Group items tagged

"A good portion of 21st-century news consumers no longer believe in objectivity. They know it isn't possible. And yet the public expects reporters to always play it down the middle, delivering the facts and only the facts, unencumbered by bias. But to what lengths should reporters go? Can they report fairly on beats that encroach on their personal lives? Should they vote? Brooke canvassed an array of (objective) sources and compiled this report."

"Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous - from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it. But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism. The campaign, labeled "Take Back Yoga," does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga's debt to the faith's ancient traditions. That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu - and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it. The question at the core of the debate - who owns yoga? - has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry. "

Like it or not - and I don't - the Obama-McConnell tax-cut deal, with its mixture of very bad stuff and sort-of-kind-of good stuff, is likely to pass Congress. Then what? The deal will, without question, give the economy a short-term boost. The prevailing view, as far as I can tell - and that includes within the Obama administration - is that this short-term boost is all we need. The deal, we're told, will jump-start the economy; it will give a fragile recovery time to strengthen. I say, block those metaphors. America's economy isn't a stalled car, nor is it an invalid who will soon return to health if he gets a bit more rest. Our problems are longer-term than either metaphor implies. And bad metaphors make for bad policy. The idea that the economic engine is going to catch or the patient rise from his sickbed any day now encourages policy makers to settle for sloppy, short-term measures when the economy really needs well-designed, sustained support.

"When discussing what to eat and how much, people often come to the conclusion "Everything in moderation." This is too vague for me. What exactly is "everything"? Every kind of Drake's Cake and candy bar? There's a lot I could justify with this "directive." Twinkies in moderation? Pop-Tarts in moderation? Ice cream in moderation? I could make an entire "everything in moderation" diet in which I eat nothing but crap.\n\nOf course, this is not what "everything in moderation" means. It means lumping these foods into one category (junk food, or refined carbohydrates, or sugar, or desserts, or processed foods) and taking the whole category in moderation. But what exactly is "moderation"? What, pray tell, would a "moderate" amount of chocolate be? An ounce a day, a week, or only on special occasions? And what would a moderate amount of trans fat be? Aren't some things better avoided altogether, or is this what people mean when they say, "Everything in moderation. Even moderation"?\n\nAnd where did this "Everything in moderation" come from? "

"The helpless, seemingly clueless infant staring up at you from his crib, limbs flailing, drool oozing, has a lot more going on inside his head than you ever imagined. A wealth of new research is leading pediatricians and child psychologists to rethink their long-held beliefs about the emotional and intellectual abilities of even very young babies. In 1890, psychologist William James famously described an infant's view of the world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." It was a notion that held for nearly a century: infants were simple-minded creatures who merely mimicked those around them and grasped only the most basic emotions-happy, sad, angry. Science is now giving us a much different picture of what goes on inside their hearts and heads. Long before they form their first words or attempt the feat of sitting up, they are already mastering complex emotions-jealousy, empathy, frustration-that were once thought to be learned much later in toddlerhood. They are also far more sophisticated intellectually than we once believed. Babies as young as 4 months have advanced powers of deduction and an ability to decipher intricate patterns. They have a strikingly nuanced visual palette, which enables them to notice small differences, especially in faces, that adults and older children lose the ability to see. Until a baby is 3 months old, he can recognize a scrambled photograph of his mother just as quickly as a photo in which everything is in the right place. And big brothers and sisters beware: your sib has a long memory-and she can hold a grudge."

"There's a tiny island called Yap out in the Pacific Ocean. Economists love it because it helps answer this really basic question: What is money? There's no gold or silver on Yap. But hundreds of years ago, explorers from Yap found limestone deposits on an island hundreds of miles away. And they carved this limestone into huge stone discs, which they brought back across the sea on their small bamboo boats. It's unclear if these stones started as money. But at some point the people on Yap realized what most societies realize. They needed something that everyone agrees you can use to pay for stuff. And like many societies, the people of Yap took the thing they had that was pretty - their version of gold - and decided that was money."

An interesting exploration of the definition of the word "money".

