which has been around in various forms since the eighth century? Who dates to sometime before 900. Despite hundreds of years of use, the terms still confuse some speakers. How can you decide between these two interrogative pronouns?

Interrogative pronouns are used to form questions. Who can serve as the subject of a question, such as “Who was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?” It always refers to a person. For instance, the answer to the question above is Aretha Franklin. In the past, who was not used as an object, except in casual writing and speech. In recent years, who often replaces whom.

Which can serve as the subject of a question, too. A familiar example is “Which came first—the chicken or the egg?” The answer—the chicken, because egg shells form using a protein that exists only in the ovaries of a chicken—is a noun, a thing.

Many find it harder to use who or which as relative pronouns than as interrogative pronouns. Who is still restricted to people: The man who started the petition delivered it personally to the board. Mr. Johnson, who was my mathematics teacher in elementary school, finished first in the marathon. Which describes things. The hammer, which my father accidentally left on the roof, fell during the spring rains.

Will you be part of the first generation to master the age-old who and which? You can be, if you spread the word: Who is always associated with people. Which is used with things.

How Grammar Influences Legal Interpretations

Grammar is important, but it’s not a matter of life or death. Or is it? How does grammar influence the legal system? Researchers decided to find out by conducting an experiment. Does the wording of the description of a murder affect whether jurors classify a crime as first- or second-degree murder? According to their findings, “legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but [most significantly] limited to temporal dynamics… In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context.” In other words, grammar plays a part, but the study participants also paid attention to context when making their decisions. Is grammar as significant in real-life legal cases?

Trump is meeting with an ex-bank CEO who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and return to the gold standard

As President-elect’s Donald Trump’s transition rolls on, more and more attention is being paid to possible selections for a variety of high-ranking positions and meetings that might help decide these appointments.

On Monday, Trump will meet with John Allison, the former CEO of the bank BB&T and of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

How the son of an African goat herder became a Nobel Prize contender

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Daniel A. Anderson/UC Irvine Communications)

By Chandrahas Choudhury

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of the novels “Arzee the Dwarf” and the forthcoming “Clouds.”

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is Africa’s most celebrated novelist, a writer and activist who has been a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature. For more than five decades, Thiong’o has in his novels (“Weep Not, Child,” “Petals of Blood”), plays (“The Black Hermit,” “The Time Tomorrow”) and essays (“Barrel of a Pen”) sparked much fruitful discussion and controversy about power and justice in colonial and post-colonial Kenya and — in a literary version of the same question — the place of English vis-a-vis other languages in modern African literature.

Facebook Shouldn’t Fact-Check

By JESSICA LESSIN

Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive of Facebook, on Saturday. CreditEsteban Felix/Associated Press

We finally got a grudging mea culpa from Mark Zuckerberg: an admission that fake news is a significant problem that his social network must help solve.

But as a journalist who has been covering the inner workings of the technology industry for more than a decade, I find the calls for Facebook to accept broad responsibility for fact-checking the news, including by hiring editors and reporters, deeply unsettling.

7 Things You Need To Lose To Make 2016 Your Best Year

by Luke Miller Truth Theory

We live in a world of gains and goal, new year’s resolutions and the pursuit of more. While I am not saying we shouldn’t be striving for more in some areas of our lives, you will usually see more bang for your buck in what you lose, than what you gain.

Think of it like this, we are born into the world and as long as there are no issues with the birth, we pretty much have a clean slate. As time goes by we pick up habits, some good, and some bad. By the time we leave school we have so many habits stacked on top of one another that we generally do not know our true self, from our conditioned self.

By the time we are deep into adulthood, we have been pushed, pulled and guided in a  million directions, which can often lead to a huge sense of overwhelm. Then every New Year we try and add another 5 habits to the million we already have.

In this article I am trying another approach, the opposite to resolution, what I would like to call a reso¬lose-ions were we focus on losing habits that are unhealthy and sabotaging our growth, instead of gaining new ones!

Radical Hope: Philosopher Jonathan Lear on the Paradoxical Seedbed of Courage and Cultural Resilience

“Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future,”wrote the poet and philosopher David Whyte in contemplating crisis as a testing ground for courage. But the future at which courage must aim its gaze is often one obscured by the blinders of our culture’s current scope of possibility.

In January of 2009, Elizabeth Alexander took the podium at the Washington Mall and welcomed Barack Obama to the presidency with her exquisite poem “Praise Song for the Day,” which made her only the fourth poet in history to read at an American presidential inauguration. Seven years later, facing a radically different and radically dispiriting landscape of possibility,

J.K. Rowling Loses Her Billionaire Status Because Of Being Too Generous

J.K. Rowling was one of the richest people in the world in 2011, but since then her fortunes have decreased to such an extent that she is no longer a billionaire. Forbes announced their yearly list of the World’s Billionaires, but the Harry Potter author’s name was noticeably absent.

She was one of 129 people to be removed from the list that year, but her reason for leaving is a little different to the normal reason. The 51-year-old author’s departure was due to her sizeable donations to charity, as well as the high British taxes she is asked to pay.

Debate Continues: Did Your Seafood Feel Pain?

Part of our weekly "In Focus" series—stepping back, looking closer.

Chefs have been grappling with the question for years: What's the best way to humanely kill a lobster?

Some cooks recommend tucking the invertebrate into the freezer for an hour, while others prefer quickly stabbing it behind the eyes. For the serious seafood gourmand, there are even stun devices that are advertised as the only way to humanely kill your joint-legged dinner.

All of this hand-wringing and contradictory advice raises a basic, but as yet unresolved question. Can lobsters and other creatures most of us know as seafood actually feel pain?

The scientific debate on the subject has intensified recently, with a team of British researchers proposing this month that electroshock tests suggest crabs indeed feel pain. But the study has drawn scrutiny, while another study late last year pushed back on the idea that fish, more closely related to humans than are crabs, feel pain.