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A new book by Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer in Massachusetts, titled “Three Felonies a Day,” claims the average professional in the United States commits at least three crimes every day. How? While academics, lawyers and even government officials don’t actually know how many laws exist in today’s judicial system, it’s estimated that there are from 10,000 to 300,000 federal regulations that could be enforced criminally.

That something as integral to typing as the location of the keys is a forgettable detail is surprising, if consistent with the idea that daily exposure to something and explicit knowledge of that thing don’t go hand in hand.

Eventually Brad Katsuyama came to realize that the most sophisticated investors didn’t know what was going on in their own market. Not the big mutual funds, Fidelity and Vanguard. Not the big money-management firms like T. Rowe Price and Capital Group. Not even the most sophisticated hedge funds.

The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became

Technology had collided with Wall Street in a peculiar way. It had been used to increase efficiency. But it had also been used to introduce a peculiar sort of market inefficiency. Taking advantage of loopholes in some well-meaning regulation introduced in the mid-2000s, some large amount of what Wall Street had been doing with technology was simply so someone inside the financial markets would know something that the outside world did not. The same system that once gave us subprime-mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock-market trades involving fractions of a penny that occurred at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand.

The trouble with the stock market — with all of the public and private exchanges — was that they were fantastically gameable, and had been gamed: first by clever guys in small shops, and then by prop traders who moved inside the big Wall Street banks. That was the problem, Puz thought. From the point of view of the most sophisticated traders, the stock market wasn’t a mechanism for channeling capital to productive enterprise but a puzzle to be solved.

As they worked through the order types, the Puzzle Masters created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared as if there were three activities that led to a vast amount of grotesquely unfair trading. The first they called electronic front-running — seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing ahead of him to the next (what had happened to Katsuyama when he traded at RBC). The second they called rebate arbitrage — using the new complexity to game the seizing of whatever legal kickbacks, called rebates within the industry, the exchange offered without actually providing the liquidity that the rebate was presumably meant to entice. The third, and probably by far the most widespread, they called slow-market arbitrage. This occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see the price of a stock change on one exchange and pick off orders sitting on other exchanges before those exchanges were able to react. This happened all day, every day, and very likely generated more billions of dollars a year than the other strategies combined.

IEX had made its point: That to function properly, a financial market didn’t need to be rigged in someone’s favor. It didn’t need payment for order flow and co-location and all sorts of unfair advantages possessed by a small handful of traders. All it needed was for investors to take responsibility for understanding it, and then to seize its controls. “The backbone of the market,” Katsuyama says, “is investors coming together to trade.”

If an investor as large as T. Rowe Price, which acted on behalf of millions of investors, had trouble obtaining the information it needed to determine if its brokers had acted in their interest, what chance did the little guy have?

The stock market really was rigged. Katsuyama often wondered how enterprising politicians and plaintiffs’ lawyers and state attorneys general would respond to that realization. (This March, the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, announced a new investigation of the stock exchanges and the dark pools, and their relationships with high-frequency traders.

These are not questions that can be answered by the development of the technologies. They require new social understandings. "What are the things we want to see happen?" Cascio asked. "What are the things we should and should not do?"

he floated five simple principles: 1. The right to self-knowledge 2. The right to self-modification 3. The right to refuse modification 4. The right to modify/refuse to modify your children 5. The right to know who has been modified

Research into the effect of technology on the development of the language and literacy skills vis-à-vis reading activities of children has offered evidence for favorable effects of digital-form books.

E-books are also being increasingly used to teach reading among beginners and children with reading difficulties.

Technology can be used to improve reading ability in many ways. It can enhance and sustain the interest levels for digitial natives by allowing immediate feedback on performance and providing added practice when necessary.

Technology can also help in improvement of writing skills. Word processing software promotes not only composition but also editing and revising in ways that streamline the task of writing.

However, the web cannot be discounted as being "bad for language", considering that it also offers very useful tools such as blogging and microblogging that can help the student improve her writing skills with dynamic feedback. The possibility of incorporating other media into a written document (e.g. figures, graphics, videos etc.) can enhance the joy of writing using technology.

Technology enhanced oral communication is indeed useful in that it allows students from remote locations, or from all over the world to communicate orally through video and audio conferencing tools.

As with anything to do with technology, there are also detractors who propose negative influence of features like animation, sound, music and other multimedia effects possible in digital media, which may distract young readers from the story content.

Such complaints notwithstanding, the symbiotic ties between linguistics and technology cannot be ignored.

