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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.

Two studies suggest for the first time a clear link between global warming and extreme precipitation

There's a sound rule for reporting weather events that may be related to climate change. You can't say that a particular heatwave or a particular downpour – or even a particular freeze – was definitely caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. But you can say whether these events are consistent with predictions, or that their likelihood rises or falls in a warming world.

Weather is a complex system. Long-running trends, natural fluctuations and random patterns are fed into the global weather machine, and it spews out a series of events. All these events will be influenced to some degree by global temperatures, but it's impossible to say with certainty that any of them would not have happened in the absence of man-made global warming.

Most people who have heard about the Craig’s list rape by proxy of the Wyoming woman that occurred in December have been shocked by not only the brutal rape of a woman who was an innocent victim of an ex boyfriends sick mind, but also by the rapist who actually committed the crime. Many people believe that both men should get what they deserve. But what exactly does that mean in the case of Ty Oliver McDowell? Should the man be convicted of a Rape? Or is he perhaps a victim in the diabolical scheme of Jebidah James Stripe?

Posing as the victim, Stripe placed an ad complete with picture on Craig’s list. He stated in the ad that he was the woman and that she wanted to fulfill a sexual fantasy in which she was raped. Stating specifically in the ad that she was looking for an aggressive male who had little regard for women.

If McDowell is telling the truth, he saw the ad and emailed the woman, who was stripe posing as the woman, and they communicated by messenger back and forth as she detailed her fantasy and exactly what she would like done. After, discussing the fantasy. McDowell then on December 11, 2009 broke into the woman’s home, tied her to a chair, held a knife to her throat, and raped her. Thus fulfilling what he claims he believed to be the woman’s fantasy. At this stage we have no reason to disbelieve his story. But, was his belief and actions based on that belief reasonable?

Mr Smedley was such a private man that none of those friends had known in advance that he had planned his own assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, where he drank poison and died on Dec 10 last year. A few days after Mr Smedley's death, his close friends found individually-written letters from him in their post, telling each one how much they had meant to him.

They were in for a greater surprise when they were joined at his memorial service by Sir Terry, the author and campaigner, and the BBC crew that had filmed Mr Smedley's final moments. Unknown to all but his closest family, Mr Smedley invited Sir Terry to accompany him and his wife Christine, 60, to the clinic in Switzerland. Moments before he died, said Sir Terry: "I shook hands with Peter and he said to me 'Have a good life', and he added 'I know I have'." When a clinic worker asked him if he was ready to drink the poison that would end his life, Mr Smedley said: "Yes" and added: "I'd like to thank you all." After Mr Smedley died, said Sir Terry: "I was spinning not because anything bad had happened but something was saying', A man is dead... that's a bad thing,' but somehow the second part of the clause chimes in with, 'but he had an incurable disease that was dragging him down, so he's decided of his own free will to leave before he was dragged'. So it's not a bad thing."

There is something almost religious about Kurzweil’s scientism, an observation he himself makes in the film, noting the similarities between his goals and that of the world’s religions: “the idea of a profound transformation in the future, eternal life, bringing back the dead—but the fact that we’re applying technology to achieve the goals that have been talked about in all human philosophies is not accidental because it does reflect the goal of humanity.” Although the film never discloses Kurzweil’s religious beliefs (he was raised by Jewish parents as a Unitarian Universalist), in a (presumably) unintentionally humorous moment that ends the film Kurzweil reflects on the God question and answers it himself: “Does God exist? I would say, ‘Not yet.’”

Transcendent Man is Barry Ptolemy’s beautifully crafted and artfully edited documentary film about Kurzweil and his quest to save humanity.

Transcendent Man pulls viewers in through Kurzweil’s visage of a future in which we merge with our machines and vastly extend our longevity and intelligence to the point where even death will be defeated. This point is what Kurzweil calls the “singularity” (inspired by the physics term denoting the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole), and he arrives at the 2029 date by extrapolating curves based on what he calls the “law of accelerating returns.” This is “Moore’s Law” (the doubling of computing power every year) on steroids, applied to every conceivable area of science, technology and economics.

Handwritten newspapers.

I mentioned a fascinating reversal of the-medium-is-the-message as one Japanese newspaper reverted to hand-written editions once the earthquake-and-tsunami disaster destroyed all power in the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture. For the next six days, the editors of the Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun “printed” the daily newspaper’s disaster coverage the only way possible: By hand, in pen and paper. Using flashlights and marker pens, the reporters wrote the stories on poster-size paper and pinned the dailies to the entrance doors of relief centers around the city. Six staffers collected stories, which another three digested, spending an hour and a half per day composing the newspapers by hand.

All of this Internet activity is but the tip of the iceberg of a new and growing global human-tissue economy. Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that about 10% of organ transplants around the world stem from purely commercial transactions.

