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First error: missing the compounding effect

People who are good at exams (and become bureaucrats, economists, or hacks), my experience has been, are not good at understanding nonlinearities and dynamics.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’.

On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

As of Wednesday, 15 of the top 20 bestselling books are about race, racism and white supremacy in the US. Sales surged following the last eight days of protest after George Floyd's death in police custody.

"White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism," novel "The Vanishing Half" by black author Brit Bennett and the children's picture book "I Am Enough," are in such high demand that many of them are temporarily out of stock or only available in ebook or audio form.

"This doesn't happen every day," Kendi tweeted Tuesday. "It is fitting it happens on the day we are Blacking Out for Black lives and hopefully supporting our local independent bookstores too."

If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.

Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.

First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.

What's that worn-out phrase? Shouting into the wind? Well, after a decade of rising pollution, failed politics and worsening disasters, it seems the many, many of us who care about the climate crisis increasingly are shouting into the hurricane, if not the apocalypse.

On the cusp of 2020, the state of the planet is far more dire than in 2010. Preserving a safe and healthy ecological system is no longer a realistic possibility. Now, we're looking at less bad options, ceding the fact that the virtual end of coral reefs, the drowning of some island nations, the worsening of already-devastating storms and the displacement of millions -- they seem close to inevitable. The climate crisis is already costly, deadly and deeply unjust, putting the most vulnerable people in the world, often who've done the least to cause this, at terrible risk.

There are two numbers you need to understand to put this moment in perspective.The first is 1.5. The Paris Agreement -- the international treaty on climate change, which admittedly is in trouble, but also is the best thing we've got -- sets the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 or, at most, below 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

A mini- or micro-resolution is any behavior you commit to for four weeks. And even longer-term goals to, say, eat better or learn a new skill, can be broken down into more achievable goals on the way. Before you can land on Mars, focus on landing on the moon.

To create your micro-resolutions, you can start by thinking of 12 "bad" habits or indulgences you'd like to cut back on or give up entirely. This is what I did last year for what I called my "Year of Abstinence." My plan was to learn something about myself through self-denial, and it worked: I gave up alcohol, sweets, television and nine other things, but just for a month each. The mini-resolutions were as positive as they were eye-opening.

In order to simply increase my own, general awareness, every day in January my goal was to notice something new. I kept my eyes open, looked a bit longer, stopped to read the history markers, noticing buildings or took a different route than normal -- small ways to avoid sleepwalking through life.

Adults in the United States who binge drink are consuming even more alcohol per binging episode, according to a new study published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers analyzed data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System over a six-year period and discovered that the annual number of binge drinks among adults who reported excessive drinking jumped on average from 472 in 2011 to 529 in 2017. That's a 12% increase.It's not just college kids. A new study says older adults binge drink, tooThe CDC defines binge drinking as five drinks or more for men or four or more for women on a single occasion. Binge drinking has serious health risks, according to the CDC, including car accidents, domestic violence, STDs, unintentional pregnancy, stroke, heart and liver disease.

In 2017, the number of binge drinks pear year among adult binge drinkers ranged from 320 per year in Massachusetts to 1,219 in Wyoming. The number of drinks among those who reported binge drinking increased in nine states -- Idaho, Indiana, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia -- while the number of drinks decreased significantly in Massachusetts and West Virginia.

"Next time you see a TV commercial for a prescription drug, remind yourself that you know nothing about medical treatment and that everybody who made the commercial has a financial interest in your future behavior." —Eric Horowitz, Psychology Today, How Pharmaceutical Ads Distort Healthcare Markets

"According to Kantar Media, a firm that tracks multimedia advertising, 771,368 such ads were shown in 2016, the last full year for which data is (sic) available, an increase of almost 65 percent over 2012."

What catches my ears is the way in which drug presentations are made, often beginning with a personal story about someone suffering from a specific disease and how a particular drug helped them along. All well and good, until we learn that the players are usually fake patients called "actor portrayals" and fake doctors, often referred to as "actor portrayals" or "doctor dramatizations." After learning what a drug might be good for, the ads consist of rapid staccato-like talk about possible side-effects and lists in tiny text that are virtually impossible to read.

