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By the late ‘90s, trolley problems had fallen out of fashion. Many philosophers questioned the value of the conclusions reached by analyzing a situation so bizarre and specific.

It wasn’t clear trolleys could ever find a life out of the pages of academic journals until one philosophy graduate student, Joshua Greene, revived them with the modern techniques of neuroscience.

The ethicist Peter Singer cites Greene's research to support some of his positions about why we ought to make greater sacrifices for problems that may seem distant, like world poverty or a disease raging halfway around the globe.

Apple said on Wednesday that it would oppose and challenge a federal court order to help the F.B.I. unlock an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.

Teachers have complained about "cheating watches" being sold online to give students an unfair advantage in exams.These digital watches include an "emergency button" to quickly switch from hidden text to a clock face.The watches hold data or written information which can be read in exams.But a deputy head from Bath has warned about the scale of this "hidden market" and says it could tempt stressed students into cheating.

Just as ecosystems provide a wealth of services for humanity – some known, others unacknowledged or yet to be discovered – languages, too, are ripe with possibility. They contain an accumulated body of knowledge, including about geography, zoology, mathematics, navigation, astronomy, pharmacology, botany, meteorology and more. In the case of Cherokee, that language was born of thousands of years spent inhabiting the southern Appalachia Mountains. Cherokee words exist for every last berry, stem, frond and toadstool in the region, and those names also convey what kind of properties that object might have – whether it’s edible, poisonous or has some medicinal value. “No culture has a monopoly on human genius, and we never know where the next brilliant idea may come from,” Harrison says. “We lose ancient knowledge if we lose languages.”

A team of researchers walked every street in 228 census tracts around Los Angeles and New Orleans and recorded every outdoor ad they saw. Another group surveyed 2,881 residents of the same census tracts by telephone, paying them to report their height, weight and other information. After analyzing this hard-won data, the authors conclude: “For every 10 percent increase in food advertisements, the odds of being obese increased by 5 percent.” That is, areas with more outdoor food ads have a higher proportion of obese people than ones with fewer ads.

The problem is that their policy recommendations rest on a crucial but unjustified assumption: that any link between obesity and advertising occurs because more advertising causes higher rates of obesity. But the study at hand showed only an association: people living in areas with more food ads were more likely to be obese than people living in areas with fewer food ads. To be fair, the researchers correctly note that additional steps would be needed to prove that food ads cause obesity. But until those steps are taken, talk of restricting ads is premature. In fact, it is easy to imagine how the causation could run the opposite way (something the article did not mention): If food vendors believe obese people are more likely than non-obese people to buy their products, they will place more ads in areas where obese people already live. Suppose we counted ads for fitness-oriented products like bicycles and bottled water, and found more of those ads in places with less obesity. Would it then be wise anti-obesity policy to subsidize such ads? Or would the smarter conclusion be that the fitness companies suspect that the obese are less likely than the fit to buy their products?

When we seek to base policy on evidence, we must remember that not all “evidence” is created equal. Taken at face value, the study on ads and obesity provides some indication that the two are linked, but no evidence that food ads cause obesity. The fact that the causal conclusion may coincide with a moral belief — that it is wrong to tempt people who overeat by showing them ads for food — does not make it valid.

Using data from more than 330,000 doctors and 12 pharmaceutical firms, it identified 58% as having received payments. It found that payments were unlikely to represent significant opportunities to educate doctors about new drugs, and that financial gain appears to be an important motive for doctors. Daniel Carlat, director of the prescription project at the non-profit group Pew Trusts, says research to date shows that doctors who have dealings with drugs reps "tend to prescribe differently". "They prescribe more drugs, more expensive drugs, more brand-name drugs, and they're less likely to follow evidence-based practice guidelines in prescribing drugs.

There are a number of problems with teaching science as a collection of facts. First, facts change. Before oxygen was discovered, the theoretical existence of phlogiston made sense. For a brief, heady moment in 1989, it looked like cold fusion (paywall) was going to change the world. In the field of medical science, “facts” are even more wobbly. For example, it has been estimated that fewer than 10% of published high profile cancer studies are reproducible (the word “reproducible” here is a euphemism for “not total poppycock”).

In Israel, for instance, we have one of the largest laboratories for A.I. surveillances in the world — it’s called the Occupied Territories. In fact, one of the reasons Israel is such a leader in A.I. surveillance is because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Explain this a bit further.Part of why the occupation is so successful is because of A.I. surveillance technology and big data algorithms.

was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love wine. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses—not a difficult feat, since my father schooled my brother and me in the vocabulary of wine from an early age. Confronted with another Bordeaux or Burgundy, I could toss around the terms I had learned at the dinner table (Pétillant! Phylloxera! Jeroboam!), then painstakingly direct the wine straight down the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palate’s exposure to what it perceived as discomfiting intensity.

As machine learning becomes more powerful, the field’s researchers increasingly find themselves unable to account for what their algorithms know — or how they know it.

In that pantheon of illuminatingly broken men and women, Henry stands apart. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact he has had on our understanding of ourselves. Before Brenda Milner collaborated on that first paper about Henry, the prevailing theory of memory held that its functions could not be localized to a single cortical area, that learning was distributed across the brain as a whole. By that theory — built upon the experimental lesioning of the brains of rats — a person’s memory would be affected only in proportion to the amount of brain tissue removed, regardless of which brain structures the tissue was removed from. Milner’s first paper about Henry, along with her previous work, upended this view.

The malleable nature of facts is a particular preoccupation in one field of philosophy. “Social constructivism” argues that there are simply no objective facts. Instead, every “fact” we believe is a reflection of our socially constructed values, and how we choose to perceive the world. This is not a new theory, and develops many of its ideas from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, who examined shifting human values from a historical perspective in the 19th century. But the current political debate offers a vivid demonstration of these ideas. Jesse Prinz, a philosophy professor at City University of New York, explains that facts are always subjective. Even something as foundational as the periodic table. “When you look closely, you realize that it could have been organized very differently. It could be ordered by atomic weight, rather than atomic number, it could include isotopes, it could exclude elements that don’t exist in nature, and so on,” he says. “The way we classify things is always a function of both mind and world.”

“News of Boston public schools’ decision to go with the Peters projection has gone viral over the past week, and my teeth have not stopped itching,” Jonathan Crowe writes on his blog, The Map Room. “It is incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded to say it should be one or the other,” says Mark Monmonier, author of Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Even Ronald Grim, curator of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, had concerns: “In my mind, both the Mercator and the Peters are controversial projections,” he says in a phone interview. “But we were not asked to be part of the decision.” Choosing between map projections is a necessarily difficult task. The Earth is resolutely three-dimensional, and any attempts to smooth it out are going to add a certain amount of warping. It’s a balancing act: the more accurate you make the continents’ relative area, the more you have to distort their shapes, and vice versa. The art of cartography lies in choosing to privilege one or another of these accuracies—or finding a sweet spot between them that serves your particular purpose.

So what, exactly, did the algorithm “learn” about the process of dying? And what, in turn, can it teach oncologists? Here is the strange rub of such a deep learning system: It learns, but it cannot tell us why it has learned; it assigns probabilities, but it cannot easily express the reasoning behind the assignment. Like a child who learns to ride a bicycle by trial and error and, asked to articulate the rules that enable bicycle riding, simply shrugs her shoulders and sails away, the algorithm looks vacantly at us when we ask, “Why?”