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Values of Autonomy
This chapter presents a variety of considerations suggesting that autonomy is a valuable ideal, focusing on its value for (many) women. The focus is on women for several reasons. First, autonomy has not always been idealized for women. Even though autonomy is more widely encouraged and supported in women than ever before, it is still not regarded as a particularly feminine value or virtue. If a case for autonomy can be made out for women in particular against this history, then the case for autonomy in general should prove easier to secure. Second, feminist philosophers have figured prominently among those who have expressed doubts and reservations about the value of autonomy. Focusing on the case of women's autonomy in particular helps to answer those criticisms.
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian. | <urn:uuid:1ca9f069-a3a3-4d14-802d-42083f8fc20b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195138503.001.0001/acprof-9780195138504-chapter-3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382450/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00099-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951697 | 207 | 2.640625 | 3 | [
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Over its long history, Armenia has been subject to successive conquest. It was conquered by the Roman Empire in the 1st century followed by the Persian Parthian Arsacid dynasty. This dynasty fell to the Sassanids in the 3rd century, who annexed Armenia, only to lose it to the Roman Empire later in that century, who in turn returned the Arsacids to power. In the 7th century, Armenia came under Byzantine rule. The Byzantines ceded Armenia to the Arabs, who had conquered Persia and granted Armenia independence. Then Armenia was conquered by the Byzantine Empire (again), to be succeeded by the Turks in 1071. The Mongels conquered Armenia in the 13th century to be followed by the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. During the late 1800s, Armenian nationalists, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, or ARF, sought autonomy for Armenians, but were met with repression in what historians have called the first great genocide of the 20th century. Ottoman forces killed around 800,000 Armenians between 1894 and the end of World War I. After WWI, Armenia was proclaimed by the ARF to be a independent state in 1918. In 1920, the Bolsheviks invaded Armenia and formed a coalition government, proclaiming Armenia a socialist republic. In 1921, the Bolsheviks took complete control of the government, and the Armenian nationalists were expelled. Armenia became a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Purges began in Armenia and continued through the Stalinist regime in the 1930s. Largely as a byproduct of Mikhael Gorbachev's glasnost reform of the USSR, the movement for independence began anew in Armenia, and by 1991, Armenia succeeded from the Soviet Union and declared itself an independent Republic. The first presidential elections were held in October 1991, and Levol Ter-Petrossian, head of the Pan-Armenia National Movement (PNM), became the first popularly elected president of independent Armenia in November 1991. The country elected a Parliament, and against opposition by the ARF, the PNM won a decisive victory to claim a majority of seats in Parliament. Between 1990 and 1995 Armenia dissolved the political, legal, social, and economic relationships of the previous political system, while simultaneously creating new ones. In 1993 Armenia remained a weak state with powerful regional and family clans running much of the local administration and economy. Criminal gangs operated with impunity, corruption was rampant, and assassinations of political figures occurred on occasion. In the absence of a secure rule of law, the stresses of war and material privation, uncertainty about the future, and widespread suspicion about the legitimacy of the ruling elites destabilized the infant republic. In 1995, the second parliamentary elections and a new general referendum on a new constitution were held. According to the constitution adopted in 1995 Armenia is a presidential republic with power separated between the legislature, executive, and judicial branches of power. The constitution provides for the rule of law, separation of power, and guarantees fundamental human rights. In 1996, Ter-Petrossian was reelected to a second term. Robert Kocharian succeeded him in 1998 as president. Kocharian's election was significant since he had been president of Nagaro-Karabakh. Armenian leaders had been preoccupied by the long conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karbakh, a primarily Amenian populated enclave, assigned to Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1920s by Moscow. Armenia and Azerbaijan began fighting over the enclave in 1988; the struggle escalated after both countries attained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. By May 1994, when a cease-fire took hold, Armenian forces held not only Nagorno-Karbakh but also a significant portion of Azerbaijan proper. The status of Nagaro-Karabakh remains unresolved. In 1999, five terrorist gunmen opened fire on a session of parliament, killing the Prime Minister, the parliamentary speaker, and six top officials. The gunmen surrendered after assurances from Kocharian that they would receive a fair trial.
The Criminal Code of the former Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was adopted by the Supreme Soviet in 1961. Up to the time of independence, the Criminal Code was subsequently amended in line with changes in the Soviet criminal legislation. As will be discussed below, under this preexisting code, laws differed from those in the United States, particularly in regard to treatment of women. For instance, there were no specific laws banning violence against women, against prostitution, nor prohibiting trafficking in persons. However, these codes are being revised, based upon the new constitution. According to the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia, all international laws that Armenia has ratified or acceded to, have supremacy over national ones, and are an integral part of Armenia legislation. The death penalty has been abolished under the new code for economic crimes and desertion, leaving the penalty only for premeditated murders under aggravated circumstances, as well as for military crimes committed in time of war.
INCIDENCE OF CRIME
With the exception of murder, Armenia has a low rate of violent crime. In 1994, the homicide rate was 5.4 per 100,000, compared to 2.8 for assault, 0.6 for rape, and 2.9 for robbery. The rate of theft (including burglary) was 47.9 per 100,000. The U.S. State Department warns that common street crime has increased, especially at night. Generally incidents are limited to pickpocketing and other petty thefts. However, expatriates have been victims of several attacks involving knives in the last year. Robberies on board train service to Georgia are a problem. Though crime on the roads is rare, the police themselves often seek bribes at periodic checkpoints on main routes. Drug trafficking is increasingly significant in Armenia. Armenia is an illicit cultivator of cannabis, mostly for domestic consumption; however, it is increasingly used as a transshipment point for illicit drugs -mostly opium and hashish - to Western Europe and the US via Iran, Central Asia, and Russia.
TRENDS IN CRIME
Especially in the chaotic conditions that have existed during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Armenia has suffered steep increases in the gang activity of an organized mafia. Overall crime in 1991 increased 11.5 percent over 1990; then it increased 24.8 percent from 1991 to 1992. "Major" crimes (murder, robbery, armed robbery, rape, and aggravated assault) increased 3 percent from 1991 to 1992. The largest increases in that category were in murder, robbery, and armed robbery. White-collar crime (bribery and fraud) increased about 2 percent in that time, crimes by juveniles increased about 40 percent, and drug-related crimes increased 240 percent. According to one report, 80 percent of crimes committed in Armenia in 1992 were drug related. In 1992 and 1993, a police campaign temporarily limited the activity of a few large gangs, but gang leaders, whose identities were commonly known in Armenian society, used influence in parliament to stymie the efforts of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Some deputies in parliament were implicated directly in white-collar crime, and some even had been convicted prior to their election. From 1991 to 1993, six convicts were sentenced to death, but by early 1994 none had been executed. Possibly as result of the anti-crime campaign, crime dropped after 1992. As result, comparing the years 1990 and 1994, the total number of offenses reported to the police in Armenia decreased from 12,110 to 9,923 (-18%). Though the total number of intentional homicides (including attempts) stayed virtually the same, assaults decreased by 70%, robbery by 71%, and rape by 38%. Related to the anti-crime campaign, the total number of persons brought into formal contact with the criminal justice system for intentional homicides increased by 91.9%. The same pattern existed for other major crimes. Formal contact increased 154.9% for robbery, 20% for rape, 200% for theft, and an astounding 4000% for drug-related crimes. Related to these increases, there were increases in the total number of people prosecuted, brought before the criminal court, and admitted to prison. The trends of the past several years are encouraging: the number of crimes registered in 1999 has decreased by 0.7% as compared with 1998. Out of all registered crimes, 67.3% were legally punitive, while heavy crime cases constituted 11.6%, which is lower by 11% than in 1998. The crimes connected with appropriation of property (27.7%) have also declined. The situation is rather alarming concerning bribery cases and the number of economic crimes has increased by 14.8% and constitutes around 6.3% of the overall crimes. While the prevalence of drug abuse has declined slightly since 1996, an increase in narcotic-related criminal activity was registered too. Compared to 1993, such crimes have increased one and half times and the amount of drugs seized has increased thirty times. Seventy percent of narcotics confiscated in Armenia is imported. The difficult socio-economic situation, temptation of making easy money from drugs in an unstable economy, coupled with yet undeveloped system of drug control made Armenia a propitious territory for drug abuse and drug-related activities. Geographically Armenia is situated on crossroads of drug trafficking from Asia to Europe and during the last 10 years has become a transit route for illicit drug trafficking, while lacking the necessary technical facilities to fully counter this problem. Into the country, drugs are brought mainly from Russia and the Ukraine (via Georgia), and Iran, by road transport. The prices of drugs in the black market in Armenia are considered the highest in the region. Among the age and the social group of drug abusers, prevail those of the age of 18-20 (47%) and the irregularly employed (60%). According to the Centre of Toxicology, the number of registered cases of drug use has increased from 610 in 1996 (66% hashish and 34% opium) to 1,438 (90% of hashish and 10% of opium) in 1998. According to the Centre, the number of drug addicts is close to 300, while the operative data of the Special Department of the Interior Ministry indicate the figure of 20,000.
