Group items tagged

The jury chosen for the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, is notable because it is significantly less white than Minneapolis itself.

three Black men, one Black woman and two jurors who identify as multiracial.

50% of the panel that will vote on Chauvin's fate will be Black or multiracial.

While my experience wasn't related to statistics, it was an issue of science which seemed like we should have been able to prove the right answer one way or another -- but we failed.

What the influential whistleblower revealed forced substantive changes to the surveillance state. But he may never be able to safely come hom

he catalyst for Congress’ historic vote on NSA reform on Tuesday – the same person who led to a federal court to rule that NSA mass surveillance of Americans was illegal – remains exiled from the United States and faces decades in jail.

it’s a shame that almost everyone nonetheless ignores the oppressive law under which Snowden was charged or the US government’s outrageous position in his case: that if he were to stand trial, he could not tell the jury what his whistleblowing has accomplished.

Jury selection continues for the second week in the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Later this week, the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys are expected to question prospective jurors. They will ask about jurors’ backgrounds, their feelings about the death penalty and whether they already have an opinion about Tsarnaev.

. Some say brain science is likely to play a role in the trial, because courts are increasingly looking at what neuroscience tells us about adolescence and the developing brain.

newish is the rhetoric of unreality, the insistence, chiefly by Democrats, that some politicians are incapable of perceiving the truth because they have an epistemological deficit: they no longer believe in evidence, or even in objective reality.

the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.

. Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

(CNN)A jury has found both Amber Heard and Johnny Depp liable for defamation in their lawsuits against each other.

Depp sued Heard, his ex-wife, for defamation over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in which she described herself as a "public figure representing domestic abuse." Though Depp was not named in the article, he claims it cost him lucrative acting roles. Heard countersued her ex-husband for defamation over statements Depp's attorney made about her abuse claims.

Heard kept her eyes down as the verdict was read. Depp was not present in court, but released a statement that said, in part, "the jury gave me my life back."

The case threatens a huge financial and reputational blow to Fox, by far the most powerful conservative media company in the country. But legal scholars say it also has the potential to deliver a powerful verdict on the kind of pervasive and pernicious falsehoods — and the people who spread them — that are undermining the country’s faith in democracy.

“We’re litigating history in a way: What is historical truth?” said Lee Levine, a noted First Amendment lawyer

“Here you’re taking very recent current events and going through a process which, at the end, is potentially going to declare what the correct version of history is.”

Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.

Neisser became fascinated by the concept of flashbulb memories—the times when a shocking, emotional event seems to leave a particularly vivid imprint on the mind.

Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.

When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use. Something similar can be said of other cherished goods and practices. We don’t allow children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult the process of adoption can be or how willing impatient prospective parents might be. Even if the prospective buyers would treat the child responsibly, we worry that a market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing them. Children are properly regarded not as consumer goods but as beings worthy of love and care. Or consider the rights and obligations of citizenship. If you are called to jury duty, you can’t hire a substitute to take your place. Nor do we allow citizens to sell their votes, even though others might be eager to buy them. Why not? Because we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way. These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.

Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. Its truths are objective, necessary and timeless.

What kinds of things are mathematical entities and theorems, that they are knowable in this way? Do they exist somewhere, a set of immaterial objects in the enchanted gardens of the Platonic world, waiting to be discovered? Or are they mere creations of the human mind?

Many mathematicians, when pressed, admit to being Platonists. The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” But if this is true, how do humans manage to access this hidden reality?

. As convincing as juries may find the testimony of witnesses, good prosecutors know that human memory is, more often than not, the least reliable source of evidence.

“We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap,” says Northwestern University scientist Kenneth Paller. “Thus, the vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that’s very similar to that of an experienced event.”

How this process works is a research question of great interest to neuroscientists. This week, researchers affiliated with a project at MIT reported a giant step toward explaining how external stimuli can distort mental representations to produce brand new, seemingly accurate—but completely false—memories.

