Any theory of being American must explain one salient and striking fact: cruelty. America is the most cruel nation among its peers — even among most poor countries today. It is something like a new Rome. It has little, if any, functioning healthcare, education, transport, media, no safety nets, no stability, security. The middle class is collapsing, and life expectancy is falling. Young people die for a lack of insulin they cannot crowdfund. Elderly middle-class people live and die in their cars. Kids massacre each other in schools — when they’re not self-medicating the pain of it all away. The combination of these pathologies happens nowhere else — not a single place — in the world. Not even Pakistan, Costa Rica, or Rwanda. Hence, the world is aghast daily at the depths of American cruelty — yet somehow, they seem bottomless.(Of course I don’t mean that all Americans are cruel. I just mean that in the same way we say countries have attitude, dispositions, that there’s such a thing as a French or German national attitude or disposition, so, too there is an American one. Nor do I mean America is “the most cruel society in the world”. Can we really ever judge that? But it is uniquely cruel — a kind of special example — in weird, needless, and singular ways.)Let me throw that into relief. Scandinavians are the happiest, longest-lived, and most prosperous people in the world because they do not punish one another constantly — but lift one another up. But Americans do not believe this reality. The underlying sentiment that unites America’s manifold problems is a myth of cruelty.
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Evangelical Elites Are Out of Touch | Carl R. Trueman | First Things - 0 views
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As noted above, Galli is not playing some sanctimonious Pharisee, standing in the Temple of Twitter, thanking God that he is not like other evangelicals-white supremacists, misogynists, or even this Trump supporter over here. But his editorial is symptomatic of the same underlying pathology. Evangelical elites are clearly as out of touch with the populist evangelical base as is the case in society in general. And lambasting populist evangelicals as hypocrites or dimwits will simply perpetuate the divide.
Rebuilding soil microbiomes in high-tunnel agricultural systems focus of study - 0 views
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Their research findings have important implications for soil fertility, and by extension, crop health and yield, explained Laura Kaminsky, a doctoral candidate in plant pathology, who led the investigation under the guidance of Terrence Bell, assistant professor of phytobiomes.
Gender imbalanced datasets may affect the performance of AI pathology classifi... - 0 views
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Though it may not be common knowledge, AI systems are currently being used in a wide variety of commercial applications, including article selection on news and social media sites, which movies get made,and maps that appear on our phones-AI systems have become trusted tools by big business. But their use has not always been without controversy. In recent years, researchers have found that AI apps used to approve mortgage and other loan applications are biased, for example, in favor of white males. This, researchers found, was because the dataset used to train the system mostly comprised white male profiles. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if the same might be true for AI systems used to assist doctors in diagnosing patients.
Algorithms Can't Tell When They're Broken-And Neither Can We - 0 views
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