All police agencies are under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Border patrols are administered by the Main Administration for the Protection of State Borders. Some of the patrols on the Iranian and Turkish borders are manned by Russian troops, whose presence is partially funded by Armenia. The rest of the border patrols are made up of Armenian troops serving under contract. In the early 1990s, growing radical opposition to the moderate domestic and foreign policies of the Ter-Petrosian government endangered internal security. By 1993 a widespread breakdown of law and order in the republic had eroded the authority of the Armenian state. Shortly after independence, a special internal security force was formed under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, whose special status in the government alarmed many observers in the ensuing years. The original mission of the internal security force was to prevent guerrilla attacks on military installations in the first months of independence. Since that time, this militia also has acted as the sole general (and nominally apolitical) police force. As originally formed, the internal affairs unit had 1,000 troops, including one assault battalion, two motorized patrol battalions, and one armored patrol battalion. Three specialized companies, including a canine unit for drug detection, also were formed. Elements of the former KGB have remained active under Armenian direction. In early 1994, Armenia completely reorganized the State Administration for National Security (SANS), the umbrella agency of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that heads all national security activities. All agency activities except border patrols were suspended for three months while staff were reevaluated and an announced focus on intelligence and counterintelligence was introduced. The controversial measure may have been instigated by the assassination of Marius Yuzbashian, a former chief of the Armenian branch of the KGB; SANS had failed to investigate the assassination fully when it occurred, in the fall of 1993. Experts saw a serious long-term threat to internal security in the independent mercenary Fidain forces that had been trained and expanded by Armenian political parties to fight in Nagorno-Karabakh. The end of the Karabakh war would free these combat-hardened forces, which did the bulk of the fighting in Karabakh, for possible guerrilla activity within Armenia on behalf of their respective opposition parties. Most cases of police brutality go unreported, due to fear of police retribution. Impunity remains a problem. Homosexuals complained that police physically and mentally abused them and demanded bribes; such abuse reportedly increased when homosexuals were unable to pay police. Yezidis complained that police routinely failed to respond to crimes committed against Yezidis. In April 2000, police reportedly did not intervene to prevent harassment and abuse of members of Jehovah's Witnesses by local hoodlums. A few cases of police brutality were reported after the intervention of local human rights groups. The Helsinki Association received two complaints from citizens about beatings at the police precincts in the village of Kasakh and in the Korhrdain community in Yerevan. Both petitioners agreed to file a motion to the Procurator General's office; however, one of them later refused to proceed with his case.
Arbitrary arrest and detention is a problem. Authorities continued to arrest and detain criminal suspects without legal warrants, often on the pretext that they were material witnesses. An amendment to the Criminal Code reduces the length of time the police have the right to detain suspects without official charges from 96 to 72 hours. The police frequently imprison detainees without notifying their family members. Often several days pass before family members obtained information about an arrest and the person's location. The Constitution and laws prohibit torture; however, the practice of security personnel beating pretrial detainees during arrest and interrogation remains a routine part of criminal investigations, and prosecutors rely on such confessions to secure convictions. There were no reports that members of the security forces committed extrajudical killings due to severe beatings and mistreatment in detention. However, there were no reports of government action against individuals who may have been responsible for the reported 54 deaths in custody in 1999. Security agencies often restrict access of lawyers and family members to prisoners until the preliminary investigation phase is complete, a process that can last weeks. Although the Criminal Procedure Code has entered into force, the Criminal Code remains under consideration in Parliament. A suspect may be detained for no more than 12 months pending trial, after which the suspect must be released or tried; however, this latter provision is not always enforced in practice and lengthy pretrial detention remains a problem.
The legal system of Armenia is based on a civil law system. A civil law system is based on codes enacted by the legislature and made into laws, and the judiciary has less power to shape law than it would in a common law system. The Constitution provides for an independent judiciary; however, the Constitution's provisions do not insulate the courts fully from political pressure, and in practice, courts are subject to pressure from the executive and legislative branches and some judges are corrupt. Legal and constitutional provisions make judges and prosecutors dependent on the executive branch for their employment. The system, inherited from the Soviet system, views the court largely as a rubber stamp for the prosecutor and not as a defender of citizens' rights. The Constitution mandates a three-level court system: The highest court is the Court of Cassation. There are two lower-level courts, the Appellate Court and courts of the first instance. First instance courts try most cases, with a right of appeal to the Court of Appeals, and then to the Court of Cassation. District courts are the courts of first instance. Their judges are named by the president and confirmed by the parliament. The Supreme Court, whose chief justice is nominated by the president and elected by a simple majority of parliament, provides intermediate and final appellate review of cases. The court includes a three-member criminal chamber and a three-member civil chamber for intermediate review and an eleven-member presidium for final review. The full, thirty-two member court provides plenary appellate review. The Constitutional Court rules on the conformity of legislation with the Constitution, approves international agreements, and decides election-related legal questions. It can accept only cases proposed by the President, by two-thirds of all parliamentary deputies, or election-related cases brought by candidates for Parliament or the presidency. Because of these limitations, the Constitutional Court cannot ensure effective compliance with constitutional human rights safeguards. The general prosecutor is nominated by the president and elected by parliament. The general prosecutor's office moves cases from lower to higher courts, oversees investigations, prosecutes federal cases, and has a broad mandate to monitor the activities of all state and legal entities and individual citizens. The general prosecutor appoints district attorneys, the chief legal officers at the district level. Prosecutors continue to greatly overshadow defense lawyers and judges during trials. Under the Constitution, the Council of Justice, headed by the President, the Procurator General, and the Justice Minister, appoints and disciplines judges for the tribunal courts of first instance, review courts, and the Court of Appeals. The President appoints the other 14 members of the Justice Council and 4 of the 9 Constitutional Court judges. This authority gives the President dominant influence in appointing and dismissing judges at all levels. The selection of judges is often based on scores on a multiple-choice test to determine potential judges' fitness under the system, and on their interviews with the Minister of Justice. The list of nominations is then approved by the Council of Justice and, finally, by the President. Approximately 55 percent of the appointed judges in 1999 had been judges under the old structure. Based on the results of this four-stage selection, 123 judges were appointed to the courts in January 1999. Judges are subject to review by the President, through the Council of Justice, after 3 years; unless they are found guilty of malfeasance, they are tenured until they reach the age of 65. The military legal system operates essentially as it did during the Soviet era. There is no military court system; trials involving military personnel take place in the civil court system and are handled by military prosecutors. Military prosecutors perform the same functions as their civilian counterparts, and operate in accordance with the Soviet-era Criminal Code. In November 1999, the Military Prosecutor was named Deputy Procurator General, and placed in charge of the investigation into the October 1999 shootings in Parliament. The Criminal Procedure Code does not allow detainees to file a complaint in court prior to trial to redress abuses committed by the Prosecutor's Office, the police, or other security forces during criminal investigations. Witnesses have no right to legal counsel during questioning while in police custody--even though failure to testify is a criminal offense--and detainees must obtain permission from the police or the Prosecutor's Office to obtain a forensic medical examination to substantiate a report of torture. Although defense lawyers may present evidence of torture in an effort to overturn improperly obtained confessions and, according to law, all such charges must be investigated, judges and prosecutors routinely ignored such complaints even when the perpetrator can be identified. All trials are public except when government secrets are at issue. Defendants are required to attend their trials unless they have been accused of a minor crime not punishable by imprisonment. Defendants have access to a lawyer of their own choosing. The court appoints an attorney for any indigent defendants who need one. However, in 2000, the local Helsinki Association conducted a survey of the courts together with the International Helsinki Federation, the International Union of Armenian Lawyers, and the Moscow Helsinki Group. According to their report, 38 percent of 50 respondents stated that they were not provided with defense attorneys during the preliminary investigation. Reportedly individuals choose to defend themselves in court because they have little respect for a defense attorney's professional skills and ethics. Defendants may confront witnesses and present evidence. The Constitution provides that those accused of crimes shall be informed of charges against them; however, the constitutionally mandated presumption of innocence is not observed in practice, and acquittals are rare once a case comes to trial. Defendants and prosecutors have the right to appeal; however, figures released by the Association of Armenian Judges showed that in 2000, three out of four appeals were turned down by higher courts.
Three major prisons are in operation, at Sovetashen, Artik, and Kosh. Local jurisdictions also have jails. All prisons and jails are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Soviet prison system remains intact in Armenia. That system includes two general categories: labor colonies, and prison communities similar to Western prisons. Prison system reforms call for establishment of general and high-security reform schools for teenagers; general and high-security prisons for women; and four grades of prisons for men, from minimum to maximum security. The death penalty is applicable for military crimes, first-degree murder, rape of a minor, treason, espionage, and terrorism.