Researchers call it the filter bubble: the personalized view of the Internet created through tech company algorithms.

For example, liberals and conservatives may rarely learn about issues that concern the other side simply because those issues never makes it into their news feeds. Over time, this could cause political polarization, because people are not exposed to topics and ideas from the opposite camp.

So on the question of whether Facebook is a force for good or ill for democracy, Aral says, "the jury is still out."

how we all usually respond when our memory is challenged. We have an abstract understanding that people can remember the same event differently.

But when our own memories are challenged, we may neglect all this and instead respond emotionally, acting as though we must be right and everyone else must be wrong.

It’s no accident that Oprah Winfrey’s latest best seller is called “What I Know For Sure,” rather than “Some Things That Might Be True.”

THIS is a strange moment for sex in America. We’ve detached it from pregnancy, matrimony and, in some circles, romance. At least, we no longer assume that intercourse signals the start of a relationship.

But the more casual sex becomes, the more we demand that our institutions and government police the line between what’s consensual and what isn’t. And we wonder how to define rape. Is it a violent assault or a violation of personal autonomy? Is a person guilty of sexual misconduct if he fails to get a clear “yes” through every step of seduction and consummation?

According to the doctrine of affirmative consent — the “yes means yes” rule — the answer is, well, yes, he is.

people treat sexual abuse differently than other crimes. Because the crime reveals icky things about our society and our continuing problem of gendered violence, a lot of people simply refuse to see it for what it is, either going into deep denial or holding accusations of rape to a much higher standard of evidence than they would any other crime.

The Cosby situation is a classic example of this. Public Policy Polling found, back in January, that despite the testimony of dozens of women, 41 percent of Americans remained unsure about Cosby’s guilt. Another 20 percent outright preferred to believe all those women were lying rather than admit that he probably did it. A minority of Americans—39 percent—were able to look at all these testimonials and accept the likely truth that he did it.

there’s a felony conviction in only 5 percent of rape cases. That is well beyond “innocent until proven guilty” and shows that eyewitness testimony is simply disregarded in rape cases to an extent that isn’t true in all other crimes. Fixing this situation requires everyone—not just cops and judges, but ordinary Americans who might sit a jury one day—to rethink our attitudes towards rape accusations.

17-year-old Hungarian student Iván Merker has won a shared gold medal at the 23rd International Philosophy Olympiad held in the Estonian city of Tartu, Henrik Farkas, leader of the Hungarian team and member of the Hungarian Society of Philosophy has disclosed.

Each year, two Hungarian students are invited to the International Philosophy Olympiad who have already proven their knowledge in the subject as finalists of a national competition for secondary school students and at the Hungarian qualifiers for the international event.

The jury evaluated the compositions based on five considerations: understanding of the subject, coherence, the ability to argue, originality and proficiency in the area.

People who are empathetic are more sensitive to the perspectives and sufferings of others. They are more likely to make compassionate moral judgments.

The problem comes when we try to turn feeling into action. Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action. In the early days of the Holocaust, Nazi prison guards sometimes wept as they mowed down Jewish women and children, but they still did it.

These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them

he story of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on an African American man who was bird watching in Central Park and who asked her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules, is about racism, yes. But it's also about how racism is more than just whites' hostility toward people of color. Racism is more than a feeling; it's a system in which white people can and do exploit their own social positions, assumptions about their innocence, and the presumption that they're telling the truth.

That a black man has to rely on videotaped wrongdoing to be believed -- to protect himself from an agitated stranger advancing up on him, and to ultimately see something resembling justice

She refused to leash the dog, and, according to Christian Cooper's account on Facebook (where he posted a video of part of their encounter), he told her "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it."

A law that defines a crime in vague terms is likely to raise due-process issues.

a law is unconstitutionally vague when people “of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning.”

Psychiatrists have suggested that Milligan had as many as 24 personalities

The first jury to hear this case could not reach a consensus on the murder, and the prosecution eventually gave up those charges.