Group items tagged

Others would say she was a modern wonder. She was genetically engineered by a Canadian company to produce milk that could be spun into spider silk.

As visitors pass through a curtain to enter the darkened exhibition space, they see a spectacularly fluffy white ornamental chicken and an aquarium full of glowing fish

But Pell does not intend the museum to be merely a cabinet of curiosities or a freak show. Visitors will not find rants that drum up fears of “Frankenfoods.”

Gov. Chris Christie insisted during his latest trip to New Hampshire that the fallout from the George Washington Bridge scandal wouldn't have been as nearly as intense if he were a Democrat.

argued to early-primary voters Hillary Clinton escaped scrutiny for clearing the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state because she's a Democrat and he declared "bias is on full display" when that's compared to his own controversy.

"Could you imagine if my response the day after

On June 16, Pope Francis is expected to release an encyclical letter on the environment, the Catholic Church’s strongest statement to date on the moral issues associated with climate change. It’s a move that has environmentalists very excited — and one GOP presidential nominee less than thrilled.

“When we get involved with controversial and scientific theories, I think the Church is not as forceful and not as credible,” Santorum continued. “I’ve said this to the Catholic bishops many times — when they get involved in agriculture policy, or things like that, that are really outside of the scope of what the Church’s main message is, that we’re better off sticking to the things that are really the core teachings of the Church as opposed to getting involved in every other kind of issue that happens to be popular at the time.”

By releasing an encyclical on climate change, the Catholic Church isn’t involving itself in controversial science — it’s reiterating what a majority of scientists already know: that the climate is changing, and that humans are the cause.

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.”

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."

YouTube said on Sunday that it was investigating the simmering complaints by some users that its family-friendly “restricted mode” wrongly filters out some lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender videos.

In a statement, YouTube described restricted mode as “an optional feature used by a very small subset of users who want to have a more limited YouTube experience.”

In a statement, YouTube said that many videos featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender content were unaffected by the filter, an optional parental-control setting, and that it only targeted those that discussed sensitive topics such as politics, health and sexuality.

But just being allowed to set foot in that locker room was a huge victory for the girl. She is transgender.

but the war over how to accommodate transgender students is far from over in her Chicago suburb.

on the grounds that they are “the opposite biological sex.” Their presence, the opponents argue, violates community standards of decency.

The death penalty holds a crucial, conflicted place in a nation deeply divided over crime and punishment, and whether the state should ever take a life. But for such a long, very public legal process, only a small number of people see what unfolds inside the country’s death houses.

There is no uniformity when they look back on the emotions that surround the minutes when they watched someone die.

You’re watching through glass, and then the process starts.

Should economics study the psychological basis of agents’ choice behaviour? I show how this question is multifaceted and profoundly ambiguous. There is no sharp distinction between ‘mentalist’ answers to this question and rival ‘behavioural’ answers. What's more, clarifying this point raises problems for mentalists of the ‘functionalist’ variety [Dietrich, F., & List, C. (2016). Mentalism versus behaviourism in economics: A philosophy-of-science perspective. Economics and Philosophy, 32(2), 249–281. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267115000462]. Firstly, functionalist hypotheses collapse into hypotheses about input–output dispositions, I show, unless one places some unwelcome restrictions on what counts as a cognitive variable. Secondly, functionalist hypotheses make some risky commitments about the plasticity of agents’ choice dispositions.

This controversy over the proper role of psychological concepts, explanations and evidence in economics is multifaceted and profoundly indeterminate, this paper will argue. In what way multifaceted? One facet of this controversy is the issue of whether economics should study the anatomical structures in the brain that underlie decision-making (Section 3). A second facet is the issue of whether economics should study the causes and effects of cognitive variables (Section 4). A third facet, I suggest, is the issue of whether economics should study the plasticity of agents’ choice dispositions (Section 6).

The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.

in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.

ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded

In February-March 1616, the Catholic Church issued a prohibition against the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion.

This led later (1633) to the Inquisition trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as a suspected heretic, which generated a controversy that continues to our day.

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This book elaborated the (geokinetic and heliocentric) idea that the earth rotates daily on its own axis and revolves yearly around the sun

Snapchat (SNAP) will no longer promote President Donald Trump's account on its platform in the wake of his controversial comments on ongoing protests across the US, the company announced Wednesday.

"We are not currently promoting the President's content on Snapchat's Discover platform. We will not amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice by giving them free promotion on Discover," Rachel Racusen, a spokesperson for Snap, Snapchat's parent company, said in a statement Wednesday.

"Racial violence and injustice have no place in our society and we stand together with all who seek peace, love, equality, and justice in America,"

Johnson has proved staunch in his defense of his close ally since the latter was accused of breaking the UK's strict lockdown by driving 260 miles with his wife, who he admits was displaying some symptoms of coronavirus, and young son to be near his extended family.

In quarantine-fatigued Britain, however, where many have agonized over the command to stay away from frightened, sick and dying relatives, the Prime Minister's words have not gone down well. Highly unusually, several of his own Conservative MPs are now calling for Cummings to be sacked, and even the government-friendly Daily Mail asked: "What Planet Are They On?" of his decision to stand by his man.

In one of the more moving responses, Helen Goodman, until December the Labour Party MP for Durham, the northern town Cummings visited to stay in a property belonging to his parents, said she was "appalled" by his behavior, given her own father had died alone from Covid-19 in a local care home after she obeyed the rules and did not visit.

Hushed voices and anxious looks dictate so many conversations on campus here at the University of Virginia, where I’m finishing up my senior year.

I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group — and then I wasn’t.

Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think.

The distinguished philosopher Thomas Nagel has spent much of his career defending an antireductionist view of mind. His new book, “Mind and Cosmos,” extends this skepticism to much of contemporary scientific inquiry, including evolutionary biology, and calls for a new scientific revolution based on teleological principles. It’s a proposal that has, unsurprisingly, been quite controversial

, they think Nagel’s insistence “that explanation and prediction are symmetrical” is an outdated one, and that his description of what a new, teleologically-oriented science would look like is insufficiently clear.

As for teleology, Sober has no problem understanding certain phenomena this way, as long as there are “causal underpinnings” for a given teleological statement. But Nagel’s position, as Sober understands it, entails “teleological explanations that are both true and causally inexplicable,” a class for which neither Sober, nor Nagel, apparently, can offer any examples. (In a strangely concessive coda, Sober does admit that his “reactions may be mired in presuppositions,” and that history may prove Nagel to be “a prophet whom naysayers such as me were unable to recognize.”)