There is no specific law banning violence against women, and few cases of rape, spousal abuse, or other violence against women are reported; however, their number likely is higher than the statistics indicate. Domestic violence cases usually are not reported to the police, and women are not protected from it. Several nongovernmental organizations exist in the Yerevan and Gyumri areas, which provide shelter and assistance to battered women. The law (the old Soviet Criminal Code) cites specific punishments for rape, forced abortion, forbidding a woman from marrying, and discrimination in hiring due to pregnancy. Prostitution is not illegal, and according to anecdotal evidence, most prostitutes stopped by police for street-walking, simply are sent to a hospital or physician for a medical check-up. Although, the Criminal Code does not forbid prostitution itself, keeping brothels is prohibited. According to an investigation conducted by journalists, more than 1,600 prostitutes were registered by the police, around 800 in the Yerevan area. A study of Yerevan prostitution done by an international NGO showed that while some operate by telephone, the vast majority are what is known as streetwalkers, with their "class" and desirability defined by the area of the city in which they operate. An international NGO reports that the problem of battered wives is much more widespread then the Government or local human rights groups will admit. Many cases are not reported to police in some cases because women are afraid of physical harm if they do so, afraid that police will refuse to take action and instead return them to their husbands, and in others because they are embarrassed to make "family matters" public. Even women's groups and health professionals decline to offer specific figures, but do not indicate that such violence is especially common. At least four cases were reported in the press of women who died as a result of domestic violence. In view of the phenomenon of Armenian women working as prostitutes in Russia and the Middle East, it is likely that trafficking in women and girls (particulary from the country) is more of a problem than the Government and women's organizations have recognized openly.
TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS
The law does not prohibit trafficking in persons specifically, although it does prohibit exploitation by force of persons for financial gain, and trafficking in women and girls from the country is a problem. However, specific information on trafficking is difficult to obtain and there is little information about trafficking within the country. The Criminal Code specifically prohibits the keeping of what generally are considered to be brothels. Prostitution itself is legal. Armenian women work as prostitutes in the Middle East and Russia, and in the past there have been reports of trafficking in women and girls to these countries. Young women and girls from socially vulnerable groups all over Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh are the main targets of traffickers. Trafficked persons often were lured by jobs abroad offered through recruiters and informal channels, tourism firms and some media. Reportedly, there were cases when older girls from orphanages and poor families are sold to wealthy men in Dubai. An orphanage run by a religious group reports that older girls have been approached by relatives urging them to "earn their share" for the family by engaging in prostitution. Most parents and relatives are convinced; however, that they are sending such children to work in the UAE or elsewhere as models, dancers, waitresses, or domestic servants. Traffickers themselves are often ex-prostitutes or pimps who have already established "good working contacts" in the country of destination. They are well organized, have connections with local authorities and are supported and protected by criminal gangs. Most potential victims are approached by persons whom they personally know (e.g. friends of friends, relatives of relatives, neighbors, etc.), or by travel agencies. Most often, recruiters tell victims that they will be working as babysitters, waitresses, or cleaning ladies. Only a few of the victims know before departure that they will work as prostitutes, but even these do not realize that they will have their documents and money confiscated and that they will be pressured to receive numerous clients every day to maximize their employer's profits. To tighten control over their "staff" procurers threaten to burn prostitutes' passports or to inform police about their "business." While there is no specific law prohibiting trafficking in persons, traffickers may be prosecuted under different articles of the Criminal Code. For example, illicit seizure of non-property documents (passports or other personal documents), as well as use of these documents, may be punished by imprisonment up to 1 year. Police officials announced the investigation of numerous cases of procuring but said that they were unable to arrest the main offenders because they resided in the Middle East rather than in the country. There have been few cases (four to five in 1999-2000) in which traffickers were prosecuted. Some officials from the Ministry of Interior complained that courts easily acquit procurers or sentence them to only minor administrative punishment and fines. In addition, victims usually are the main witnesses and are often reluctant to come forward out of fear of violent retaliations. Reliable information on trafficking has been difficult to obtain. Some NGO's and experts insist that local police officers, border guards and customs officers are involved in trafficking by accepting bribes from traffickers in exchange for tolerating their business. According to international NGO's, the Government appears to be focusing more on prostitution within the country than on trafficking; however, the Government acknowledges the problem.
Armenia is a party to three major United Nations drug control conventions: the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances; the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs; and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Despite the scarcity of financial resources, which reduces the government's ability to implement the national program in full scale, considerable work has been done in combating illegal drug trafficking. Interested state bodies cooperate to make their actions more effective, e.g., 400 tons of drug crops (mixed) were eliminated in Armenia. Joint activities of the Interior Ministry, Ministry of Health, and the Border guards to combat illegal drug trafficking involve different spheres: the draft Law on Drug Abuse is prepared, while the draft of the new Criminal Code includes provisions stemming from the requirements of the UN Conventions of 1961, 1971 and 1988; planned improvement in the diagnosis and treatment of drug abusers will allow early and more effective warning; law enforcement bodies and the Ministry of Health cooperate to reduce the drug supply and demand to meet the 2003 and 2008 UNGASS demand reduction goals. | <urn:uuid:47f5425b-fff1-4816-a76e-1cca9280fefb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/rwinslow/asia_pacific/armenia.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703532372/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112532-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967639 | 5,564 | 3.71875 | 4 | [
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
By Daniel Kahneman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 25, 2011)
I am always on the lookout for ways to improve my scientific thinking. That’s why I have an interest in the areas of sociology concerned with decision making in groups and how the individual is influenced by this. And this is also why I have an interest in cognitive biases - intuitive judgments that we make without even noticing; judgments which are just fine most of the time but can be scientifically fallacious. Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, fast and slow” is an excellent introduction to the topic.
Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Price for Economics in 2002, focuses mostly on his own work, but that covers a lot of ground. He starts with distinguishing between two different modes in which we make decisions, a fast and intuitive one, and a slow, more deliberate one. Then he explains how fast intuitions lead us astray in certain circumstances.
The human brain does not make very accurate statistical computations without deliberate effort. But often we don’t make such an effort. Instead, we use shortcuts. We substitute questions, extrapolate from available memories, and try to construct plausible and coherent stories. We tend to underestimate uncertainty, are influenced by the way questions are framed, and our intuition is skewed by irrelevant details.
Kahneman quotes and summarizes a large amount of studies that have been performed, in most cases with sample questions. He offers explanations for the results when available, and also points out where the limits of present understanding are. In the later parts of the book he elaborates on the relevance of these findings about the way humans make decision for economics. While I had previously come across a big part of the studies that he summarizes in the early chapters, the relation to economics had not been very clear to me, and I found this part enlightening. I now understand my problems trying to tell economists that humans do have inconsistent preferences.
The book introduces a lot of terminology, and at the end of each chapter the reader finds a few examples for how to use them in everyday situations. “He likes the project, so he thinks its costs are low and its benefits are high. Nice example of the affect heuristic.” “We are making an additional investment because we not want to admit failure. This is an instance of the sunk-cost fallacy.” Initially, I found these examples somewhat awkward. But awkward or not, they serve very well for the purpose of putting the terminology in context.
The book is well written, reads smoothly, is well organized, and thoroughly referenced. As a bonus, the appendix contains reprints of Kahneman’s two most influential papers that contain somewhat more details than the summary in the text. He narrates along the story of his own research projects and how they came into being which I found a little tiresome after he elaborated on the third dramatic insight that he had about his own cognitive bias. Or maybe I'm just jealous because a Nobel Prize winning insight in theoretical physics isn't going to come by that way.
I have found this book very useful in my effort to understand myself and the world around me. I have only two complaints. One is that despite all the talk about the relevance of proper statistics, Kahneman does not mention the statistical significance of any of the results that he talks about. Now, this is all research which started two or three decades ago, so I have little doubt that the effects he talks about are indeed meanwhile well established, and, hey, he got a Nobel Prize after all. Yet, if it wasn’t for that I’d have to consider the possibility that some of these effects will vanish as statistical artifacts. Second, he does not at any time actually explain to the reader the basics of probability theory and Bayesian inference, though he uses it repeatedly. This, unfortunately, limits the usefulness of the book dramatically if you don’t already know how to compute probabilities. It is particularly bad when he gives a terribly vague explanation of correlation. Really, the book would have been so much better if it had at least an appendix with some of the relevant definitions and equations.
That having been said, if you know a little about statistics you will probably find, like I did, that you’ve learned to avoid at least some of the cognitive biases that deal with explicit ratios and percentages, and different ways to frame these questions. I’ve also found that when it comes to risks and losses my tolerance apparently does not agree with that of the majority of participants in the studies he quotes. Not sure why that is. Either way, whether or not you are subject to any specific bias that Kahneman writes about, the frequency by which they appear make them relevant to understand the way human society works, and they also offer a way to improve our decision making.
In summary, it’s a well-written and thoroughly useful book that is interesting for everybody with an interest in human decision-making and its shortcomings. I'd give this book four out of five stars.
Below are some passages that I marked that gave me something to think. This will give you a flavor what the book is about.
“A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
“[T]he confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.”
“The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.”
“It is useful to remember […] that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is cost-less is wrong.”
“A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.”
“I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the fact of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.”