Trade in organs follows a clear, geographically linked pattern: people from rich countries buy the organs, and people in poor countries sell them. In my research on organ trafficking, I have entered some of these shadow markets, where body parts from the poor, war victims, and prisoners are commodities, bought or stolen for transplant into affluent ill people.

Organ trafficking depends on several factors. One is people in distress. They are economically or socially disadvantaged, or live in war-torn societies with prevalent crime and a thriving black market. On the demand side are people who are in danger of dying unless they receive an organ transplant. Additionally, there are organ brokers who arrange the deals between sellers and buyers.

I kicked off a recent episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast on the topic of transhumanism by defining it as “the idea that we should be pursuing science and technology to improve the human condition, modifying our bodies and our minds to make us smarter, healthier, happier, and potentially longer-lived.”

Massimo understandably expressed some skepticism about why there needs to be a transhumanist movement at all, given how incontestable their mission statement seems to be. As he rhetorically asked, “Is transhumanism more than just the idea that we should be using technologies to improve the human condition? Because that seems a pretty uncontroversial point.” Later in the episode, referring to things such as radical life extension and modifications of our minds and genomes, Massimo said, “I don't think these are things that one can necessarily have objections to in principle.”

There are a surprising number of people whose reaction, when they are presented with the possibility of making humanity much healthier, smarter and longer-lived, is not “That would be great,” nor “That would be great, but it's infeasible,” nor even “That would be great, but it's too risky.” Their reaction is, “That would be terrible.”

look at stuff that statisticians usually dismiss as noise

I happen to be such a great fan of weirdonomics, I actually believe weird statistics sometimes work even better than the conventional approach – for one they provide a more timely snap shot of what’s really happening in the world than official numbers along with what we would usually term as market driven aggregates.

I don’t need to look the trading volume or for that matter refer to data that is generated by the EPFR, which tracks global money flows

Is it legitimate to cite one’s intuitions as evidence in a philosophical argument?

appeals to intuitions are ubiquitous in philosophy. What are intuitions? Well, that’s part of the controversy, but most philosophers view them as intellectual “seemings.” George Bealer, perhaps the most prominent defender of intuitions-as-evidence, writes, “For you to have an intuition that A is just for it to seem to you that A… Of course, this kind of seeming is intellectual, not sensory or introspective (or imaginative).”2 Other philosophers have characterized them as “noninferential belief due neither to perception nor introspection”3 or alternatively as “applications of our ordinary capacities for judgment.”4

Philosophers may not agree on what, exactly, intuition is, but that doesn’t stop them from using it. “Intuitions often play the role that observation does in science – they are data that must be explained, confirmers or the falsifiers of theories,” Brian Talbot says.5 Typically, the way this works is that a philosopher challenges a theory by applying it to a real or hypothetical case and showing that it yields a result which offends his intuitions (and, he presumes, his readers’ as well).

A man was caught with more than 500 offensive photos in his mobile phone. This happened after a woman complained against him taking a picture of her chest at a shopping centre.

"My husband and I were shocked when we were shown the data because there were more than 500 pictures of various women that this man took. All the pictures were of their chests and breasts. From the angle of the shots, I could see that the women in these pictures were not aware that they were victims."

According to the law, anyone who takes offensive photos of a woman in a public place without the lady's prior consent can be charged for outrage of modesty. If found guilty, the persons involved faces a fine, up to a year in jail or both.

brain-computer interface, or BCI

is a branch of science exploring how computers and the human brain can be meshed together. It sounds like science fiction (and can look like it too), but it is motivated by a desire to help chronically injured people. They include those who have lost limbs, people with Lou Gehrig's disease, or those who have been paralysed by severe spinal-cord injuries. But the group of people it might help the most are those whom medicine assumed were beyond all hope: sufferers of "locked-in syndrome".

These are often stroke victims whose perfectly healthy minds end up trapped inside bodies that can no longer move. The most famous example was French magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who managed to dictate a memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by blinking one eye. In the book, Bauby, who died in 1997 shortly after the book was published, described the prison his body had become for a mind that still worked normally.

Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia.

What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.

It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability "tail risks" to disappear from policymakers' fields of observation.

Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.

Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups. And it is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 2007-8 and the current turmoil in the Arab world. The policy implications are identical: to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open -- fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the Latin saying.

The Turk was a hoax, although he was incorrect about the workings of the trick. Rather than a man hidden inside the wooden body, the seemingly exposed innards of the cabinet did not extend all the way back. A hidden grandmaster slid around when the cabinet doors were opened and closed. The concealed grandmaster controlled The Turk’s movements and followed the game’s action through a clever arrangement of magnets and strings.