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THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Michael Hor noted that despite the vocal attempts to demonise gay people and paint homosexual orientation as injurious (including by some members of the ruling party) the government did not subscribe to such reasoning. Yet the government chose to keep the law.

The “key speech arguing for the retention of 377A” that Hor refers to was that made by Thio. Hor then goes on to discover that the government’s decision was bi-layered. The surface justification, going by the prime minister’s words, was that it would be symbolic — a “signpost of heterosexual orthodoxy”. Hor next asks what the motivation might be for wanting such a symbol. He examines the possibility that it could be to steer people towards heterosexual orientation, yet the government itself, from its own words, does not believe so.

As was well-known, the anti-gay movement was religiously inspired. The government however was neither dictated nor swayed by them, Hor said. In fact, the government “roundly rejected” the movement’s essential beliefs. Still, it appears that the government did not want to annoy them any further by leaving them empty-handed. That motivation alone made the government decide to retain 377A.

Internet surveys sometimes acknowledge how unscientific (read: meaningless) they really are. They surely must be a pale imitation of the rigorous, carefully sampled, thoroughly transparent polls favored by political savants and mainstream news organizations

The line between junk and credible polling remains. But it became a little blurrier — creating concern among professional survey organizations and reason for greater skepticism by all of us — because of charges this week that one widely cited pollster may have fabricated data or manipulated it so seriously as to render it meaningless.

founder of the left-leaning Daily Kos website, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Oakland on Wednesday charging that Research 2000, the organization he had commissioned for 1 1/2 years to test voter opinion, had doctored its results.

an interesting article I read recently, penned by Julian Savulescu for the Practical Ethics blog.

Savulescu discusses an ongoing controversy in Germany about genetic testing of human embryos. The Leopoldina, Germany’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, has recommended genetic testing of pre-implant embryos, to screen for serious and incurable defects. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has agreed to allow a parliamentary vote on this issue, but also said that she personally supports a ban on this type of testing. Her fear is that the testing would quickly lead to “designer babies,” i.e. to parents making choices about their unborn offspring based not on knowledge about serious disease, but simply because they happen to prefer a particular height or eye color.

He infers from Merkel’s comments (and many similar others) that people tend to think of selecting traits like eye color as eugenics, while acting to avoid incurable disease is not considered eugenics. He argues that this is exactly wrong: eugenics, as he points out, means “well born,” so eugenicists have historically been concerned with eliminating traits that would harm society (Wendell Holmes’ “three generation of imbeciles”), not with simple aesthetic choices. As Savulescu puts it: “[eugenics] is selecting embryos which are better, in this context, have better lives. Being healthy rather than sick is ‘better.’ Having blond hair and blue eyes is not in any plausible sense ‘better,’ even if people mistakenly think so.”

Instead of acquiring military-style multi-million dollar unmanned aerial vehicles the size of small airliners, the media is beginning to go micro, exploiting rapid advances in technology by deploying small toy-like UAVs to get the story.

Last November, drone journalism hit the big time after a Polish activist launched a small craft with four helicopter-like rotors called a quadrocopter. He flew the drone low over riot police lines to record a violent demonstration in Warsaw. The pictures were extraordinarily different from run-of-the-mill protest coverage.Posted online, the images went viral. More significantly, this birds-eye view clip found its way onto the bulletins and web pages of mainstream media.

Drone Journalism Lab, a research project to determine the viability of remote airborne media.

history of voting math comes mainly in two chunks: the period of the French Revolution, when some members of France’s Academy of Sciences tried to deduce a rational way of conducting elections, and the nineteen-fifties onward, when economists and game theorists set out to show that this was impossible

The first mathematical account of vote-splitting was given by Jean-Charles de Borda, a French mathematician and a naval hero of the American Revolutionary War. Borda concocted examples in which one knows the order in which each voter would rank the candidates in an election, and then showed how easily the will of the majority could be frustrated in an ordinary vote. Borda’s main suggestion was to require voters to rank candidates, rather than just choose one favorite, so that a winner could be calculated by counting points awarded according to the rankings. The key idea was to find a way of taking lower preferences, as well as first preferences, into account.Unfortunately, this method may fail to elect the majority’s favorite—it could, in theory, elect someone who was nobody’s favorite. It is also easy to manipulate by strategic voting.