“The brains s of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.”
“Loss aversion is a powerful conservative force that favors minimal changes from the status quo in the lives of both institutions and individuals.”
“When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that maybe exposed to events no one has yet experienced, this is not good news.”
“We tend to make decisions as problems arise, even when we are specifically instructed to consider them jointly. We have neither the inclination not the mental resources to enforce consistency on our preferences, and our preferences are not magically set to be coherent, as they are in the rational-agent model.”
“The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, und unpromising research projects. I have often observed young scientists struggling to salvage a doomed project when they would be better advised to drop it and start a new one.”
“Although Humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgments and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help.” | <urn:uuid:f3e23106-43c2-4e73-987b-0d17dd29b4a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2012/08/book-review-thinking-fast-and-slow-by.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706635063/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121715-00099-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965581 | 1,648 | 2.546875 | 3 | [
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[NOAA] National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Services Center. Alternatives for Coastal Development: One Site, Three Scenarios. 2004 May 14. <http://www.csc.noaa.gov/alternatives/>
This website illustrates three different coastal development scenarios: conventional design, conservation design, and new urbanist design. It uses several indicators (water consumption, infrastructure costs, etc.) to compare the economic, environmental, and social differences that result from each approach.
[Daily, GC et al.] 1997. Ecosystem Services: Benefits supplied
to human societies by natural ecosystems. Issues in Ecology.
Number 2. Ecological Society of America.
This document focuses on services that natural ecosystems provide for humans such as, seafood, game animals, crops, wood for fuel and building materials, and pharmaceutical products. In addition it looks at the role nature plays in purifying our air and water, climate regulation, soil regeneration, nutrient cycling, and detoxification and decomposition of waste. It is one of the required modules for the US EPA Watershed Academy Certification Program. | <urn:uuid:3bac0d78-f95a-4457-8cc1-14da2a659847> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.coastal.edu/wwa/issues/bib/ab_ecoserv.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697843948/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095043-00095-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.833357 | 222 | 2.953125 | 3 | [
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Amazon Tribe Already Feels the Pinch From Climate Change & Deforestation
Like the Kalapalo people pictured here, the Kamayurá people, also living in the Xingu national park, get most of their protein from fish . Photo: e-giacomazzi via flickr
For a really great image of how environmental changes are already affecting people, in fact destroying an entire culture -- and no, not in some low-slung Pacific Island -- The New York Times has a poignant piece about how the Kamayurá people in Brazil are struggling today with deforestation and climate change making their way of life less and less tenable:Forest Homelands Now Surrounded by RanchesThe Kamayurá people live in the middle of the Xingu National Park -- which was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by ranches -- and live by hunting, fishing and some agriculture. They have done so for countless years. But changes in precipitation in the region -- brought about by a combination of deforestation and warmer temperatures -- are making things difficult to follow their traditional ways.
Fish Stocks Collapsed in 2006The fish stocks began to decline in the 1990s, the Times reports, and have collapsed completely since 2006. Fish farming has been considered, but water levels in rivers and lakes have dropped with the hotter temperatures and decreased rainfall.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. "There aren't as many around because the kids have eaten them," Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, "You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach."
Agriculture & Medicine Also SufferingThe tribe's agriculture has suffered as well, with traditional signals used to signal the start of the rainy season no longer accurate.What's more, traditional sources of medicine have become increasingly hard to find, as the flora in the region changes.
Read more about the plight of the Kamayurá and other indigenous groups -- who even less than people in Bangladesh, and other low-lying and low-emitting nations have done next to notion to create the problem -- as they try to cope with climate change: As Trees Fall in the Amazon, Fears That Tribes Won't Be HeardGlobal Climate ChangeBangladesh Want $4 Billion From Wealthy Countries for Climate Change Adaptation ProjectsAmazon Will Be Drier Because of Global Warming, But Won't Turn to SavannahNext Five Years Will Warm Faster Than Predicted, Scientists Say | <urn:uuid:7368fabf-1069-4473-9c7b-a73a6c0e29f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.treehugger.com/culture/amazon-tribe-already-feels-the-pinch-from-climate-change-deforestation.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706474776/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121434-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947904 | 587 | 2.65625 | 3 | [
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] | 3 |
Early detection strategies focus on identifying either the earliest pathological expression of disease before clinical signs appear or detecting the first clinical signs of disease. Screening tests can be conducted without full clinical presentation of disease. In some cases, surrogate markers can be employed for early detection when their presence is clearly associated with a disease. For example, high cholesterol is a surrogate marker for early detection of heart disease. In AD, neuroimaging may detect disease in the brain years before cognitive loss is apparent. The value of early detection results in the use of drugs and lifestyle interventions to slow or prevent the onset of disease in its earliest stages.
Andrew Blackwell, PhD
Prototype development for the Guided Neuropsychological Evaluation system for the early detection and differential diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease
Duration: 2008 - 2009See an abstract
Prototype development for the Guided Neuropsychological Evaluation system for the early detection and differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease Investigator(s): Andrew Blackwell, PhD Institution(s): Cambridge Cognition
Duration: 2008 - 2009
Cambridge Cognition Ltd (CCL) develops and markets software based medical devices based upon the world leading CANTAB technology invented at the University of Cambridge. This highly validated technology is already used by many of the world's leading researchers focusing on neurodegenerative diseases, and, in addition, is increasingly used by pharmaceutical companies in the drug development process. A series of independent studies have demonstrated that CANTAB measures of visuospatial associative learning and semantic memory are sensitive in detecting the earliest signs of prodromal Alzheimer's disease (up to 32 months prior to clinical diagnosis) both in memory clinic attendees (Fowler et al., 1995, Fowler et al., 1997; Fowler et al., 2002; Swainson et al., 2001; Blackwell et al., 2004) and in community dwelling cohorts of individuals classified as asymptomatic using current clinical measures (De Jager et al., 2002); De Jager et al., 2005). CCL now intends to take this core technology into mainstream healthcare with a particular focus on improving the early detection and diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. This is a particularly important and large unmet need which, given the impending registration of disease modifying drugs is now more urgent than ever.
Christos Davatzikos, PhD
University of Pennsylvania
Predicting conversion from MCI to AD via 4-dimensional pattern analysis and classification of ADNI imaging data
Duration: 2008See an abstract
Predicting conversion from MCI to AD via 4-dimensional pattern analysis and classification of ADNI imaging data Investigator(s): Christos Davatzikos, PhD Institution(s): University of Pennsylvania
The investigators will apply computer-based image analysis for early detection of structural patterns of brain change that characterize the development of Alzheimer’s diseaes in persons with amnestic mild cognitive impairment and identify patterns that predict which patients are likely to convert from MCI to AD. The project will use data from the Alzheimer\'s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a $60 million longitudinal study primarily funded by the NIH, the pharmaceutical industry, and by ISOA. The ADNI generates enormous amounts of longitudinal data on AD that is being made publicly available for research through supplemental funds. This proposal therefore represents excellent leverage of ISOA funds.
Kelvin Lee, PhD
Proteomic Technologies for the Analysis of the Disease Modifying Effects of IVIg Immunotherapy
Duration: 2006 – 2008See an abstract
Proteomic Technologies for the Analysis of the Disease Modifying Effects of IVIg Immunotherapy Investigator(s): Kelvin Lee, PhD Institution(s): Cornell University
Duration: 2006 – 2008
Significant progress has been made in identifying molecules involved in Alzheimer’s disease. However, there are currently no validated biomarkers for AD that aid in preclinical diagnosis, early diagnosis, or in the monitoring of the effectiveness of drugs in clinical trials or in clinical use. One approach to the identification of biomarkers relies on proteomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This approach has the potential to account for the multifactorial nature of the disease. There is evidence that univariate tests based on changes in CSF protein expression (for example of tau, phosphoTau, or Aβ42) may have some utility, but none of these offer significant improvement over a detailed clinical examination by an experienced physician. By relying on new statistical methods well-suited to proteomic analysis, the investigators have identified a panel of 23 biomarkers that offer a significant opportunity to improve current diagnostic methods. Current proteomic approaches depend on two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DE) as the primary method for detecting these 23 biomarkers. The development of nanobiotechnology-based proteomic methods for the detection of these biomarkers offers significant scientific and practical advantages in terms of sensitivity and specificity. In this study, the investigators will develop nanotechnology based, proteomic methods for the development of a panel of biomarkers that can be used in the early diagnosis of AD. The test will also be used for the monitoring of therapy in a clinical trial of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg).