"When reports emerged 30 years ago that young gay men were suffering from rare forms of pneumonia and cancer, public health investigators scrambled to understand what appeared to be a deadly immune disorder: What were the symptoms? Who was most susceptible? What kinds of infections were markers of the disease? They were seeking the epidemiologist's most essential tool - an accurate case definition, a set of criteria that simultaneously include people with the illness and exclude those without it. With AIDS, investigators soon recognized that injection-drug users, hemophiliacs and other demographic groups were also at risk, and the case definition evolved over time to incorporate lab evidence of immune dysfunction and other refinements based on scientific advances. "If you recognize something is happening, you need a case definition so you can count it," said Andrew Moss, an emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and an early AIDS investigator. "You need to know whether the numbers are going up or down, or whether treatment and prevention work. And if you have a bad case definition, then it's very difficult to figure out what's going on." Once a disease can be diagnosed reliably through lab tests, creating an accurate case definition becomes easier. But when an ailment has no known cause and its symptoms are subjective - as with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and other diseases whose characteristics and even existence have been contested - competing case definitions are almost inevitable. Now a new study of chronic fatigue syndrome has highlighted how competing case definitions can lead to an epidemiologic "Rashomon" - what you see depends on who's doing the looking - and has stoked a fierce debate among researchers and patient advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. "

"After retiring from truck driving in 1987, Teri Horton devoted much of her time to bargain hunting around the Los Angeles area. Sometimes the bargains were discovered on Salvation Army shelves and sometimes, she willingly admits, at the bottom of Dumpsters. Even the most stubborn deal scrounger probably would have been satisfied with the rate of return recently offered to her for a curiosity she snagged for $5 in a San Bernardino thrift shop in the early 1990s. A buyer, said to be from Saudi Arabia, was willing to pay $9 million for it, just under an 180 million percent increase on her original investment. Ms. Horton, a sandpaper-voiced woman with a hard-shell perm who lives in a mobile home in Costa Mesa and depends on her Social Security checks, turned him down without a second thought. Ms. Horton's find is not exactly the kind that gets pulled from a steamer trunk on the "Antiques Roadshow." It is a dinner-table-size painting, crosshatched in the unmistakable drippy, streaky, swirly style that made Jackson Pollock one of the most famous artists of the last century. Ms. Horton had never heard of Pollock before buying the painting, but when an art teacher saw it and told her that it might be his work (and that it could fetch untold millions if it were), she launched herself on a single-minded post-retirement career - enlisting, along the way, a forensic expert and a once-powerful art dealer - to have her painting acknowledged as authentic by scholars and the art market."

"Teri Horton is a 74-year-old retired truck driver with an eighth grade education. She likes to gamble a bit, and now she thinks she has hit the jackpot. Not in a casino, but in the high-stakes world of modern art. Teri isn't the kind of person who knows-or cares-much about art. But as CNN's Anderson Cooper reports, she has caused a stir in the upper reaches of the art world because of a painting she bought years ago, a painting she now believes is the work of the famous abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. If Teri's painting is by Pollock, it would likely be worth tens of millions of dollars. Not bad, considering she bought it as a gift for a friend and only paid $5 for it in a thrift shop in San Bernardino, Calif."

war - a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations (2) : a period of such armed conflict (3) : state of war kinetic - of or relating to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith - Merriam-Webster.com

"Last year's GOP takeover of the U.S. House and statehouses across the country has dramatically changed the shape of the nation's abortion debate. It has also given a boost to an even more far-reaching effort: the push to legally redefine when life itself begins. The question being raised in legal terms is: When does someone become a person? The answer varies under the law. "The definition of personhood ranges if you're talking about property law, or inheritance, or how the census is taken," says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Freedom Project. All those differences are exactly what Keith Mason wants to change. He's president of Personhood USA, a group that's trying to rewrite the laws and constitutions of every state - and some countries - to recognize someone as a person "exactly at creation," he says. "It's fertilization; it's when the sperm meets the egg." Mason says the basic problem is that science has advanced faster than policymaking. "We know, without a shadow of a doubt, when human life begins," he says. "But our laws have not caught up to what we know." And according to his organization, those laws should recognize every fertilized egg as an individual and complete human being."

