TOK@ISPrague

TWO of our most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far. We’re hitting the targets, but missing the point.

A series of studies suggests that, while a product’s ethics may influence purchasing decisions, many shoppers choose simply not to know whether something was ethically made. That includes shoppers who care about social responsibility. And shoppers who ignore ethical matters can even develop a negative opinion about people who do express ethical concerns—which makes them even less likely to pay attention to ethical issues in the future.

“You feel badly that you were not ethical when someone else was,” Rebecca Reczek, a professor of marketing at Ohio State University and one of the study’s authors, told NPR about the results. “It’s a threat to your sense of self, to your identity. So to recover from that, you put the other person down.”

International supply chains, she points out, are notoriously opaque, and the free market doesn’t have any good way to deal with the way this system stifles information. It might be best, she says, if these matters were regulated before the products even reached consumers, taking ethical dilemmas out of the shopping equation. Of the unethical choice, like a polluting car or a shirt made with exploited labor, she suggests: “Maybe we just shouldn’t have it available.”

What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) got it wrong. Our solar system has 10 planets. As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft glides its way to the cold outer reaches of our solar system to take the first-ever up-close look at Pluto, the time is right to revise the International Astronomical Union (IAU)'s 2006 definition of a planet, which resulted in Pluto's "demotion" from planet to ambiguous dwarf-planet status.

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge?

A new artwork painted by artist Banksy on the treatment of people in the Calais camp known as the Jungle has been removed from a site in Knightsbridge, London opposite the French Embassy. Before its removal, Google decided to preserve it digitally for its Cultural Institute Project and Street View to allow other people to see the work.

Since Wikipedia is a compendium of information that already exists elsewhere, it reflects this long-standing bias. In addition, Wikipedia’s editorship–the tens of millions of volunteers who add, tinker with, and argue about articles–is not particularly diverse. “It’s largely younger, largely male, largely white,” Ayers says. “And people often write about their own interests, which is natural and makes sense. But what that means is that we have a lot of articles about software and famous military figures, and not a lot about, say, traditional women’s handicrafts or activists in the developing world.” For a site that aims to “really reflect the fullness of our collective human experience,” Ayers says, this is a big issue.

As the hackers dig in, roadblocks keep popping up–some common to all historical efforts, others unique to this one. One hacker, trying to separate a psychologist couple into two independent pages (“it’s like she’s glued to her husband’s side!”) has difficulty finding sources that credit the female half of the pair with anything. Another recalls making a prior effort, only to find her changes immediately reversed by the overzealous editors Hyland was talking about.

The ‘‘-phobic’’ suffix has emerged as the activist’s most trusted term of art for pinning prejudice on an opponent. There’s ‘‘xenophobic,’’ ‘‘homophobic,’’ ‘‘Islamophobic,’’ ‘‘transphobic,’’ ‘‘fatphobic’’ and ‘‘whorephobic’’: Any blowhard who spews bigotry against a marginalized group — or any journalist who pens an article perceived as insufficiently sensitive — risks being called out for an irrational anxiety over one Other or another. When did this particular diagnosis become such a powerful weapon in the identity wars?

"In all of my publications I have said that giftedness looks different across cultures," she said. "That means that what these predominantly white teachers are looking for may look different than [for] a person from another culture." She calls this a "cultural mismatch," which can cause teachers to have lower expectations for minority students or misinterpret their behavior. As an example, Ford said a common indicator of giftedness —independence — might not manifest in black students, who tend to have tight-knit and interdependent family structures.

"Tell me what fear is," Tranel began. "Well, that's what I'm trying to -- to be honest, I truly have no clue," SM said, her voice raspy. That's actually a symptom of the condition that stole fear from her. Urbach-Wieth disease

Even though she's a talented artist, she always has trouble drawing (or reading) a fearful facial expression. "I wonder what it's like, you know, to actually be afraid of something," she told Tranel.

That's actually just one of two times that SM has been held at knife point. She's also been held at gunpoint twice. And after the above incident, she didn't feel like she should call the police. The threat had passed. She didn't have any lasting trauma, because the event had failed to faze her. SM isn't stupid. She understands what can and can't kill her. But she lacks the quick, subconscious, visceral response that the rest of us feel when we're exposed to danger.

Is It Wrong to Watch Football?

The government of Poland plans to introduce a law making it a crime to imply the country bears any responsibility for atrocities carried out on Polish soil by Nazi Germany.

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.

The Karolinska Institute (KI) in Stockholm is ending its association with acclaimed but controversial surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who pioneered transplants of artificial windpipes but has been accused of ethical breaches in his work. 

It’s no secret that therapies that look promising in mice rarely work in people. But too often, experimental treatments that succeed in one mouse population do not even work in other mice, suggesting that many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.