Mark A. Gluck, PhD
Rutgers University - Newark
Novel Behavioral Screening Tools for Memory Assessment in Rodents and Humans
Duration: 2005 – 2006See an abstract
Novel Behavioral Screening Tools for Memory Assessment in Rodents and Humans Investigator(s): Mark A. Gluck, PhD Institution: Rutgers University
Duration: 2005 – 2006
We propose to develop novel behavioral assessment tools for detecting mild memory impairments (and improvements) that can be used both in mouse models of AD as well as in non-demented elderly and MCI patients. The project is collaborative with the Mayo Clinic, with the transgenic mouse work to be done with Michelle Nicolle at Mayo-Jacksonville, and the parallel human longitudinal MCI->AD conversion studies to be done with Ronald Petersen at Mayo-Rochester. This work will address a high priority need for current AD research: better behavioral paradigms for translational research between rodents and humans. These need to be sensitive to the selective assessment of memory impairments due to dysfunction to the septo-hippocampal memory circuits seen in MCI and early AD. There are three things that make our work unique: (1) our tasks directly translate from rodent to human studies for better pre-clinical to clinical translation of results, (2) our tasks are theoretically motivated by specific neuro-computational theories of the hippocampus in learning and memory (see Gluck & Myers, 2001, MIT Press book, Gateway to Memory: An Introduction to Neural Network Models of Learning and the Hippocampus), and (3) we have already collected and published evidence that our human tasks are highly predictive of very mild hippocampal atrophy seen in non-demented elderly and early MCI which others have shown is predictive of conversion to AD (Myers et al, 2002, 2003). Our tasks are more sensitive at predicting this early mild hippocampal-region atrophy than current standard neuropsychological memory tests Ultimately, this program of research will lead to a novel battery of behavioral tests, standardized across rodents and humans, that researchers can use to evaluate new Alzheimer\'s drugs that target the earliest stages of the disease.
Ely Simon, MD
NeuroTrax Corporation, Bayside, NY
Mindstreams Cognitive Testing for Early Diagnosis and Longitudinal Follow-up of Dementia:
A 3-Center Validation Study
Duration: 2003-2006See an abstract
Mindsteams Cognitive Testing for Early Diagnosis and Longitudinal Follow-up of Dementia: A Validation Study Investigator(s): Ely Simon, MD Institution(s): NeuroTrax, LTD | <urn:uuid:6ef158ba-de31-48d1-82f4-aabc51f73396> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alzdiscovery.org/index.php/research-programs/funded-programs-early-detection/page/4/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701910820/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105830-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.888721 | 1,598 | 2.53125 | 3 | [
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Food Glorious Food
Lesson involving a brainstorm on why we eat with a follow-up worksheet entitled "Balance your Diet" demonstrating the food groups.
4.5 The function of consciousness
What is consciousness? How does the brain generate consciousness and how can a science of the mind describe and explain it adequately? This unit will introduce you to the slippery phenomenon that is consciousness, as well as some of the difficulties consciousness presents to science and philosophy.
Fire ants on the ground
Ants are indirect decomposers because they bring fungi, a decomposer, to their nests in compost piles.
The Richmond MBA Graduation Testimonials 2011
Graduates from The Richmond MBA Class of 2011 sat down at the annual graduate reception and shared their memories and reflections on the program. Featuring: Connie Mattox, Landon Davis, Gray McDermid, Jamey Nolan and Joe Bergeron.
To read,vocabulary, grammar, writing: Who kann ich muffler zubereiten?
You will practice your reading skills and vocabulary about Judicial system and nationalities. You can change adjectives correctly. You will learn to write sentences in which you present typical Court cases.
Optical Microscope - Perform calibration checks
An introduction to procedures in scientific and medical testing laboratories for calibrating an optical microscope.
Support community participation
This competency has the following elements of competency. 1. Work with individuals and the community to promote participation. 2. Support existing community activities.
Infosys leaders on leadership
When Infosys Technologies Ltd. founder and CEO S. Gopalakrishnan addressed INSEAD as part of the Global Leadership Series in March, the 55-year-old corporate titan said he believes in leading by example. Now, the world is about to see if he practices what he preaches.
Description not set
Lesson 246: Culture/News Yellowstone: Monitoring the Fire Below Science Bulletins: Correlation to the National Standards 140: Growing a business with word-of-mouth marketing: the case of iXiGO.com Pricing and Pricing Strategies - Mini Lecture Stronger, Smarter, Nicer Humans
Undestrand the Politics' Crysis in Honduras in portuguese, listen and learn in this post of Brazilian Portuguese Podcast, the Effective Portuguese Learning
Check out our website, brazilianportuguesepod.com and find out more how we can help you improving your Portuguese!
This interactive feature story is part of Science Bulletins, an innovative online and exhibition program that offers the public a window into the excitement of scientific discovery. Published in June 2006, this Earth Bulletin looks at the geologic history of Yellowstone National Park. It includes the following components: Three online essays - Yellowstone National Park Is a Volcano, Signs of Restlessness, and Volcanic Witness; An Interview with Bob Smith -- each available in a print-friendly for
See how Science Bulletins materials correlate with National Science Education Standards.
Most start-up companies allocate a hefty budget for advertising and marketing at the beginning, especially when they have lofty goals of capturing market share. But an Indian online travel start-up has proven the unthinkable: you can do it all by word-of-mouth and not spend a penny on advertising.
A mini-lecture which introduces a number of pricing techniques
Julian Savulescu's 'Sydney Ideas Lecture' on Human Enhancement was originally broadcast on ABC Radio National in Australia, August 19 2007.
Yellowstone: Monitoring the Fire Below
Science Bulletins: Correlation to the National Standards
140: Growing a business with word-of-mouth marketing: the case of iXiGO.com
Pricing and Pricing Strategies - Mini Lecture
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Welcome to the Birds of North America Online!
Welcome to BNA Online, the leading source of life history information for North American breeding birds. This free, courtesy preview is just the first of 14 articles that provide detailed life history information including Distribution, Migration, Habitat, Food Habits, Sounds, Behavior and Breeding. Written by acknowledged experts on each species, there is also a comprehensive bibliography of published research on the species.
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Let a squadron of southbound pelicans but feel a lift of prairie breeze over Clandeboye and they sense at once that here is a landing in the geological past, a refuge from that most relentless of aggressors, the future. With queer antediluvian grunts they set wing, descending in majestic spirals to the welcoming wastes of a bygone age.
The American White Pelican occurs mainly in western and southern portions of North America, breeding inland in colonies on remote islands and wintering along warm southern coasts. The species is of particular interest because of its large body size, conspicuous white and black coloration, graceful flight, highly developed cooperative foraging, and the somewhat comic proportions of its large bill and pouch. White Pelicans are most commonly seen at foraging and adjacent loafing sites, where they are tolerant of human observers if not approached too closely. At breeding colonies, by contrast, they are shy and prone to desert or to leave eggs and young exposed to predators if approached.
Early spring migrants often arrive at colony sites before winter ice has left all surrounding waters. Courtship begins almost immediately, starting with aerial flights of often dozens of birds circling prospective breeding sites. Groups of newly paired birds at the same stage of the reproductive cycle then begin to form dense, synchronized nesting clusters or sub-colonies. As more birds arrive, additional sub-colonies form on other nearby portions of the colony, with the different sub-colonies commonly at different stages of the reproductive cycle.
Upon hatching, the altricial young are totally dependent on parents for food, warmth, and protection. By about 3 wks of age, they become more mobile, typically forming large overnight creches for protection and warmth, while the parents stay at the foraging grounds except for trips to the colony to feed their young. Generally only one of the two young survives, the other being harassed or killed by its older nestmate, a form of siblicide.
Favored foraging sites are shallow marshes, rivers, and lake edges, where mainly fish of little commercial value are taken. White pelicans obtain their food by dipping their bills into the water and scooping up prey. They do not plunge-dive from the air like Brown Pelicans. Like some of the Old World species of pelicans, White Pelicans are widely noted for their habit of cooperative foraging. Coordinated flocks of swimming birds encircle fish or drive them into the shallows where they become concentrated and can be more easily caught with synchronized bill dipping.
The continental population of White Pelicans was considered threatened until the early 1960s by combinations of changing water levels, human disturbance, and possibly contaminants. The population has since recovered and continues to increase at >3%/year. These increases have created conflicts with the aquaculture industry in the Southeastern United States in the last decade, especially during spring migration.
The first significant inquiry into the biology of the American White Pelican was a study of food habits relative to game fish interests by Hall(1925) at Pyramid Lake, Nevada. Thompson (1933) provided the initial estimate of the continental population, which has been repeated at various intervals since (Sloan 1979, Vermeer 1970, Sidle et al 1985). Behle (1958) summarized a decade of studies of the natural history of the species on Great Salt Lake, and that volume along with the ethological observations of Schaller (1964) stimulated many additional studies of behavior and physiological ecology by Evans and his students at the University of Manitoba and breeding biology ecology by Knopf at Utah State University. Recent studies by King and his associates (King and Michot 2002, King and Werner 2001) have again focused on behavior and food habits of the species, specifically relative to economic impacts on aquaculture in the Mississippi River Delta region. | <urn:uuid:52dc3db4-fbd1-477d-b100-07c1964b90dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/057/articles/introduction | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702454815/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110734-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945184 | 994 | 2.8125 | 3 | [
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Have you always dreamt of having a little girl? Or maybe your heart is set on having a little boy? Well, new technologies are now allowing some couples to choose the sex of their child before pregnancy. Many couples wish to have a child of a particular sex in order to prevent certain medical illness or to help balance their families. Sex selection procedures are now available at fertility clinics worldwide to help couples conceive a child of the desired gender. Sex selection is a hotly debated procedure, though, and is associated with many ethical, moral, and legal concerns.