She identifies herself as having just started her second postdoc in the lab of the adviser trying to look down her shirt. A postdoctoral researcher already has a Ph.D., and frequently has her own funding, but does not yet have a permanent position or the institutional affiliation and (relative) job security that goes with it

Postdocs rely on the forbearance of an adviser who gives them lab space (and usually some other resources), an institutional affiliation, and, one hopes, some mentoring in how to succeed as a member of their scientific community.

terrible advice

postdoc wants an adviser that engages her as a scientist, someone committed to helping her gain both the competence and the confidence to become a full-fledged colleague in the scientific community. These are not goals that are fostered when the adviser regularly tries to look down the postdoc’s shirt.

Huang’s column suggested that, because workplaces are part of life, they are also places where we ought to expect people’s libido to influence their behavior. She wrote, “the kind of behavior you mention is common in the workplace.”

postdoc may have more power than a graduate student, she has significantly less power than her adviser, especially given the importance of networking in building one’s scientific reputation, establishing future collaborations, and locating a permanent position.

Huang offered her opinion that the adviser in question had not crossed that legal line. On that basis, Huang argued that even though leering is inappropriate workplace behavior, the postdoc should “put up with it, with good humor if you can.”

It matters not a whit whether the behavior rises to the level of unlawful sexual harassment. It

Telling this early career scientist to grin and bear unprofessional behavior from her adviser, rather than doing something to mitigate it, leaves her stuck in a professional relationship where it may never be possible to engage the adviser’s scientific interest without concerns about engaging his carnal interest

It will be hard to get mentoring without wondering if there are unspoken strings attached.

It will be hard for the postdoc to believe her adviser sees her as a colleague — or for her to see herself as one

So “Bothered” probably doesn’t want to confront her adviser in a way that comes across as accusing, and she should almost certainly have back-up from someone else in her scientific community with enough power to protect her

If it doesn’t look like there’s a reasonable way to ask the adviser to stop without repercussions, the postdoc’s confidants can help her develop an escape plan so “Bothered” can receive the mentoring (and salary and benefits) she needs without the hassle of an adviser’s unprofessional behavior.

“The intensity of this reorganization will depend, unsurprisingly, on the magnitude of warming.”

researchers seek to predict future impacts of global warming on marine life by examining how the oceans were affected during times of substantial temperature change in the distant past.

Extrapolating from those records, the researchers predicted that even moderate climate change will cause significant disruptions, with local extinctions and species migrations occurring three times more frequently than today.

More severe warming will have a major impact on marine life, with significant disruptions occurring across 50 to 70 percent of the world’s oceans, the authors concluded.

The impacts cannot fail to affect life on land, given the ocean’s role in supporting human populations

“When the temperature of the environment changes, animals and plants change in abundance locally or may move to new locations if the habitat is suitable,”

“These movements ultimately affect the food web and ecology, and if they are rapid, the food web may become uncoupled.”

humans “rely upon the ecosystem services that the interconnected web of life creates.”

Because facial recognition can be used covertly to identify and track people by name at a distance, some civil liberties experts call it unequivocally intrusive. In view of intelligence documents made public by Edward J. Snowden, they also warn that once companies get access to such data, the government could, too. “This is you as an individual being monitored over time and your movements and habits being recorded,”

facial recognition may soon let companies link a person’s online persona with his or her actual offline self at a specific public location. That could seriously threaten our ability to remain anonymous in public.

industry and consumer advocates will have to contend with nascent facial-recognition apps like NameTag; it is designed to allow a user to scan photographs of strangers, then see information about them — like their occupations or social-network profiles.

It shows that the little changes provided by many, many transcriptional enhancers can help make the small tweaks that result in an individual facial shape. Of, course, this study was done in mice, but it’s very possible that these effects are present in humans (though hopefully none of them result in a long furry snout). The results could help scientists better understand what gives one person that chiseled jaw, and another that heavy brow. And the next time you look in the mirror, and see your cleft chin or your prominent cheekbones, send out many small thank yous to your many, many transcriptional enhancers.

audited existing maps for 174 infectious diseases of clinical importance. Following a huge systematic review, they scored the maps for each disease according to how much of the known global range is covered and the quality of the data—whether they were up-to-date and whether they relied on accurate measures like molecular diagnostics or GPS coordinates, rather than unverified expert opinion.

even the highest-scoring diseases have room for improvement.