"The United States has 50 distinct states, which means there are 50 distinct definitions of "proficient" on standardized tests for students. For example, an Arkansas fourth-grader could be told he is proficient in reading based on his performance on a state exam. But if he moved across the border to Missouri, he might find that's no longer true, according to a new report. "

"Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors -- a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that -- that the Bible actually contains lies? Most people wouldn't put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle -- Peter, Paul or James -- knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery. Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books "pseudepigrapha." You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It's the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means "writing that is inscribed with a lie.""

"And this is how the Civil War comes to life for a roomful of fourth-graders in Northern Virginia, 150 years after the nation's deadliest armed conflict began. Agner's reenactment of the landmark naval Battle of Hampton Roads - a tactile lesson the vet­eran teacher dreamed up this year - drew her Fairfax County class into a chapter of American history that has long provoked education debate. The war's sesquicentennial, starting Tuesday with the anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, provides a "teachable moment" for schools everywhere. But how and when students learn about slavery and secession, blue and gray, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Bull Run (or Manassas) and Appomattox varies enormously from state to state, school to school and even teacher to teacher. This year, Virginia learned anew the sensitivity of Civil War education when the state Board of Education withdrew approval of a fourth-grade textbook - "Our Virginia: Past and Present" - that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the South. Most historians reject that claim. Last year, the Texas State Board of Education voted to require eighth-graders to study the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis alongside President Abraham Lincoln's first and second inaugurals and his Gettysburg Address. That was one of many controversial revisions to Texas standards. Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state academic standards this year for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said differences in the timing and scope of Civil War education across the United States are dramatic. Often, he said, the war is not taught systematically until middle school. "

"Does It Matter Why He Did It? January 14, 2011 There's been no evidence to link today's toxic political environment with Jared Loughner's decision to use his gun last weekend. But the question persists: what has the aggressive rhetoric - peddled by mainstream candidates and media outlets and not just militant fringe groups - done to our society? The New Yorker's George Packer says the particular motivations for Loughner's rampage aren't the point."

"Political Rhetoric in the Wake of the Tucson Shooting January 14, 2011 After the shooting in Tucson last weekend, pundits across the political spectrum took a renewed look at the hyperbolic and oftentimes violent rhetoric that marks our modern political discourse. Brooke looks at the way the media responded to this tragedy."

"What is it that makes a face look beautiful? What are the differences between very attractive and less appealing faces? For every historical period and every human culture, people have always had their own ideal of beauty. But this ideal has never been constant and is still subject to changes. In our research project we adopted an empirical approach and created prototypes for unattractive and attractive faces for each sex by using the morphing technique. For example, the prototype for an unattractive face ("unsexy face") was created by blending together four faces that had previously been rated as very unattractive. The "sexy face" was created by blending together four of the most attractive faces, respectively (see report). In order to find out the characteristic differences between attractive and unattractive faces, we presented pairs of one "sexy" and one "unsexy" image for both sexes to test subjects. The task was to report which facial features were perceived to be different between the two faces. For the results see the list below. "

"At one point in "The Wizard Of Oz," Dorothy (Judy Garland) picks an apple and the tree she picks it off protests: "Well, how would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?" Dorothy is abashed and she says, "Oh, dear - I keep forgetting I'm not in Kansas," by which she means she's now entered an alternate universe where the usual distinctions between persons and objects, animate and inanimate, human beings and the natural world that is theirs to exploit do not hold. In Kansas and, she once assumed, everywhere else, trees are things you pick things off (even limbs) and persons are not. Persons have an autonomy and integrity of body that are to be respected; trees do not. A person who is maimed has a legal cause of action. A tree that has been cut down has no legal recourse, although there may be a cause of action (not, however, on behalf of the tree) if it was cut down by someone other than the owner of the property it stood on. All this seems obvious, but what the tree's question to Dorothy shows is that the category of the obvious can be challenged and unsettled. I thought of this scene on the last day of my jurisprudence course when we came to the chapter on animal rights and the rights of objects . The question of the day was posed by Christopher Stone's landmark article "Should Trees Have Standing? - Toward Legal Rights For Natural Objects" (1972), and was answered, it would seem, in Genesis 1:26, when God gave man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." The dominion of man over animals and nature is established theologically, and it is established again in the modern period by classical liberalism's privileging of individual rights exercised by beings endowed (by either God or nature) with the capacity of choice. From Locke to Mill to Berlin to Rawls, the centrality of the

"It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head."