What is Sex Selection?
Sex selection, or gender selection, is any method used to increase your chances of having a child of a specific gender. Every egg contains one X chromosome while sperm contain either an X chromosome or a Y chromosome. When an X-bearing sperm fertilizes an egg, a girl is conceived, and when a Y-bearing sperm fertilizes an egg, a boy is conceived. Typically, you have about a 50% of conceiving a male child and a 50% chance of conceiving a female child. Sex selection techniques work to increase the odds in favor of having either a male or female child.
The History of Sex Selection
Gender selection has actually been around for centuries; in fact, methods of sex selection were recorded in hieroglyphics by the Ancient Egyptians. In the past, sex selection has relied on certain sexual positions, timing, or special foods eaten during pregnancy. But these methods are based on little or no scientific evidence, and don’t really increase your chances of having either a boy or a girl. Recent advances in technology, however, have allowed for sex selection to become much more precise and effective. Through these technologies, couples can significantly improve their chances of having a child of a specific sex.
Why Sex Selection?
The reasons for undergoing baby gender selection are numerous. The most typical reasons for choosing sex selection procedures include:
- Genetic Disease: Some couples are afraid of passing certain genetic diseases on to their children. There are genetic disorders associated with male children, such as hemophilia and muscular dystrophy. In order to avoid having a child with these disorders, some parents choose to have a female child.
- Family Balancing: Family balancing is also a popular reason to turn to sex selection. Couples who have already had a child often would like to have another child of the opposite sex, in order to balance their family.
- Death of a Child: Unfortunately, some parents lose their children at a very young age. Sex selection provides these couples with the chance of having another child of the same gender.
There are also certain cultural, economic, and social reasons for having a child of a specific gender.
Methods of Sex Selection
There are currently three types of sex selection procedures available.
The gradient method is one the simplest forms of sex selection technology. Sperm from the father is placed in a rapidly spinning machine called a centrifuge. As it spins, this machine helps to separate sperm with Y-chromosomes from those with X-chromosomes, which are heavier due to more genetic material. Sperm with the desired chromosome is then used in IUI in order to produce a child of the desired sex. The gradient method is associated with poorer success rates, but it is also less expensive than other sex selection options.
Flow cytometry is another sperm sorting technique. It uses fluorescent dye to highlight sperm that carry X chromosomes. This fluorescent dye adheres to genetic material within the sperm. Because X-bearing sperm contain more genetic material, these sperm pick up more dye than the Y-bearing sperm. A laser machine is then used to separate the two types of sperm. The sperm with the appropriate chromosomes are then used in IUI or IVF. Success rates with flow cytometry are high: you have a 60% to 70% of conceiving a child of the desired gender.
Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD)
PGD is one of the most successful methods when it comes to gender selection. This is a complex procedure that involves the creation of embryos that are then analyzed for cell structure and DNA. Embryos are created in a laboratory and allowed to divide. After three or four days, one cell from each dividing embryo is removed and analyzed for DNA and genetic material. Once the sex of the embryos are determined, only those embryos of the desired sex are implanted into the mother’s uterus through IVF. PGD is highly successful, giving you a 99% chance of having a child of the desired gender.
Costs of Sex Selection
Sex selection isn’t cheap, so it shouldn’t be done lightly. The gradient method is the most inexpensive procedure – one cycle of IUI with sperm selection will cost around $600. Flow cytometry is currently only available as part of a limited FDA-study. PGD testing costs between $2,000 and $4,000 plus the costs of IVF procedures.
Ethical and Legal Concerns
Sex selection is hotly debated in countries all over the world. This is because the sex selection procedures go against the moral and ethical concerns of many people. Some argue that sex selection perpetuates sexual discrimination and stereotyping. Many worry that sex selection will have a negative impact on the ratio of male to female births in certain countries. Others worry that it will lead to the desire to select other characteristics of our children, including hair color, eye color, and intelligence level. For these reasons sex selection based on non-medical reasons has been banned in certain countries.
Sex selection is available at fertility clinics throughout the United States. To date, there is no body that governs sex selection procedures and fertility clinics may offer it at their own discretion. However, sex selection techniques are typically only offered for those concerned about genetic disorders. Sex selection based on non-medical reasons is illegal in both Britain and Canada. If you are interested in sex selection techniques, be sure to contact your local government authorities for information in the laws in your country or state. | <urn:uuid:6d4712bd-7e90-45b2-ba0f-3a574744067c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sharedjourney.com/ivf/sex_selection.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701943764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105903-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949915 | 1,231 | 3.453125 | 3 | [
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] | 5 |
WHAT COLOR IS YOUR HORSE?
There are five basic body colors of horses.
- BROWN A brown horse has a mixture of black and brown in his coat.
In Europe, a "bay" is considered to be a brown horse.
- BAY A bay horse can be any shade of brown (which is a mixture of red
and yellow), with points such as tail, mane, muzzle and lower legs being black.
The brown can range from a light, almost tan or chestnut to a dark, seal color.
- BLACK A black horse is completely black, including muzzle and
flanks. Most horses that look black are actually a very dark bay.
- CHESTNUT A chestnut horse has brown skin and the hairs are actually
red. The shades vary from a light yellowy color to dark liver. The mane and
tail are usually the same color as the body but can be lighter. The lighter
coloring is called flaxen. Lighter colored horses are called sorrel; very dark
chestnut is called "liver chestnut".
- WHITE A truly white horse is born white and remains white. His hair
is snowy; he has pink skin and blue eyes. Cream horses are a variation, also
having unpigmented skin and pink or blue eyes, with a pale colored coat. Most
"white horses" are actually light grey.
There are also three major color variations in horses and three major color
- DUN Duns have black skin with an evenly distributed coat color and a
black mane and tail, similar to bay coloring. The coat color can range from a
pale yellowish color to the color of a dirty canvas. Dun horses usually have a
dorsal stripe down their backs and some have stripes on their forearms. The
lighter shades are called buckskin.
- GRAY A gray coat is actually a mixture of black and white hairs on
black skin. A foal may be born a solid color with a few white hairs sprinked in
his coat, but more white hairs will appear in the coat until he is gray at
maturity. "Dappled grey" looks mottled, while greys with clusters of
darker hair which sometimes include a reddish brown, are called "flea
- ROAN Roan is a mixture of white and colored hairs. White with brown
is called red roan; white with red is strawberry roan; white with black is
called blue roan.
- PALOMINO Palominos are golden horses with light colored, or
"flaxen" manes and tails.
- PINTO Pintos have a mixture of white and colored areas on their
bodies. Horses with black and white splotches are called piebald, while horses
with any other color than black are called skewbald. Pinto is a Spanish word
meaning painted. Painted horses are divided into two categories: Tobianos, the
most common, have white splotches across their backs which extend downward. On
Overos, the white extends from the belly and legs upward toward the back but
does not actually cross the back. Overos often have a "War Bonnet" or
- APPALOOSA This is a color breed. It is divided into three color
Leopard is a white horse with dark spots all over his body;
Snowflake is a dark horse with tiny white spots;
and the "blanket", the most well-known Appy pattern which usually
consists of a white blanket with dark spots on the rump.
Appys must meet
three minimum requirements: striped hooves, unpigmented sclera (white around
the cornea of the eye) and mottling of the skin, particularly on the nostrils,
muzzle, and genitalia. There are solid colored appaloosas but they must meet
the above requirements.
Many horses have markings on their faces and legs. Here are the more common
- BLAZE A white mark spread over the forehead and the length of the
face. If the blaze is exaggerated to cover the entire front of the face, the
term "bald face" or "war bonnet" might be used.
- STRIPE A white mark down the face, similar to a blaze but narrower.
- STRIP A white mark running partway down the face.
- STAR A patch of white on the forehead.
- SNIP A white or pink patch on the nose or lip.
- WHORL A patch of hair swirling opposite to the surrounding hair,
usually found on the forehead.
- SOCK White hair on a leg, looking like human ankle socks.
- STOCKING White hair on a leg, extending from hoof to hock or knee.
A full, legal description of a horse would include: name, age, color, breed
or type, sex, height, parentage, natural marks (such as those listed above and
patches on the body), whorls, acquired marks such as scars.
This article was kindly provided by Michelle
Staples, Staples Stables | <urn:uuid:d686e0e5-1a22-41c0-ab44-ff35cc5fb61e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.equiworld.net/horses/horsecare/colors&markings.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696384181/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092624-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931677 | 1,085 | 3.1875 | 3 | [
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] | 39 |
On May 1, the American Lung Association (ALA) will release its annual "State of the Air" report on air pollution levels in American cities. Like previous "State of the Air" reports, the news is alarming. The ALA claims "nearly half of the US population" lives in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. Metropolitan areas from New York to San Diego are given letter grades of "F" for air quality.
