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declared that “a strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community.”

Unfortunately, his memo ignored two major points — the role that Facebook and other technology platforms are playing in inadvertently damaging local news media, and the one way they could actually save journalism: with a massive philanthropic commitment.

As advertising spending shifted from print, TV and radio to the internet, the money didn’t mostly go to digital news organizations. Increasingly, it goes to Facebook and Google.

In today’s globally connected world, language may still be a barrier to science.

Today, almost every major scientific journal prints in English – even while featuring research from all over the world.

Meanwhile, new research suggests, tens of thousands of reports are being published without English translations.

According to a source close to Lasswell, the relationship between Lasswell and Gigot broke down in June when Gigot blocked Lasswell from publishing op-eds critical of Trump’s business practices and which raised questions about his alleged ties to Mafia figures. Lasswell asked Gigot for a book leave for the remainder of the election. Gigot, who had been critical of Trump, took a “sudden turn” on the candidate, the source said.

When Lasswell reached out to Gigot after the election about coming back to the paper in the new year, the source said, there was a period of weeks of silence before Gigot fired him over the phone.

“People really, really liked and respected Mark … Some were quite disappointed to see how he was treated,” the source said. “It’s clear that there’s a divide at the Journal [over Trump], and I think that this is indicative of a larger sort of tension that’s going on there right now.”

The domination of English and a lack of translation is hurting global science, new research suggests.

Researchers say the domination of English among international scientific communities and the lack of translation makes it more likely non-English research will go ignored.

According to a new study in the journal PLOS Biology, the domination of English creates barriers to knowledge transfer. The barriers are present in all scientific fields, but especially problematic in biodiversity conservation.

When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists.

lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers’ privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud.

corporate control of data could give preferential access to an elite group of scientists at the largest corporations.

American millennials—those born between 1982 and 1999—are less likely to identify as religious than previous generations at the same age, according to a new analysis of a combined large survey.

Though the survey results can only show correlation, and not causation, Twenge thinks that this generational shift is likely a result of a rise of individualism. “Individualism can be an uncomfortable fit with religion,” she says. Whereas religion typically emphasizes social norms and appeals to a higher authority, individualism focuses on the self and personal choices.

Researchers analyzed survey data from more than 11 million respondents, consisting of everyone from eighth graders to college-goers in the period between 1966 and 2014. The analysis, published in the journal PLOS One, reveals that even though the majority of adolescents still identify as religious in some way, a growing number is identifying as having no religion.

Getting parents to take sore throats more seriously and treating them more aggressively with penicillin could save thousands of lives in poor countries relatively cheaply, doctors from India and South Africa say.

The authors of a recent paper in the journal Global Heart estimate that a quarter of all sore throats are caused by strep A bacteria and that such infections lead to as many as 500,000 deaths a year, almost all of them in poor countries.

. Cuba, Costa Rica and Martinique have sharply reduced rheumatic fever by public education about sore throat, screening for strep by symptoms, and treating quickly.

We speak so effortlessly that most of us never think about it. But psychologists and neuroscientists are captivated by the human capacity to communicate with language.

Untangling the brain’s mechanisms for language has been a pillar of neuroscience since its inception. New research published in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences about the different connections going on in the brains of Mandarin and English speakers, demonstrates just how flexible our ability to learn language really is.

Victims of stroke or traumatic brain injury to either of these crucial areas on the left side of the brain exhibited profound disabilities for producing and understanding language.

we ought to ask why meditation is useful. So I polled a group of meditation researchers, teachers and practitioners on why they recommend it. I liked their answers, but none of them were unique to meditation. Every benefit of the practice can be gained through other activities.

it may reduce stress. Fine. But so does quality sleep and exercise

you can reduce stress simply by changing the way you think about it.

You know the situation is getting desperate when three bioethicists propose genetically modifying humans to reduce our environmental impact. In a bizarre paper titled ‘Human engineering and climate change’, Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache argue we should seriously consider technologies to engineer human bodies to reduce carbon emissions.

The paper, to be published in a respectable journal, is beyond satire and its only likely effect is to bring the philosophy profession into disrepute. Philosophy, it seems, does not have a ‘laugh test’ for filtering out whacky proposals. So why stop at cat’s eyes and midget babies? Why not genetically modify people to make them white in order to cool the Earth by increasing its reflectivity?

The three bioethicists suggest that people who are appalled at the idea of human engineering may have a “status quo bias”, resisting their innovative ideas because of an inherent conservatism.

He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community

for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem

he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found

Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability.

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.

“Probably the biggest empathy generator is cuteness: paedomorphic features such as large eyes, a large head, and a small lower face,” Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, tells me. “Professional empathy entrepreneurs have long known this, of course, which is why so many charities feature photos of children and why so many conservation organizations feature pandas. Prettier children are more likely to be adopted, and baby-faced defendants get lighter sentences.”

Not much we can do about looks — although criminal defense lawyers try, by having scruffy clients shave and dress up before appearing in court.

Granted, skepticism is reasonable any time (mostly liberal) academics reach conclusions that portray the wealthy in a poor light. But these experiments also find a measure of backing in the real world. For example, among Democratic politicians, personal wealth is a predictor of supporting legislation that would increase inequality, according to a journal article last year by Michael W. Kraus and Bennett Callaghan.

scholars covet thy neighbor's data. They're attracted to the very large and often fascinating data sets that private companies have developed.

It's the companies that own and manage this data. The only standards we know they have to follow are in the terms-of-service that users accept to create an account, and the law as it stands in different countries.

the "sexiness" of the Facebook data that led Cornell University and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) into an ethically dubious arrangement, where, for example, Facebook's unreadable 9,000-word terms-of-service are said to be good enough to meet the standard for "informed consent."

“The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions.

The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics

Coates believes that if there is an answer to contemporary racism, it lies in confronting the pas

We don’t just loathe inconsistencies in others; we hate them in ourselves, too. But why? What makes contradictions so revolting — and should they be?

Leon Festinger, one of the great social psychologists in history, coined the term cognitive dissonance to describe the discomfort you feel if you say or do something that is inconsistent with one of your beliefs

there was a catch: Sometimes people weren’t bothered at all by holding inconsistent beliefs

If you’re in a state of perpetual fear of losing market share for you as a person, it’s just the wrong mind-set to move through the world with.” Meaning that if your goal is to get liked and retweeted, then you are perhaps molding yourself into the kind of person you believe will get those things, whether or not that person resembles the actual you. The writer’s job is to say things that are uncomfortable and hard to reduce. Why would a writer mold himself into a product?

And why couldn’t people hear him about the social effects this would have? “The internet is all about destroying the elite, destroying the gatekeepers,” he said. “The people know best. You take that to its conclusion, and you get Donald Trump. What do those Washington insiders know? What does the elite know?

So he decided to withdraw from it all. After publicity for “The Corrections” ended, he decided he would no longer read about himself — not reviews, not think pieces, not stories, and then, as they came, not status updates and not tweets. He didn’t want to hear reaction to his work. He didn’t want to see the myriad ways he was being misunderstood. He didn’t want to know what the hashtags were.

More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.

Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"

Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.

In a world of record-breaking inequality, Linton is giving those of us who are not wealthy much-needed insight into how wealth impacts personality, which could help us understand how all the wealthy people whom Trump has put in charge of his administration think.

In a 2015 paper, “Why Wealthier People Think People Are Wealthier, and Why It Matters,” researchers at Britain’s University of Kent and New Zealand’s University of Auckland discovered that the more money someone possessed, the wealthier they believed their peers to be.

Other research shows lower-income people spend more time looking at their surroundings and pick up on emotional cues better than their wealthier peers.