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RD: There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

DA: A physicist will tell me that this armchair is made of vibrations and that it's not really here at all. But when Samuel Johnson was asked to prove the material existence of reality, he just went up to a big stone and kicked it. I'm with him.

RD: It's intriguing that the chair is mostly empty space and the thing that stops you going through it is vibrations or energy fields. But it's also fascinating that, because we're animals that evolved to survive, what solidity is to most of us is something you can't walk through.

DA: Yes, there was a letter in the paper [about Stephen Hawking's comments on the nonexistence of God] saying, "It's absolutely clear that the function of the world is to declare the glory of God." I thought, what does that sentence mean?!

What is the most difficult ethical dilemma facing science today?DA: How far do you go to preserve individual human life?RD: That's a good one, yes.DA: I mean, what are we to do with the NHS? How can you put a value in pounds, shillings and pence on an individual's life? There was a case with a bowel cancer drug – if you gave that drug, which costs several thousand pounds, it continued life for six weeks on. How can you make that decision?

First, we count if we can, but counting depends a great deal on previous assumptions about categorization. Consider, for example, the number of homeless people in Philadelphia, or the number of battered women in Atlanta, or the number of suicides in Denver. Is someone homeless if he’s unemployed and living with his brother’s family temporarily? Do we require that a women self-identify as battered to count her as such? If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself? The answers to such questions significantly affect the count.

Second, after we’ve gathered some numbers relating to a phenomenon, we must reasonably aggregate them into some sort of recommendation or ranking. This is not easy. By appropriate choices of criteria, measurement protocols and weights, almost any desired outcome can be reached.

Are there good reasons the authors picked the criteria they did? Why did they weigh the criteria in the way they did?

Since the answer to the last question is usually yes, the problem of reasonable aggregation is no idle matter.

These two basic procedures — counting and aggregating — have important implications for public policy. Consider the plan to evaluate the progress of New York City public schools inaugurated by the city a few years ago. While several criteria were used, much of a school’s grade was determined by whether students’ performance on standardized state tests showed annual improvement. This approach risked putting too much weight on essentially random fluctuations and induced schools to focus primarily on the topics on the tests. It also meant that the better schools could receive mediocre grades becausethey were already performing well and had little room for improvement. Conversely, poor schools could receive high grades by improving just a bit.

Medical researchers face similar problems when it comes to measuring effectiveness.

Suppose that whenever people contract the disease, they always get it in their mid-60s and live to the age of 75. In the first region, an early screening program detects such people in their 60s. Because these people live to age 75, the five-year survival rate is 100 percent. People in the second region are not screened and thus do not receive their diagnoses until symptoms develop in their early 70s, but they, too, die at 75, so their five-year survival rate is 0 percent. The laissez-faire approach thus yields the same results as the universal screening program, yet if five-year survival were the criterion for effectiveness, universal screening would be deemed the best practice.

Because so many criteria can be used to assess effectiveness — median or mean survival times, side effects, quality of life and the like — there is a case to be made against mandating that doctors follow what seems at any given time to be the best practice. Perhaps, as some have suggested, we should merely nudge them with gentle incentives. A comparable tentativeness may be appropriate when devising criteria for effective schools.

Arrow’s Theorem, a famous result in mathematical economics, essentially states that no voting system satisfying certain minimal conditions can be guaranteed to always yield a fair or reasonable aggregation of the voters’ rankings of several candidates. A squishier analogue for the field of social measurement would say something like this: No method of measuring a societal phenomenon satisfying certain minimal conditions exists that can’t be second-guessed, deconstructed, cheated, rejected or replaced. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be counting — but it does mean we should do so with as much care and wisdom as we can muster.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."

when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

If you think that some of these approaches to antipiracy enforcement have problems, Castro knows why; he told Congress yesterday that critics of such ideas "assume that piracy is the bedrock of the Internet economy" and don't want to disrupt it, a statement patently absurd on its face.