If the candidate who is your second preference is a strong challenger to your first preference, you may be able to help your favorite by putting the challenger last. Borda’s response was to say that his system was intended only for honest men.

Merchant of Doubt is exactly what its subtitle says: a historical view of how a handful of scientists have obscured the truth on matters of scientific fact.

it was a very small group who were responsible for creating a great deal of doubt on a variety of issues. The book opens in 1953, where the tobacco industry began to take action to obscure the truth about smoking’s harmful effects, when its relationship to cancer first received widespread media attention.

The tobacco industry exploited scientific tendency to be conservative in drawing conclusions, to throw up a handful of cherry-picked data and misleading statistics and to “spin unreasonable doubt.” This tactic, combined with the media’s adherence to the “fairness doctrine” which was interpreted as giving equal time “to both sides [of an issue], rather than giving accurate weight to both sides” allowed the tobacco industry to delay regulation for decades.

society's answer to the question “Is it acceptable to hurt animals for our pleasure?” isn't always “No.” Odds are that most of the people who objected to the dog fighting and crush videos are frequent consumers of meat, milk, and eggs from industrialized farms. And the life of an animal in a typical industrialized farm is notoriously punishing. Many spend their lives in cages so confining they can barely move; ammonia fumes burn their eyes; their beaks or tails are chopped off to prevent them from biting each other out of stress; and the farm's conditions make many of them so sick or weak that they die in their cages or on the way to slaughter. As a society, however, we apparently believe that the pleasure we get from eating those animals makes their suffering worth it.

many people will object that eating animals isn’t a matter of pleasure at all, but of the need for sustenance. While that may have been true for our ancestors who survived by hunting wild animals, I don’t think it has much relevance to our current situation. First, it's questionable whether we actually do need to eat animal products in order to be healthy; the American Dietetic Association has given the thumbs up to vegetarian and even vegan diets. But even if you believe that some amount of animal product consumption is medically necessary, we could still buy from farms that raise their livestock much more humanely. It would cost more, but we could always compensate by cutting back on other luxuries, or simply by eating less meat. By any reasonable estimate, Americans could cut their meat consumption drastically with no ill effects on their health (and likely with many positive effects). Buying the sheer amount of meat that Americans do, at the low prices made possible by industrialized farms, is a luxury that can’t be defended with a “need for sustenance” argument. It’s about pleasure — the pleasure of eating more meat than strictly necessary for health, and the pleasure of saving money that can then be spent on other things we enjoy.

there are several reasons why people regard consumers of industrial farming differently than consumers of crush videos and dogfighting. The first has to do with the types of animals involved: pigs, cows, and chickens simply aren't as cute as dogs, bunnies, and kittens. I don't know how many people would explicitly cite that as the reason they're willing to inflict suffering on the former and not the latter, but it seems to play a role, even if people won't admit as much. People who have no qualms about a pig spending its life in a small, dark crate would nevertheless be outraged if a dog were treated in the same way.

Although it may be a form of arrogance to attempt the management of one’s own death, is it better to surrender that management to the arrogance of someone else? We know we can’t avoid dying, but perhaps we can avoid dying badly.

Dodging a bad death has become more complicated over the past 30 or 40 years. Before the advent of technological creations that permit vital functions to be sustained so well artificially, medical ethics were less obstructed by abstract definitions of death.

generally agreed upon criteria for brain death have simplified some of these confusions, but they have not solved them. The broad middle ground between our usual health and consciousness as the expected norm on the one hand, and clear death of the brain on the other, lacks certainty.

I’m constantly disappointed how so many science questions that I research turn out to be political questions.

I consistently find that the conservative attitude on many science questions tends to be “everything’s fine” and the liberal attitude tends to be “the sky is falling”

of course, that’s exactly what conservative and liberal mean: Conserve things the way they are, and change things liberally.

there is a sub-field within the study of philosophy that looks at what should qualify as valid or certain knowledge. And one main divide in this sub-field would perhaps be the divide between empiricism and rationalism. Proponents of the former generally argue that only what can be observed by the senses should qualify as valid knowledge while proponents of the latter are more sceptical about sensory data since such data can be "false" (for example, optical illusions) and instead argue that valid knowledge should be knowledge that is congruent with reason.