. They argue that technology can help to plug the gaps in our maps in the future, and they point to several untapped sources of data. For example, both PubMed and GenBank, which collect biomedical literature and gene sequences respectively, contain geospatial information for the majority of diseases that the team reviewed. And social networks like Twitter can provide invaluable real-time clues about spreading symptoms and illnesses, often tagged with geographical information. During the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 swine flu, for example, Twitter predicted outbreaks 1 or 2 weeks ahead of traditional surveillance measures.

I struggled because governments or researchers wouldn’t share their information,” he said. “But there was all this incredible knowledge on the web being discussed through professional networks or news media.”

believes that the problem now is not a lack of data but a deluge of it. Sites like HealthMap and BioCaster are already using learning algorithms to filter online sources for information relevant to infections. They are also using crowdsourcing tools that ask online volunteers to check if flagged social media chatter actually relates to the disease of interest.

first new fossil was unearthed in 2011, when the team found a molar belonging to the oldest known Old World monkey or cercopithecoid, which they named Nsungwepithecus gunnelli. A year later and 15 kilometers away, they found the oldest known remains of a hominoid or “ape”—a jawbone and four teeth belonging to a new species that they dubbed Rukwapithecus fleaglei. 

fossils from the late Oligocene are rare, partly because there are few deposits of the right age and they tend to be covered in thick vegetation.

“That implies that the hominoid-cercopithecoid divergence was well underway.”

the new discoveries expand the range of Oligocene primates from a handful of fossils in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, to the more southerly country of Tanzania. This location also suggests that the ape and Old World monkey lineages arose against a background of great geological upheaval. By the time Rukwapithecus and Nsungwepithecus appeared, the climate was warming and the flat Tanzanian landscape had already begun to fragment into mountains, deep rifts, and lakes, creating the beginnings of the Eastern African Rift. These changes could have created many new habitats, and fueled the diversification of the local primates.

were expecting [similar] fossils to occur in a more tectonically stable landscape, and were searching to the north in Kenya, Libya, and Egypt,”

“The Rukwa Rift Basin Project has succeeded in destroying those preconceived notions and opens many new possibilities.”

We suspect that by 25 million years ago, there were already several independent lineages of both apes and monkeys in Africa, but paleontologists just haven’t found their fossil remains yet. We are soon headed back to the field to try to find some more!”

Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape.

The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below.

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

Ben.Lynch Augusta, Georgia 1 day ago I've followed Mr. Coates for sometime now and tend to agree with his viewpoints. As a white southern male who works in our segregated education systems, it took years for me to actually apprehend my day to day interactions with black children in poverty. For the longest time, I simply couldn't understand the behaviors I saw, the reactions, and at first I reacted with contempt, but then I began to understand little by little. I don't think I can express it to anyone here, let alone Mr. Brooks, but it is something that one only appears to get by letting it sink into your bones day after day, hour after hour. The conditions are terrible and promise to remain so for the rest of my career. My students know, even if they lack the rhetorical chops to express it, that the game is rigged, that what we sell, meaning America at large, to make ourselves feel better, to feel just, is demonstrably a false bill of goods that does nothing to solve the actual problems of their life. These students are so used to being crushed that they can't even begin to articulate that they are being crushed because it's simply how it is. Some suppose Mr. Coates is overly dour, overly negative, but he provides a necessary contrapuntal to those who assume that the arc of the universe inevitably bends toward justice. Struggle can and often does end in defeat. The wicked often sleep as well as the just and sometimes better. The sins of the fathers remain fixed around the necks of the sons and daughters.

The real payoff in subscribing to the idea of a brain as a computer would come from using that idea to profitably guide research. In an article last fall in the journal Science, two of my colleagues (Adam Marblestone of M.I.T. and Thomas Dean of Google) and I endeavored to do just that, suggesting that a particular kind of computer, known as the field programmable gate array, might offer a preliminary starting point for thinking about how the brain works.

FIELD programmable gate arrays consist of a large number of “logic block” programs that can be configured, and reconfigured, individually, to do a wide range of tasks. One logic block might do arithmetic, another signal processing, and yet another look things up in a table. The computation of the whole is a function of how the individual parts are configured. Much of the logic can be executed in parallel, much like what happens in a brain.

our suggestion is that the brain might similarly consist of highly orchestrated sets of fundamental building blocks, such as “computational primitives” for constructing sequences, retrieving information from memory, and routing information between different locations in the brain. Identifying those building blocks, we believe, could be the Rosetta stone that unlocks the brain.

it is unlikely that we will ever be able to directly connect the language of neurons and synapses to the diversity of human behavior, as many neuroscientists seem to hope. The chasm between brains and behavior is just too vast.

