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The notion that a person might embody several personalities, each of them distinct, is hardly new. The ancient Romans had a sense of this and came up with Janus, a two-faced god. In the 1880s, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a novella that provided us with an enduring metaphor for good and evil corporeally bound. Modern comic books are awash in divided personalities like the Hulk and Two-Face in the Batman series. Even heroic Superman has his alternating personas. But few instances of the phenomenon captured Americans’ collective imagination quite like “Sybil,” the study of a woman said to have had not two, not three (like the troubled figure in the 1950s’ “Three Faces of Eve”), but 16 different personalities. Alters, psychiatrists call them, short for alternates. As a mass-market book published in 1973, “Sybil” sold in the millions. Tens of millions watched a 1976 television movie version. The story had enough juice left in it for still another television film in 2007.

“Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life.”

The Nonhuman Rights Project is the only organization working toward actual LEGAL rights for members of species other than our own. Our mission is to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere “things,” which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to “persons,” who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them. Our first cases were filed in 2013.

A chimpanzee is not entitled to the same rights as people and does not have be freed from captivity by its owner, a US court has ruled. The appeals court in New York state said caged chimpanzee Tommy could not be recognised as a "legal person" as it "cannot bear any legal duties". The Nonhuman Rights Project had argued that chimps who had such similar characteristics to the humans deserved basic rights, including freedom. The rights group said it would appeal. Owner pleased In its ruling, the judges wrote: "So far as legal theory is concerned, a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties. "Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions.'' The court added that there was no precedent for treating animals as persons and no legal basis.

The golden ratio's aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don't use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There's also no science to really back it up.

"Strictly speaking, it's impossible for anything in the real-world to fall into the golden ratio, because it's an irrational number," says Keith Devlin, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

You Don't Really Prefer The Golden Ratio In the real world, people don't necessarily prefer the golden ratio.

The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.

Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.

Perhaps even more potentially problematic than negative personal experience is the possibility that bias may influence research quality: its design, execution, evaluation, and interpretation. In 1975, Stephen Abramowitz and his colleagues sent a fake manuscript to eight hundred reviewers from the American Psychological Association—four hundred more liberal ones (fellows of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and editors of the Journal of Social Issues) and four hundred less liberal (social and personality psychologists who didn’t fit either of the other criteria). The paper detailed the psychological well-being of student protesters who had occupied a college administration building and compared them to their non-activist classmates. In one version, the study found that the protesters were more psychologically healthy. In another, it was the more passive group that emerged as mentally healthier. The rest of the paper was identical. And yet, the two papers were not evaluated identically. A strong favorable reaction was three times more likely when the paper echoed one’s political beliefs—that is, when the more liberal reviewers read the version that portrayed the protesters as healthier.

All these studies and analyses are classic examples of confirmation bias: when it comes to questions of subjective belief, we more easily believe the things that mesh with our general world view. When something clashes with our vision of how things should be, we look immediately for the flaws.

Recently, at the Dumbo Arts Festival, in Brooklyn, an artist named Risa Puno stood at a table and gave out cookies in exchange for personal information such as a driver’s license number, a mother’s maiden name, or the last four digits of a Social Security number. This information was entered on a form that assigned values to various pieces of identifying data—one point for your first pet’s name, three points for your home address, five points for your fingerprints, and so on—and different types of cookies required different numbers of points.

Maybe, instead of asking why people don’t react rationally to online threats, we should be asking whether it’s possible to react rationally to the contradictory ways in which we engage with the Web

Imagine that someone else was controlling your actions. You would still look like you, and sound like you, but you wouldn’t be the one deciding what you did and what you said. Now consider: would anyone notice the difference?

If I started shadowing someone else’s speech, would my friends and family notice? I would like to think so. Most of us would like to think so. But how easy would it be? Do we really listen to each others’ words, after all, or do we just assume that because person X is speaking, they must be saying the kind of thing that person X likes to say? We’re getting into some uncomfortable territory here.