Khaled Al-Sebaei's Profile

The New Testament stakes out clear if seemingly contradictory positions: on the one hand is the admonition that a rich person has little chance of getting into heaven; on the other is the parable of the talents, which praises the servant who got the biggest return on his money. Islam, to this day, outlaws the charging of interest; Buddhism instructs its followers to abjure desire for material goods.

On a larger scale, religious denominations affect economics by creating bonds of trust and shared commitment among small groups, both necessary qualities for lending and trade. In the Middle Ages, studies show, monk-run estates outperformed those that used serfs, thanks to religiously inspired cooperation and frugality. The Quakers of 18th-century Britain, renowned for their scrupulous honesty, came to dominate British finance. Ultra-orthodox Jews similarly dominate New York’s diamond trade because of levels of trust based on religion. Modern religious kibbutzim on average outperform their secular rivals, in part because of trust built through engaging in communal religious rituals.

In 1905, Max Weber, a German sociologist who studied religions, identified what he called “the Protestant work ethic” as the driving force behind modern capitalism in the West.

The two collected data from 59 countries where a majority of the population followed one of the four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. They ran this data - which covered slices of years from 1981 to 2000, measuring things like levels of belief in God, afterlife beliefs, and worship attendance - through statistical models. Their results show a strong correlation between economic growth and certain shifts in beliefs, though only in developing countries. Most strikingly, if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth. Belief in heaven also has a similar effect, though less pronounced. Mere belief in God has no effect one way or the other. Meanwhile, if church attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies.

McCleary says this makes sense from a strictly economic standpoint - as economies develop and people can earn more money, their time becomes more valuable. For economic growth, she says, “What you want is to have people have their children grow up in a faith, but then they should become productive members of society. They shouldn’t be spending all their time in religious services.”

So what is it about religion that creates these economic effects? On one level, the connection seems intuitive: All the major religions extol virtues like self-discipline, sacrifice, and thrift. Some even preach that earthly success translates to good things in the afterlife, a kind of gold-plated stairway to heaven. Religion can, quite directly, affect what you earn - fundamentalists and evangelicals in the United States tend to have lower savings rates and incomes than members of other religions, in part because they have larger families and give away more of their money.

Belief’s influence on our economic behavior might even reflect biology. The special motivational power of hell, for instance, may lie deep in the human psyche. Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and his graduate student Azim Shariff set up an experiment that would make it easy for people to cheat on a difficult math test. They found that people who believed in an omniscient, vengeful God typically chose short-term suffering - that is, facing the test without the crutch of cheating - over possible eternal suffering. “Those who believed in a punishing God cheated less,” Norenzayan said in an e-mail. He considers his findings to be consistent with Barro and McCleary’s research.

“Learning from the brain is an attractive way to overcome power and density challenges faced in computing today,” said Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and lab director of IBM Research - Almaden. “As the digital and physical worlds continue to merge and computing becomes more embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, it’s imperative that we create a more intelligent computing system that can help us make sense the vast amount of information that's increasingly available to us, much the way our brains can quickly interpret and act on complex tasks.”

“The goal of the SyNAPSE program is to create new electronics hardware and architecture that can understand, adapt and respond to an informative environment in ways that extend traditional computation to include fundamentally different capabilities found in biological brains,” said DARPA program manager Todd Hylton, Ph.D.

Modern computing is based on a stored program model, which has traditionally been implemented in digital, synchronous, serial, centralized, fast, hardwired, general-purpose circuits with explicit memory addressing that indiscriminately over-write data and impose a dichotomy between computation and data. In stark contrast, cognitive computing - like the brain - will use replicated computational units, neurons and synapses that are implemented in mixed-mode analog-digital, asynchronous, parallel, distributed, slow, reconfigurable, specialized and fault-tolerant biological substrates with implicit memory addressing that only update state when information changes, blurring the boundary between computation and data.

ثالثا: مشكلة الخطاب الدينى منزوع السياسة: مفيد للغاية أن يعيد الخطاب الدينى الجديد اهتمام الناس بقضايا الأمة، لكن أغلب مشاكل هذه الأمة لها بعد سياسى دون أن يعنى ذلك التحزب أو الانتماء لتنظيم سياسى بعينه. فإذا كان بعض الدعاة حريصين على التأكيد على أن سرقة الدش حرام، فماذا عن سرقة الانتخابات والعزوف عن المشاركة فيها؟ فكم من هؤلاء المتدينين، لديهم بطاقة انتخابية ويذهبون لاختيار من يحكمهم أو يمثلهم فى البرلمانات. لا يتوقع عاقل من الدعاة أن يطلبوا من الشباب أن يعطوا أصواتهم فى اتجاه دون آخر، ولكن السكوت عن واجب المسلم السياسى يهمشه، ولا أعرف نهضة حقيقية يمكن أن تتحقق فى ظل غيبوبة سياسية كالتى نعيشها الآن ويساهم فيها الخطاب الدينى بباع طويل بتركيزه على أمور العلم بها لا ينفع والجهل بها لا يضر. لكن يبدو أنهم اختاروا المنطقة الآمنة بعيدا عن بطش الساسة.

فمادام الخطاب الدينى الجديد قد «سرق الجو» من أصحاب الرأى والفكر والعلم فى المجالات الأخرى، فعلى الدعاة أن يعلموا أن مسئوليتهم كبيرة وأنهم محاسبون ليس فقط على ما يقولون ولكن كذلك على ما يتجاهلون. ومن هنا فإن المنطق يقتضى بأن ننصحهم وأن نساعدهم على أن يتجنبوا السلبيات التى وقعوا فيها وأن يعظموا من عوائد ما أنجزوه حتى الآن. ورغما عن أننى شخصيا لا أطيق الاستماع لسطحية خطاب بعضهم لأكثر من دقائق معدودة، لكننى أدافع عن حقهم فى توصيل رسالتهم حتى وإن اختلفت معها. ولا تدرى لعلّ اللهَ يُحدثُ بعد ذلك أمرا.

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

One sign that this skill truly is innate: Children enter the world with a head for numbers.

Newborns consistently looked longer at the screen when the number of shapes matched the number of sounds they had just heard. For example, a baby who heard “tuuu, tuuu, tuuu, tuuu” would look the longest at four shapes, less at eight, and still less at twelve. Izard’s study suggests that newborns already have a basic understanding of numbers. Moreover, their concept of numbers is abstract; they can transfer it across the senses from sounds to pictures.

Mathematical intuition develops as we grow up, but probing its growth is tricky because older children draw on both their innate skills and the ones they learn. So scientists have come up with ways to force people to rely on intuition alone.

People do fairly well on these tests, which summons up a weird feeling in them: They know they are right, but they don’t know how they got the answer. Even in toddlers who cannot yet count, these studies reveal, the brain automatically processes numbers. From infancy to old age, mathematical intuition consistently follows two rules. One is that people score better when the numbers are small than when they are large. The other is that people score better when the ratio of the bigger number to the smaller one is greater.

Psychologists suspect that the mathematical intuition that these neurons help produce lays the foundation for all of our more sophisticated kinds of math. Justin Halberda of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues recently carried out a telling study of mathematical intuition in a group of 14-year-olds.

The fact that children possess a mathematical intuition long before they even start school implies that our evolutionary ancestors had it too. Indeed, recent research indicates that our forebears possessed such an intuition long before they could walk upright. Scientists have found that many primates, including rhesus monkeys, can solve some of the same mathematical problems we can. Since monkeys and humans diverged 30 million years ago, mathematical intuition presumably is at least that old.