Apple occasionally places itself in an awkward position. Like, for instance, when Exodus International, one of those ministries that promotes "gay cures," released an iPhone app. People complained that it was offensive (I don't like it myself), and Apple removed it, saying it violates their "developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people." Just last year, Apple repeatedly rejected the app Gay New York: 101 Can't-Miss Places-basically a gay sight-seeing app. The creator found Apple's rejection of the "PG-13" app to be "homophobic and discriminatory to the point of hostile," since, he claims, that "far racier photographic material is routinely available on other apps."

Apple doesn't want people to perceive the App Store as a seedy place (which the Android Market kind of seems like sometimes!), or a place where kids can get their hands on stuff they shouldn't. It's family friendly, mostly. (Apps that could lead to bad stuff, like browsers, carry 17+ warnings and can be blocked via parental controls.) And it keeps regulators and Congressmen off their back

there is a tendency to conclude that govts with the best expert advice have made this decision because there is a real danger of something sinister happening. But remember govts are also under pressure to act because they are made up of politicians - also they may be making precautionary moves because they have little to lose and have to be seen as being pro-active. How real is the danger of harmful radiation reaching Tokyo and should you leave if you're in Tokyo? There were many people doing a "wait and see" before Wednesday but once the US & UK govt called for a pull-out, the fear factor rose several notches and if you're a Japanese in Tokyo watching all the foreigners "abandoning" your city, you start to feel some anxiety and later panic. One EU official used the word "apocalypse"[Link] to describe the situation in Japan and the fear index hit the roof....then a whole herd of experts came out to paint more dire scenarios saying the Japanese have lost all control of the nuclear plants. All this lead the public to think that calamity is the most likely outcome of the unfolding saga and if make a decision from all this, you will just run for the exits if you're in Tokyo. All this is happening while the Japanese govt is trying to calm the people and prevent a pandemonium after the triple disaster hit the country. In China, people have emptied the supermarket shelves of iodized salt because of media reports that the consumption of iodine can block radioactive iodine from being absorbed by thyroid glands causing thyroid cancer. There are also reports of people getting ill after ingesting iodine pills out of fear of radiation.

However, if you look at the placement of the three photos and the choice of headlines, it also tells you something else has not changed. The top photo is of a People’s Action Party (PAP) leader, in a pose resembling that of a victor acknowledging the people’s acclamation. Only sitting under it are pictures from the Singapore Democratic Party’s rally and the Workers’ Party’s.

Arguably, an objective measure of newsworthiness would suggest that the biggest news story from the evening before would be the size of the crowd at Hougang, the traffic jams leading up to it, and the way people were responding to the Workers’ Party’s “star candidate” Chen Show Mao, making his first rally appearance, and not what who-and-who said. After all, plenty of candidates were saying all sorts of things. Why was George Yeo’s the leading choice for front-page headlines?

On the rightside column is another story that gives a sum-up of (most) of the rallies the night before. You can see the text of it here. What I was more interested in was to analyse, using the internet version of the same article, the share of mentions devoted to the respective parties and their placements. I think my annotations on the left side of this graphic say it all.

In a nutshell, the editorial policy is this. While giving more space to opposition campaigns this time around (and perhaps fairer reporting angles as well) the pole position is still reserved for the PAP. You see this in the relative positions and sizes of the front page pictures and in the text share within the column above.

You also see this policy at work in terms of the allocation of the inside pages. Two whole pages (pages 4 and 6) are devoted to the PAP:

Deeper in, pages 8 and 9 are devoted to opposition parties:

The first thing you’ll notice is that there is a bigger version of the Hougang rally picture, for which I am estimating a crowd of about 100,000. This indeed confirms the view that wide-angle pictures can no longer be suppressed. Or can they? What we don’t see are comparative wide-angle pictures of other parties’ rallies, particularly those of the PAP’s. And this is not likely to happen until netizens also publish such pictures. The problem with that of course, is that netizens are in the main uninterested in attending PAP rallies, so having pictures out in cyberspace may not be a likely thing. But surely, until we see comparative pictures of other parties’ rallies, one cannot fully judge the significance of the Hougang pictures.