Before taking this year's ALA report at face value, reporters should ask the ALA report's authors a few questions to clarify the report's biases.
1. Is air quality in California, and the U.S. as a whole, better or worse than it was 10 years ago? Five years ago?
Discussion: Air pollution has been declining for decades. While southern California's air pollution remains the highest in the nation, southern California has made more progress than any other region. Figure 1 displays the improving trend in exceedences of the 1-hour ozone standard. National compliance with the 1-hour ozone standard went from about 50% in the early 1980s to 87% today.
About 40% of U.S. monitoring locations still exceed EPA's stringent new 8-hour ozone standard, but 8-hour ozone levels have been dropping as well. Virtually the entire nation (>99%) now meets all federal health standards for carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide. More than 96% of the nation complies with PM10 standards (particulate matter under 10 micrometers in diameter), and the compliance rate is about 70% for EPA's stringent new annual PM2.5 standard. PM2.5 declined 33% between 1980 and 2000, with the most polluted areas once again achieving the greatest reductions (see Figure 2 for PM trends).
These declining trends will continue in the coming decade (see discussion of question 4 below).
2. Is every single person in each city or county with an "F" grade exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution?
[If the ALA spokesperson says "Yes" to this question, it will mean they do not know what they are talking about and reporters can stop taking notes. See discussion below.]
Follow up question: For each county, "State of the Air" lists the number of days per year exceeding the 8-hour ozone standard. How many individual monitoring locations in a given county exceeded the ozone standard that many times per year? [The correct answer is zero for almost all counties with more than one ozone monitoring site (see Figure 6 below).]
Discussion: ALA "State of the Air" reports give an entire county an "F" grade if only a single air quality monitor within a county exceeds the EPA's strict new 8-hour ozone benchmark more than 3 times per year. But in most metro areas only a few monitors ever register an exceedence. In some metro areas, only a tiny percentage of the population lives in proximity to air quality monitors that exceed the EPA standard.
For example, ALA gave San Diego an "F" for air quality, claiming that San Diego experienced 16 exceedences per year of the EPA ozone standard. In fact, only a single rural location, Alpine, exceeded the 8-hour ozone standard more than 2 times per year (see Figure 3). 99.7% of people in San Diego County breathe air that meets both the EPA 8-hour and 1-hour ozone standards. ALA greatly exaggerated ozone levels in other metro areas as well (see figures 4, 5, and 6).
This one of the ways in which ALA was able to claim half of all Americans live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone—they simply included tens of millions of people who actually breathe clean air.
The point: One might argue that talking about the number of days smog is elevated somewhere in a region is not misleading and paints a fair picture of the nature of the regional pollution problem. But the health effects of smog depend on how often a given person is exposed. Since no one is exposed to smog anywhere near as often as the ALA claims, the public is being encouraged to vastly overestimate its risk from air pollution.
3. Does ALA believe that air that exceeds EPA's 8-hour ozone standard poses a major health risk?
Discussion: The EPA's new, stricter 8-hour ozone standard is was selected to offer protection to those people who are considered "most sensitive" to pollution, chiefly the elderly and people with respiratory ailments. Most Americans do not face significant risk from current levels of ozone. For example, the EPA projects that going from nationwide attainment of the 1-hour ozone standard to attainment of the 8-hour standard would reduce emergency room visits for asthma by 0.6 percent, even though the 8-hour standard is significantly more stringent. Comparison of air pollution levels in California counties shows that there is little relationship between air pollution levels and asthma prevalence (see Figure 7), while a recent study of California's Central Valley, funded by the California Air Resources Board, found that emergency room visits and hospitalizations for respiratory disease were lower on days with higher ozone. While no one believes ozone protects against respiratory harm, the effects of ozone at current levels are small enough that epidemiologists have difficulty detecting any change in health outcomes with changes in air pollution levels. Nevertheless, ALA claims 40% of Americans are "at risk" when air pollution exceeds the 8-hour ozone benchmark on just a few days per year.
Discussion: ALA claims in the "State of the Air" that "the improvement in ozone levels seen in 1999-2001 is likely due to favorable weather conditions rather than significant new measures to reduce pollution," and "much air pollution cleanup has been stalled during the past five years, because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has failed to take steps to enforce more the more protective ozone standard adopted in 1997." (p. 3, col. 1).
In fact, the downward trend in pollution levels has been ongoing and will continue. On-road pollution measurements show emissions from gasoline vehicles are dropping by about 10 percent per year, as the fleet turns over to more recent models that start out and stay much cleaner than vehicles built years ago. Diesel truck emissions are also declining, albeit about half as fast. Although motorists are driving more miles each year and population growth means more motorists on the roads, these increases in driving are tiny compared to the large declines in vehicle emission rates and will do little to slow progress on auto pollution (see Figure 8).
Emissions from industrial sources will also continue to drop. Starting in 2004, EPA regulations require a 60 percent reduction in summertime NOx emissions from coal-fired power plants and industrial boilers—the major industrial sources of ozone-forming pollution, and a 20 percent reduction in PM-forming SO2 from power plants between now and 2010. These reductions are in addition to substantial declines in industrial NOx and SO2 emissions during the last 30 years.
Clearly "State of the Air" is designed to generate alarming headlines—and aid fundraising for the American Lung Association—rather than provide the media and the public with accurate information on air pollution. Last August Andrew Goldstein of Time magazine wrote: "Fuzzy math and scare tactics might help green groups raise money, but when they, abetted by an environmentally friendly media, overplay their hand, it invites scathing critiques. . ." (From "Too Green for Their Own Good?" Time magazine, August 26, 2002.)
Joel Schwartz is an adjunct fellow at Reason Foundation and visiting scholar at American Enterprise Institute.
Steven F. Hayward is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Pacific Research Institute, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. | <urn:uuid:200d3504-e3d7-420b-8c58-d06c74d538ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://reason.org/news/printer/state-of-the-air-report | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132729/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943668 | 1,572 | 2.953125 | 3 | [
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All sorts of athletes came to the lab, cross-country skiers, runners, speed skaters, cyclists, oarsmen and lugers, to name a few, and if the work Arnot did with them was ad hoc to a degree that enraged conventional medical opinion, it was also pertinent. As Dr. Allan Ryan, now editor-in-chief of The Physician and Sports-medicine, says, "He has trained himself, which draws criticism from the classic exercise physiologists who want him to have a formal training, but his Lake Placid lab was active and useful."
No group was as well represented there as the cross-country skiers. Arnot had brought home from Europe the realization that in the off-season such skiers had to train the legs and upper body simultaneously. After the Games, Hall, now Canadian National coach, said, "I'm a lot smarter coach for having been involved with Arnot's work."
Arnot rigged a device to simulate poling—a pulley, adjustable for tension, and a cord with handles extending from each side—and had the skiers speed hike on an elevation-adjustable treadmill. He tried various combinations of arm-and-leg tensions and ultimately was able to prove that the skiers' isolated leg and upper body exercising had not been the most effective method of training.
Arnot also tested the athletes on a piece of sports science equipment called a breath-by-breath pulmonary gas-exchange system, which he linked up to a computer. It enabled him to determine each athlete's anaerobic threshold, the level of exertion at which lactic acid in the blood increases suddenly, causing breathlessness and burning in the muscles. That is the level at about which all endurance athletes should train to optimally increase their race pace, and no athlete benefited more from this testing than Doug Peterson of Hanover, N.H., a 28-year-old skier on the U.S. cross-country team, who says that he improved more in the last two years, having worked with Arnot, than in all the previous seven years. "Bob Arnot," he says, "has done more for elite athletes, in my sport, at least, than anyone else in the country."
Olympic competition began in February of 1980, and activity in Arnot's lab ended. Although the experience cost Arnot the $150,000, he says that it was worth that much and more to him, and he continues to be fascinated by the role of science in improving athletic performance. After Lake Placid he also had a new nickname to go with Doctor Ben Gay; a lot of people were starting to call him Doctor Sport.
One night late last April Arnot met his 29-year-old for dinner in New York, and soon thereafter he began a typically hectic five-week slice of life. He kicked off, characteristically, with a sleepless night in a hospital, followed, equally characteristically, by a 60-mile bicycle race in the a.m. That night, with a windsurfing race on Long Island ahead of him the next day, Arnot attended a formal dance given by Boston's Alliance Française. The band played '40s jitterbug music, and Arnot's date spent a good part of the evening and early morning in defiance of various Newtonian laws, whirling dizzily about his chest, shoulders and neck. Most of the other partygoers were content to watch, as Arnot, rarely known to resist an audience or a pretty girl, failed to resist again.
The next afternoon, windsurfing in the second of three triangle races, Arnot fell from his board and finished last. He had slept only three hours the night before, and he seemed to be having difficulty concentrating. But maybe that had something to do with the presence, just off his stern, of a photographer in a launch.