Another significant divide in this sub-field would be the divide between positivism/scientism and non-positivism/scientism. Essentially, proponents of the former argue that only knowledge that is congruent with scientific reasoning or that can be scientifically proven should qualify as valid knowledge. In contrast, the proponents of non-positivism/scientism is of the stance that although scientific knowledge may indeed be a form of valid knowledge, it is not the only form of valid knowledge; knowledge derived from other sources or methods may be just as valid.

Evidently, the latter divide is relevant with regards to this debate over the validity of TCM, or alternative medicine in general, as a form of medical treatment vis-a-vis Western medicine, in that the general impression perhaps that while Western medicine is scientifically proven, the former is however not as scientifically proven. And thus, to those who abide by the stance of positivism/scientism, this will imply that TCM, or alternative medicine in general, is not as valid or reliable a form of medical treatment as Western medicine. On the other hand, as can be seen from the letters written in to the ST Forum to defend TCM, there are those who will argue that although TCM may not be as scientifically proven, this does not however imply that it is not a valid or reliable form of medical treatment.

The truth is not all screening tests are equal, and more importantly, even when a screening test is accurate (yes, I chose to use this term because I am lazy) and we are able "determine the health condition of an individual", it did not necessarily mean that it was cost-effective to screen the population at large, or indeed a specific patient. Unfortunately, if someone was in a position that "the costs of these tests are a big burden" to him or her, an accurate diagnosis may just be the beginning of more financial burden...

But the cost-effectiveness of screening tests are really quite a technical issue that we cannot expect laymen (or even all doctors) to understand - that's not what bothered me about this letter. What bothered me was how a layman can think that a bunch of doctors and statisticians sitting in MOH can be blind to the benefits of "all cancer screenings as well as all tests to detect heart disease", which are so obvious to him.

No one knows exactly why the international prototype of the kilogram, as pampered a hunk of platinum and iridium as ever existed, appears to weigh less than it did when it was manufactured in the late 19th century.

It is here that the kilogram — the universal standard against which all other kilograms are measured — resides in controlled conditions set out in 1889, in an underground vault that can be opened only with three different keys possessed by three different people. The change, discovered when the prototype was compared with its official copies, amounts only to some 50 micrograms, equal to the mass of a smallish grain of sand. But it shows that the prototype has fallen down on its primary job, to be a beacon of stability in a world of uncertainty.

scientists say, that it is time to find a new way to calculate the kilogram, which currently enjoys a delightfully frustrating definition: “a unit of mass equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.”

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

It is far from accurate to refer to “science” as a single entity (as I just have). Many arguments that dispute the consensus about climate change being the result of man made activity talk about “scientists” as though they are “all in it together” and “supporting each other”. This implies some grand conspiracy. But science is a competition, not a collusion. If anything they are all against each other. No given person or research team has the whole picture of climate science. The range of scientific disciplines that work in this area is vast. Indeed there are few areas of science which do not potentially have something to contribute to the area. But put a geologist and a geneticist in a room together and they can barely speak the same language. Far from some great conspiracy, the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come to a consensus about climate change is truly extraordinary.

So the report is recommending that journalists do what they should always have done – investigate and verify. By all means ask another expert’s point of view, determine whether the latest finding is in fact good science or what its implications are. But we need to move away from the idea of “balance” between those who believe it is all a big conspiracy and those who have done some work and looked at the actual evidence. The report concludes that in particular the BBC must take special care to continue efforts to ensure viewers are able to distinguish well-established fact from opinion on scientific issues, and to communicate this distinction clearly to the audience. In other words, to remember that the plural of anecdote is not data.

My concern about the potential effects of human influences on the climate system are not a function of global average warming over a long-period of time or of predictions of continued warming into the future.

what maters are the effects of human influences on the climate system on human and ecological scales, not at the global scale. No one experiences global average temperature and it is very poorly correlated with things that we do care about in specific places at specific times.

Consider the following thought experiment. Divide the world up into 1,000 grid boxes of equal area. Now imagine that the temperature in each of 500 of those boxes goes up by 20 degrees while the temperature in the other 500 goes down by 20 degrees. The net global change is exactly zero (because I made it so). However, the impacts would be enormous. Let's further say that the changes prescribed in my thought experiment are the direct consequence of human activity. Would we want to address those changes? Or would we say, ho hum, it all averages out globally, so no problem? The answer is obvious and is not a function of what happens at some global average scale, but what happens at human and ecological scales.