his predicament stands as a chilling example of what it means to be at the mercy of the Google algorithm.

The question is best directed at the search engines. And Google’s defense — that the behavior of its ever-improving algorithm should be considered independent of the results it produces in a particular controversial case — has a particularly patronizing air, especially when it comes to hurting living, breathing people.

it was the algorithm that took the hit, and washed away accountability.

THIS fall, one in 11 kindergarten-age children in the United States will not be going to class. Parents of these children often delay school entry in an attempt to give them a leg up on peers, but this strategy is likely to be counterproductive.

Teachers may encourage redshirting because more mature children are easier to handle in the classroom and initially produce better test scores than their younger classmates.

This advantage fades by the end of elementary school, though, and disadvantages start to accumulate. In high school, redshirted children are less motivated and perform less well. By adulthood, they are no better off in wages or educational attainment — in fa

Hundreds of scientists packed an auditorium at one of the world's foremost laboratories on the Swiss-French border to hear how a subatomic particle, the neutrino, was found to have outrun light and confounded the theories of Albert Einstein.

Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen, according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity. The speed of light — 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) — has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

Naturalism is the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge.

it is now a dominant approach in several areas of philosophy — ethics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and, most of in all, metaphysics, the study of the basic constituents of reality.

Naturalists have applied this insight to reveal the biological nature of human emotion, perception and cognition, language, moral value, social bonds and political institutions. Naturalistic philosophy has returned the favor, helping psychology, evolutionary anthropology and biology solve their problems by greater conceptual clarity about function, adaptation, Darwinian fitness and individual-versus-group selection.

Facebook, in short, aims not to be a Web site you spend a lot of time on, but something that defines your online — and increasingly offline — life.

Searching the Web is still the way most people discover content — whether it is news, information about wedding photographers or Swiss chard recipes. Facebook is trying to change that: in effect, friends will direct other friends to content.

it is teaming up with companies that distribute music, movies, information and games in positioning itself to become the conduit where news and entertainment is found and consumed.

people seem to be increasingly casting a cynical, calculating eye toward romance. The past few years have seen the explosion of "sugar daddy" dating sites

"In the past, you didn't see as much as you do now of shows like 'Millionaire Matchmaker' and 'The Real Housewives' -- all showing off their bling-bling. You begin to absorb the same kind of values that you see on TV."

WhatsYourPrice.com, which lets "generous" men and "beautiful" young women "buy and sell first dates." The Econ 101 concept behind it is that for a beautiful and in-demand woman, there is an opportunity cost associated with a first date (or, more simply, time is money). So, men evaluate how much a particular woman is worth in their mind and place a bid; then the woman has to weigh her options, consider the competition, and decide whether that's what her time is truly worth.

The Lancet, projecting that three-fourths of adults in the United States will be overweight or obese by 2020.

Colorado, the least fat state in 2011, would be the heaviest had they reported their current rate of obesity 20 years ago. That’s how much we’ve slipped.

Annual medical costs for an obese adult are as much as $6,500 more, on average, than for healthy-weight adults.

the planning fallacy. Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future.

Over the past three years, the United States has been committing the planning fallacy on stilts. The world economy has been slammed by a financial crisis. Countries that are afflicted with these crises typically experience several years of high unemployment. They go deep into debt to end the stagnation, but the turnaround takes a while. This historical pattern has been universally acknowledged and universally ignored.

What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner.

A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile.  The person living the life must be engaged by it.  A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile

the first step we might take beyond what Wolf tells us is to recognize that lives unfold over time.  A life is not an unrelated series of actions or projects or states of being.  A life has, we might say, a trajectory.

If a life has a trajectory, then it can be conceived narratively.  A human life can be seen as a story, or as a series of stories that are more or less related. 

Although memory performance generally improved with age, the ability to trace the source of a memory — evaluated by the second test — was particularly weak in children. Adolescents and adults performed equally well, but with a significant difference.

The participants wore electroencephalogram caps that measured their neural activity. Only adults showed a sophisticated pattern of activity when they were retrieving source memory information

when children and adolescents are asked to testify, the reliability of their source memory — for example, recalling the first time a certain person was encountered, and where — should be carefully questioned.

Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got people's attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

This won't do. The "anti-science" charge has little to with morality. When someone like Rick Perry - an avowed anthropogenic climate change and evolution denialist - is accused of rejecting science, it's an attack on Perry's epistemological beliefs rather than moral values. Even though the scientific consensus is clear on both questions, Perry refuses to accept both. By rejecting well-supported scientific truths on, say, theological grounds, he is implicitly denying that the scientific method (rather than, say, theological reasoning) is the best way to determine truths about the natural world. That's what being "anti-science" is.

Being pro-science may mean being committed to the idea that advancing scientific knowledge is good for the world, sure, but that scientific knowledge doesn't always say we should try to control the natural world. Science is at its core is a reasoning process - we arrive at certain conclusions through experiments, peer evaluation, etc. So if the best scientific evidence suggests "humans do bad things when they mess with the natural world in fashion X" then the science is telling us not to mess with the natural world in fashion X! Indeed, scientific findings often serve as evidence in debates over the environmental impact of new technology, oftentimes on both sides. There's nothing intrinsic to scientific epistemology or practice that implies a moral commitment to increasing human control over the natural world or to widespread commercial use of the new technologies its discoveries enable

Another way to put it is that scientists have a goal of advancing human knowledge. They often do that with particular ends in mind (e.g., cancer scientists want to cure cancer), but there's no reason to believe that end is always increasing human control. It could be that a scientist might want to demonstrate the dangers of certain technologies or the limits of human ability to successfully interfere with the workings of the natural world.