Our best shot may come instead from dividing and conquering. Fundamentally, that may involve two steps: finding some way to connect the scientific language of neurons and the scientific language of computational primitives (which would be comparable in computer science to connecting the physics of electrons and the workings of microprocessors); and finding some way to connect the scientific language of computational primitives and that of human behavior (which would be comparable to understanding how computer programs are built out of more basic microprocessor instructions).

If neurons are akin to computer hardware, and behaviors are akin to the actions that a computer performs, computation is likely to be the glue that binds the two.

Froese and Bader's research wound up defining four ways in which Americans see God: •The Authoritative God. When conservatives Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck proclaim that America will lose God's favor unless we get right with him, they're rallying believers in what Froese and Bader call an Authoritative God, one engaged in history and meting out harsh punishment to those who do not follow him. About 28% of the nation shares this view, according to Baylor's 2008 findings. "They divide the world by good and evil and appeal to people who are worried, concerned and scared," Froese says. "They respond to a powerful God guiding this country, and if we don't explicitly talk about (that) God, then we have the wrong God or no God at all."

•The Benevolent God. When President Obama says he is driven to live out his Christian faith in public service, or political satirist Stephen Colbert mentions God while testifying to Congress in favor of changing immigration laws, they're speaking of what the Baylor researchers call a Benevolent God. This God is engaged in our world and loves and supports us in caring for others, a vision shared by 22% of Americans, according to Baylor's findings. "Rhetoric that talks about the righteous vs. the heathen doesn't appeal to them," Froese says. "Their God is a force for good who cares for all people, wee

•The Critical God. The poor, the suffering and the exploited in this world often believe in a Critical God who keeps an eye on this world but delivers justice in the next, Bader says. Bader says this view of God — held by 21% of Americans — was reflected in a sermon at a working-class neighborhood church the researchers visited in Rifle, Colo., in 2008. Pastor Del Whittington's theme at Open Door Church was " 'Wait until heaven, and accounts will be settled.'

•The Distant God. Though about 5% of Americans are atheists or agnostics, Baylor found that nearly one in four (24%) see a Distant God that booted up the universe, then left humanity alone. This doesn't mean that such people have no religion. It's the dominant view of Jews and other followers of world religions and philosophies such as Buddhism or Hinduism, the Baylor research finds.

Does your house need a new coat of paint? Don’t bother, just enter it into your public database and you have a nice new mint green paint job that everyone will see. Want to redecorate? Do it with computer graphics. You can have a birdbath in the front yard inhabited by Disneyesque animals who frolic and play. Even indoors, don’t buy artwork, just download it from the net and have it appear where you want.

Got a zit? No need to cover up with Clearsil, just erase it from your public face and people will see the improved version. You can dress up your clothes and hairstyle as well.

Of course, anyone can turn off their enhancements and see the plain old reality, but most people don’t bother most of the time because things are ugly that way.

Some of the kids attending Fairmont Junior High do so remotely. They appear as "ghosts", indistinguishable from the other kids except that you can walk through them. They go to classes and raise their hands to ask questions just like everyone else. They see the school and everyone at the school sees them. Instead of visiting friends, the kids can all instantly appear at one another’s locations.

The computer synthesizing visual imagery is able to call on the localizer network for views beyond what the person is seeing. In this way you can have 360 degree vision, or even see through walls. This is a transparent society with a vengeance!

The cumulative effect of all this technology was absolutely amazing and completely believable

One thing that was believable is that it seemed that a lot of the kids cheated, and it was almost impossible for the adults to catch them. With universal network connectivity it would be hard to make sure kids are doing their work on their own. I got the impression the school sort of looked the other way, the idea being that as long as the kids solved their problems, even if they got help via the net, that was itself a useful skill that they would be relying on all their lives.

, the rodent displayed a heightened fear response, although no foot shock had ever been given in that location. The mice eventually became conditioned to the false memory, and would freeze in Box A even in the absence of pulsing light.

“The brain mechanisms for forming and recalling the false memories are not distinguishable from those underlying genuine memories,” said Tonegawa.

hypothesized that a similar mechanism could be behind the formation of false memories in humans and said the findings underscore the problematic nature of eyewitness testimony in court proceedings.

“We hope this kind of research will reinforce the need to look at eyewitness testimony carefully,” said Tonegawa, “so that innocent people will not be incriminated.”