That said, having two pages devoted to the PAP and two to the opposition parties, seems relatively fair. It would be nice though if on some other days, the opposition’s pages came before the PAP’s.

let us turn to the climate change “skeptics”. Are they just being more demanding than us in their skepticism? After all, nothing in science is ever certain; some room for doubt always exists. For that doubt to warrant disbelief in the face of all the positive evidence, however, skeptics would require significant contrary evidence, or a plausible alternative theory which fit the data. But climate change deniers have not provided any such evidence or theory (theories involving variations in solar activity simply don’t fit the data). Nor have they shown significant inclination to provide such evidence, generally being content to gesture frantically at any minor mistake, no matter how irrelevant, in the climate change literature. In fact, in denying climate change, these “skeptics” find themselves committed to claims no less extraordinary than the ones they deny, yet with far less evidence.

It’s not simply a matter of lifting the burden of toxic resentment or of immobilizing guilt, however beneficial that may be ethically and psychologically.  It is not a merely therapeutic matter, as though this were just about you.  Rather, when the requisite conditions are met, forgiveness is what a good person would seek because it expresses fundamental moral ideals.  These include ideals of spiritual growth and renewal; truth-telling; mutual respectful address; responsibility and respect; reconciliation and peace.

Are any wrongdoers unforgivable?  People who have committed heinous acts such as torture or child molestation are often cited as examples.  The question is not primarily about the psychological ability of the victim to forswear anger, but whether a wrongdoer can rightly be judged not-to-be-forgiven no matter what offender and victim say or do.  I do not see that a persuasive argument for that thesis can be made; there is no such thing as the unconditionally unforgivable.  For else we would be faced with the bizarre situation of declaring illegitimate the forgiveness reached by victim and perpetrator after each has taken every step one could possibly wish for.  The implication may distress you: Osama bin Laden, for example, is not unconditionally unforgivable for his role in the attacks of 9/11.  That being said, given the extent of the injury done by grave wrongs, their author may be rightly unforgiven for an appropriate period even if he or she has taken all reasonable steps.  There is no mathematically precise formula for determining when it is appropriate to forgive.

What’s especially galling to professional developers is watching sales plunge as piracy rates soar. “The current issue we face with Android is rampant piracy, and we’re working to provide hacking counter measures, a difficult task,” says Jean Gareau, founder of VidaOne, an Austin, Texas, software company that specializes in health and fitness applications for a variety of operating systems.

Doug said... 1 If legal, administrative, legislative, and political decisions that are allegedly based on science are not determined by the science than they are not based in science. They are scientifically unsubstantiated. I find this a very poor way to govern, rejecting science when it doesn't meet your political agenda.

True science is apolitical and non-ideological. Only the use of science is politicized.

I totally agree with you about the distinction between science and policy. I'm also fascinated by the concept of urgency. In the case of a developing disaster, "urgent" is logically a fairly short space on the time line. Before that, it's not yet urgent. After that, it's too late. Any analysis that does not acknowledge this basic logic is likely to strain credibility. And any uncertainty about future climate (and impacts) implies uncertainty about where on the time line the "urgent" window is or will be located. The uncertainty has to be small, or there is no way to know we're inside that short time period. And "maybe it's urgent" or "maybe it's too late" are not very persuasive arguments.

Key to this is the discovery, in the past few years, of a way to make stem cells that do not require the destruction of embryos. In one move, these induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells remove the ethical roadblocks faced by embryonic stem cells and, because they are so much easier to make, give scientists an inexhaustible supply of material, bringing them ever closer to those hoped-for treatments.

Stem cells are the body's master cells, the raw material from which we are built. Unlike normal body cells, they can reproduce an indefinite number of times and, when prodded in the right way, can turn themselves into any type of cell in the body. The most versatile stem cells are those found in the embryo at just a few days old – this ball of a few dozen embryonic stem (ES) cells eventually goes on to form everything that makes up a person.