Three days later Arnot received a call from the U.S. Olympic Yachting Committee denying his request, made weeks earlier, to attend the Olympic windsurfing (board sailing) training camp in June. It had nothing to do with the results of the Long Island race; the committee said there was little chance of anyone weighing more than 140 pounds—Arnot weighs 185—doing well in Olympic competition. Arnot had raced creditably in heavy seas off Maui, a big man's game; as for competing in small waves, he was disappointed with the committee's decision but had to agree with its reasoning.
Now it was 7 a.m. at Claremont's hospital. Arnot was completing a 24-hour shift during which he had administered intravenous therapy to a truck driver with an acute asthma attack, X-rayed and examined a local millworker who had caught her arm in a machine, and examined a woman who had suffered a massive stroke, then confronted her family with his diagnosis and his opinion that the prognosis was poor. He had also put in some time with the Tartini and "worked the phones," as he puts it, running up a phone bill of $97 while arranging with his 29-year-old for jaunts to various Hamptons and calling all over the West to determine "the hot wheels" for an upcoming roller-skating race.
As a weary nurse asked, "What does he use for fuel?" Arnot could hardly wait for the day's activities to begin. He had had eight hours sleep, after all, only three nights earlier. At eight he was telling a breakfast gathering of the Newport, N.H. Chamber of Commerce, "...your overall life expectancy, and how you feel from day to day, is largely determined by what you do for yourself, by how fit you are." He was about to begin what he calls a Health Sports Day, in conjunction with the Newport Hospital, an NES affiliate. It would be his 10th such day in 1981. | <urn:uuid:92331af4-e15d-4019-ab5f-e634c42d4317> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1124910/6/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142617/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988015 | 1,220 | 2.6875 | 3 | [
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] | 2 |
Plasteel provides two Excel spreadsheets, one English and one Metric, that compute the volume of liquid in a tank given the rod depth measurement. These spreadsheets produce print-ready lookup tables that are specific to your tank's inside length and diameter.
Download:Tank Calibration Chart - English units (inches, gallons)Tank Calibration Chart - Metric units (millimeters, liters)
1. Open the downloaded spreadsheet and click the Set Up Tab at bottom.
2. Enter your Nominal Capacity into B5.
3. Enter your Inside Length into B8.
4. Enter your Inside Diameter into B9.
5. The Actual Capacity will appear in B13.
6. Click the Charts tab at bottom and the chart will be calculated.
7. Enter Inside Diameter, Inside Length and Capacity for future reference and print the chart. | <urn:uuid:a1d1c726-d873-468d-85dc-100b1eb8a6a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.plasteel.com/data_finder/calibration/calibration.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.773318 | 184 | 2.640625 | 3 | [
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Fineweb-Edu-Fortified
What is it?
Fineweb-Edu-Fortified is a dataset derived from
Fineweb-Edu by applying exact-match
deduplication across the whole dataset and producing an embedding for each row. The number of times
the text from each row appears is also included as a count column. The embeddings were produced
using TaylorAI/bge-micro
Fineweb and Fineweb-Edu were obtained by processing data from 95 crawls of Common Crawl, covering a time period from 2013 to 2024. More information about the original datasets can be found by consulting:
The contents of a randomly selected 500k rows from this dataset can be interactively explored in this Airtrain dashboard.
Deduplication
Deduplication in original Fineweb and Fineweb-Edu
During creation of the original Fineweb dataset, a variety of deduplication strategies were explored. The evaluation criteria used to assess deduplication strategies was to train ablation models on randomly selected subsets of the data, using a subset of up to ~350 billion tokens.
Using this mechanism, the Fineweb authors selected a MinHash algorithm, using parameters considering documents with approximately 75% similarity or higher to be duplicates. This deduplication was performed within each Common Crawl crawl. For example, it would have removed all approximate duplicates from the 20th crawl from 2013, but would have retained an identical record that showed up in both the 2013-20 crawl and the 2013-48 crawl. The authors note that applying the deduplication across crawls reduced the evaluation performance of the ablation models used for assessment. The proposed reason for this performance degredation is that data duplicated across crawls is more likely to be high-quality compared to data that is not, so leaving in the duplicates effectively upsamples the higer-quality data.
Following deduplication in Fineweb, Fineweb-Edu was extracted using a model-based quality classifier targeting educational content. It thus inherited the same inter-crawl deduplication strategy of Fineweb.
Deduplication in this dataset
Motivation
Given the findings that cross-crawl deduplication reduced ablation model performance, one might ask what the motivation is for producing a dataset that uses it. Our motivation was threefold:
- Reduce the number of rows that needed to be embedded by avoiding embedding of exact-match content
- Enable easier filtering of the dataset for subsets-of-interest
- Provide a version of the dataset for users whose training goals include avoiding training on non-unique tokens.
For use cases that would benefit from "re-hydrating" or filtering the rows based on how frequently
the text appeared in the original dataset, the new count column retains the number of appearances
of the associated text.
Procedure
The overall procedure was to remove exact matches that appeared in multiple crawls (also referred to as "dumps"). This was achieved by performing an md5 hash on the text column and removing rows with duplicate hashes. To make this tractable at scale, we first grouped all rows by the first two hex digits of their hashes, then looked for exact hash matches within each of the resulting 256 buckets of data. Note that unlike the intra-crawl deduplication, we only eliminated exact matches across crawls. For duplicated rows, a strong preference was given to keep the metadata (ex: dump, url) from the oldest crawl where the text appeared. Following deduplication and embedding, the data were grouped by the "dump" column, mirroring the organization of the original Fineweb-Edu dataset.
Deduplication stats
Deduplication removed approximately 74.7% of rows from the original dataset (from 1.279 billion in Fineweb-Edu to 0.324 billion rows in Fineweb-Edu-Fortified). This indicates that a substantial amount of data in Fineweb-Edu is present across multiple crawls.
The total token count in the deduplicated dataset is approximately 375 billion, compared to the 1,320 billion tokens in Fineweb-Edu.
Embeddings
To support use cases with Fineweb-Edu such as classification, clustering, semantic search, etc., we have produced an embedding vector for each row in the dataset. The embedding model TaylorAI/bge-micro was selected for its tradeoff of strong performance on MTEB benchmarks relative to its size (17 million parameters). The model's embedding space has 384 dimensions. The context-window of the model is 512 tokens (roughly several paragraphs of text); each row is embedded by using the first 512 tokens in its text field. Producing the embeddings took approximately 412 GPU-hours on Nvidia T4 GPUs.
Using via datasets
from datasets import load_dataset
fw = load_dataset("airtrain-ai/fineweb-edu-fortified", name="CC-MAIN-2024-10", split="train", streaming=True)
Considerations for Using the Data
This "Considerations" section is copied from the parent dataset: FineWeb-edu.
Social Impact of Dataset
With the release of this dataset we aim to make model training more accessible to the machine learning community at large.
While multiple open-weights models with strong performance have been publicly released in the past, more often than not these releases are not accompanied by the corresponding training dataset. This is unfortunate as the dataset specificities and characteristics have been demonstrated to have a very large impact and role in the performances of the models. As the creation of a high quality training dataset is a fundamental requirement to training an LLM capable of excelling at downstream tasks, with 🍷 FineWeb we (a) not only make the dataset creation process more transparent, by sharing our entire processing setup including the codebase used, we also (b) help alleviate the costs of dataset curation, both in time and in compute, for model creators by publicly releasing our dataset with the community.
Discussion of Biases
Efforts were made to minimize the amount of NSFW and toxic content present in the dataset by employing filtering on the URL level. However, there are still a significant number of documents present in the final dataset that could be considered toxic or contain harmful content. As 🍷 FineWeb was sourced from the web as a whole, any harmful biases typically present in it may be reproduced on our dataset.
We deliberately avoided using machine learning filtering methods that define text quality based on the similarity to a “gold” source such as wikipedia or toxicity classifiers as these methods have been known to disproportionately remove content in specific dialects and overclassify as toxic text related to specific social identities, respectively.
Other Known Limitations
As a consequence of some of the filtering steps applied, it is likely that code content is not prevalent in our dataset. If you are training a model that should also perform code tasks, we recommend you use 🍷 FineWeb with a code dataset, such as The Stack v2. You should also probably consider complementing 🍷 FineWeb with specialized curated sources (such as Wikipedia, for example) as they will likely have better formatting than the wikipedia content included in 🍷 FineWeb (we did not tailor the processing to individual websites).
Additional Information
Acknowledgements
Airtrain would like to thank the Fineweb/Fineweb-Edu team at Hugging Face for producing the original datasets, as well as for their support during work on Fineweb-Edu-Fortified.
We'd also like to thank @underspirit for pointing out the amount of reduction in dataset size that could be achieved via deduplication.
We owe gratitude to TaylorAI for the bge-micro embedding model.
Finally, thank you to the Hugging Face community for fostering a thriving ecosystem of models, datasets, and tools to support open-source AI.
Licensing Information
The dataset is released under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) v1.0 license. The use of this dataset is also subject to CommonCrawl's Terms of Use.
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