Tonegawa said he thinks that false memories with positive connotations likely form in the same way—a hypothesis he hopes to test with future experiments. In addition, given that false memories appear robust enough to compete with real memories, Tonegawa said he plans to investigate the factors that affect the relative strengths of the two types of memory.

Students will be able to substitute a tech sequence and local test for one of the history exams, however the Regents did not present, design, or even describe what the tech alternative will look like. Although it will be implemented immediately, the Regents left all the details completely up to local initiative.

Under the proposal, students can substitute career-focused courses in subjects such as carpentry, advertising or hospitality management rather than one of two history Regents exams that are now required

In June 2010 the Regents eliminated 5th and 8th grade social studies, history, and geography assessments so teachers and schools could concentrate on preparing students for high-stakes Common Core standardized reading and math assessments.

Mace reports his middle school students have no idea which were the original thirteen colonies, where they were located, or who were the founders and settlers. The students in his honors class report that all they studied in elementary school was English and math. Morning was math; afternoon was ELA. He added, "Teachers were worried that this would happen, and it has."

Debate over the importance of teaching history and social studies is definitely not new. During World War I, many Americans worried that new immigrants did not understand and value the history and government of the United States so new high school classes and tests that developed into the current classes and tests were put in place.

Mace describes his students as the "common core kids, inundated with common core, but they do not know the history of the United States." The cardinal rule of public education in the 21st Century seems to be that which gets tested is important and that which does not is dropped.

"By making state social studies exams optional, we have come to a point where our nation's own history has been marginalized in the classroom and, with it, the means to understand ourselves and the world around us. America's heritage is being eliminated as a requirement for graduation.

I am biased. I am a historian, a former social studies teacher, and I help to prepare the next generation of social studies teachers.

But these decisions by the Regents are politically motivated, lower graduation standards, and are outright dangerous.

The city is under a lot of pressure to support the revised and lower academic standards because in the next few weeks it is required to present plans to the state for turning around as many as 250 schools that are labeled as "failing."

Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the State Board of Regents, described the change as an effort to "back-fill opportunities for students with different interests, with different opportunities, with different choice."

The need to educate immigrants and to understand global issues like ISIS and Ebola remain pressing, but I guess not for New York State high school students. Right now, it looks like social studies advocates have lost the battle and we are finally witnessing the end of history.

Despite his injuries, Turner began giving first aid and pulled other soldiers to safety. As he worked, he was shot twice — one bullet breaking a bone in his arm. Yet Turner would say later that he felt almost no pain.

"Soldiers in the heat of the moment don't recognize the pain that's happening," Linden says. But once that moment is over, those same soldiers may feel a lot of pain from something minor, like a hypodermic needle, he says.

CIA interrogators used both tactics after Sept. 11, according to a Senate report released late last year.

One system determines the pain's location, intensity and characteristics: stabbing, aching, burning, etc.

there is a completely separate system for the emotional aspect of pain

positive emotions — like feeling calm and safe and connected to others — can minimize pain. But negative emotions tend to have the opposite effect. Torturers have exploited that aspect for centuries.

they want to accentuate pain during torture they can do this with humiliation [or] with an unpredictable schedule of delivering pain

Those things will make the emotional component of the pain experience stronger."

brain also determines the emotion we attach to each painful experience, Linden says. That's possible, he explains, because the brain uses two different systems to process pain information coming from our nerve endings.

One thing scientists are still trying to understand is precisely how the brain regulates the perception of pain

The team studied low-frequency brain waves in a part of the brain that responds to sensations in the hand,

Earlier research had shown that these rhythms increase when the brain is blocking sensory information from the hand.

reseasrchers monitored the brain waves of a dozen people who were asked to pay attention only to their hand or only to their foot. During the experiment the scientists delivered a light tap to each person's finger or toe.

ocused on their feet, low-frequency rhythms increased in the brain area that responds to hand sensations — because participants were asking their brains to ignore sensory input from the hand, and it's these low-frequency rhythms that do the blocking of such information.

low-frequency rhythms also increased in a different brain area — the region that ignores distractions, the team discovered.

The two areas became synchronized

"There's coordination between the front part of the brain, which is the executive control region of the brain, and the sensory part of the brain, which is filtering information from the environment," she says.

suggests that at least some people can teach their brains how to filter out things like chronic pain, perhaps through meditation

It found that people who practiced mindfulness meditation for eight weeks greatly improved their control of the brain rhythms that block out pain.