"It is difficult to predict how organisms will respond to changes in extreme events because these events tend to be, by definition, quite rare," Botero said. "But we can have a pretty good idea of how any given species may respond to current changes in this aspect of climate -- if we pay attention to its natural history, and have some idea of the climatic regime it has experienced in the past."

develop an evolutionary model of how populations respond to rare environmental extremes. (Think: 500-year floods.) These rare events can be tricky for evolution because it is difficult to adapt to hazards that are almost never encountered

Haaland and Botero also found that factors speeding up trait evolution are generally likely to hinder -- rather than favor -- adaptation to rare selection events. Part of the reason: High mutation rates tend to facilitate the process of adaptation to normal conditions during the long intervals in between environmental extremes.

Economics, social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth.

Supply responds to that demand, and in the United States alone some 400 institutions of higher learning grant about 900 new Ph.D.’s in economics each year.

This involves the discovery of two key elements: what governs the way in which human labour, machines, and land are combined in production and how buyers and sellers are brought together in a functioning market.

decisions are arrived at as with what the aims of the whole political process should be in the light of a particular philosophy of life.

They are all fundamental to political philosophy and demand answers in terms of modern knowledge and opinion.

Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”

Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”

Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?

The philosopher Ronald Dworkin considered this type of parental conundrum in an essay called “What Is Equality?,” from 1981. The parents in such a family, he wrote, confront a trade-off between two worthy egalitarian goals. One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved.

Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations.

Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly.

If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic’s silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases.

Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.

Long before the pandemic, Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance.

Theo and Robin have a nightly ritual where they say a prayer that Alyssa, the deceased wife and mother, taught them: May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering. That prayer itself comes from the four immeasurables in the Buddhist tradition.

When we enter into or recover this sense of kinship that was absolutely fundamental to so many indigenous cultures everywhere around the world at many, many different points in history, that there is no radical break between us and our kin, that even consciousness is shared, to some degree and to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, then death stops seeming like the enemy and it starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining.

Look, I’m 64 years old. I can remember sitting in psychology class as an undergraduate and having my professor declare that no, of course animals don’t have emotions because they don’t have an internal life. They don’t have conscious awareness. And so what looks to you like your dog being extremely happy or being extremely guilty, which dogs do so beautifully, is just your projection, your anthropomorphizing of those other creatures. And this prohibition against anthropomorphism created an artificial gulf between even those animals that are ridiculously near of kin to us, genetically.

You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.

Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are

Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.

zero-knowledge proof

Zero trust is a security framework that requires users and devices to be authenticated, authorized and continuously validated over time. Each user and device is tied to a set of granular controls it must adhere to when communicating with other users, devices and systems within a secure network.

The idea is to place applications and services into logically created secure zones.

To attract workers in today's tight labor market, companies are touting better workplace amenities. Amazon is running ads about the company's pay and benefits. Levi Strauss is offering to cover travel costs for workers seeking abortions. Airbnb is allowing its employees to permanently work remotely. This is a workers' paradise in the making.

But they also made clear that willingness to stay with the current employer is also a matter of whether their direct managers can deliver on five other factors beyond the paycheck that keep people happy, productive and on the team.

Now, increasing numbers of people demand the ability to choose when, where and how to work.

House Democrats will try to advance a raft of gun control bills on Thursday in the wake of two high-profile mass shootings that rocked the nation earlier this month.

The Democratic-led package will likely fail in the face of Republican opposition in the Senate. However, Democrats have acknowledged a hope — however slim — that bipartisan talks among senators can lead to lawmakers passing a more limited bill with support from both parties.

The Raise the Age Act would lift the purchasing age for semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21, while the Keep Americans Safe Act would outlaw the import, sale, manufacture, transfer or possession of a large-capacity magazine.

Companies touted internal efforts aimed at reducing fossil fuel demand. At the same time, they said their products, the burning of which scientists say are among the dominant drivers of climate change, will remain in use for many years to come.

The hearings mark the first time oil executives will be pressed to answer questions, under oath, about whether their companies misled the public about the reality of climate change by obscuring the scientific consensus:

compare the inquiry with the tobacco hearings of the 1990s,