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A team of researchers walked every street in 228 census tracts around Los Angeles and New Orleans and recorded every outdoor ad they saw. Another group surveyed 2,881 residents of the same census tracts by telephone, paying them to report their height, weight and other information. After analyzing this hard-won data, the authors conclude: “For every 10 percent increase in food advertisements, the odds of being obese increased by 5 percent.” That is, areas with more outdoor food ads have a higher proportion of obese people than ones with fewer ads.

The problem is that their policy recommendations rest on a crucial but unjustified assumption: that any link between obesity and advertising occurs because more advertising causes higher rates of obesity. But the study at hand showed only an association: people living in areas with more food ads were more likely to be obese than people living in areas with fewer food ads. To be fair, the researchers correctly note that additional steps would be needed to prove that food ads cause obesity. But until those steps are taken, talk of restricting ads is premature. In fact, it is easy to imagine how the causation could run the opposite way (something the article did not mention): If food vendors believe obese people are more likely than non-obese people to buy their products, they will place more ads in areas where obese people already live. Suppose we counted ads for fitness-oriented products like bicycles and bottled water, and found more of those ads in places with less obesity. Would it then be wise anti-obesity policy to subsidize such ads? Or would the smarter conclusion be that the fitness companies suspect that the obese are less likely than the fit to buy their products?

When we seek to base policy on evidence, we must remember that not all “evidence” is created equal. Taken at face value, the study on ads and obesity provides some indication that the two are linked, but no evidence that food ads cause obesity. The fact that the causal conclusion may coincide with a moral belief — that it is wrong to tempt people who overeat by showing them ads for food — does not make it valid.

The Depression that ended Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age yielded to a new order that might be called the Roosevelt Republic. In the quarter-century after World War II, the country established collective structures, not individual monuments, that channeled the aspirations of ordinary people: state universities, progressive taxation, interstate highways, collective bargaining, health insurance for the elderly, credible news organizations.

One virtue of those hated things called bureaucracies is that they oblige everyone to follow a common set of rules, regardless of station or background; they are inherently equalizing.

Our age is lousy with celebrities. They can be found in every sector of society, including ones that seem less than glamorous

the goal is to improve cognitive skills. LearningRx is one of a growing number of such commercial services — some online, others offered by psychologists. Unlike traditional tutoring services that seek to help students master a subject, brain training purports to enhance comprehension and the ability to analyze and mentally manipulate concepts, images, sounds and instructions. In a word, it seeks to make students smarter.

“The average gain on I.Q. is 15 points after 24 weeks of training, and 20 points in less than 32 weeks.”

, “Our users have reported profound benefits that include: clearer and quicker thinking; faster problem-solving skills; increased alertness and awareness; better concentration at work or while driving; sharper memory for names, numbers and directions.”

If you already live in the heartland, the message is to stay. If you come from the heartland and have left, the message is to return. But what if you’re one of the tens of millions of people who can’t stay in or go home to the heartland because your home — your roots — are in the BosWash corridor of the Northeast or the urbanized areas of the West Coast? …

is this even possible in a place where paying my mortgage and other bills requires that my wife and I — like my equally striving neighbors — devote ourselves to high-stress work during nearly every waking hour of our days? If I were independently wealthy, perhaps the good life that Dreher describes would be a possibility in the Philadelphia suburbs. But alas…

There are trade-offs in all things, and no perfect solution, geographical or otherwise. Thing is, life is short, and choices have to be made. It’s not that people living in these workaholic suburbs are bad, not at all; it’s that the culture they (we) live in defines the Good in such a way that choosing to “do the right thing” ends up hollowing out your life, leaving you vulnerable in ways you may not see until tragedy strikes.

we’ve had everything from jeans commercials to rock anthems to political conventions celebrating freedom as the highest ideal.

People are much more at liberty these days to follow their desires, unhampered by social convention, religious and ethnic traditions and legal restraints.

big thinkers down through the ages warned us this was going to have downsides. Alexis de Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim thought that if people are left perfectly free to pursue their individual desires, they will discover their desires are unlimited and unquenchable. They’ll turn inward and become self-absorbed. Society will become atomized. You’ll end up with more loneliness and less community.

Every living thing is a pulse. We quicken, then we fade. There is a deep beauty in this, but deeper down, inside every plant, every leaf, inside every living thing (us included) sits a secret.

Everything alive will eventually die, we know that, but now we can read the pattern and see death coming. We have recently learned its logic, which "You can put into mathematics," says physicist Geoffrey West. It shows up with "extraordinary regularity," not just in plants, but in all animals, from slugs to giraffes. Death, it seems, is intimately related to size.

Life is short for small creatures, longer in big ones.

A panoply of devices and ideas are named after Archimedes. Besides the Archimedes screw, there is the Archimedes principle, the law of buoyancy that states the upward force on a submerged object equals the weight of the liquid displaced. There is the Archimedes claw, a weapon that most likely did exist, grabbing onto Roman ships and tipping them over. And there is the Archimedes sphere, a forerunner of the planetarium — a hand-held globe that showed the constellations as well as the locations of the sun and the planets in the sky.

Dr. Rorres said the singular genius of Archimedes was that he not only was able to solve abstract mathematics problems, but also used mathematics to solve physics problems, and he then engineered devices to take advantage of the physics. “He came up with fundamental laws of nature, proved them mathematically and then was able to apply them,” Dr. Rorres said.

people who want to argue that racism is natural have tried to buttress their position with evidence that racism is in some sense biological. For example: studies have found that when whites see black faces there is increased activity in the amygdala, a brain structure associated with emotion and, specifically, with the detection of threats.

researchers report that they've performed these amygdala studies--which had previously been done on adults--on children. And they found something interesting: the racial sensitivity of the amygdala doesn't kick in until around age 14.

What's more: once it kicks in, it doesn't kick in equally for everybody. The more racially diverse your peer group, the less strong the amygdala effect. At really high levels of diversity, the effect disappeared entirely. The authors of the study write that ''these findings suggest that neural biases to race are not innate and that race is a social construction, learned over time.''

Mr. Derman is perhaps a bit too harsh when he describes EMM—the so-called Efficient Market Model. EMM does not, as he claims, imply that prices are always correct and that price always equals value. Prices are always wrong. What EMM says is that we can never be sure if prices are too high or too low.

The Efficient Market Model does not suggest that any particular model of valuation—such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model—fully accounts for risk and uncertainty or that we should rely on it to predict security returns. EMM does not, as Mr. Derman says, "stubbornly assume that all uncertainty about the future is quantifiable." The basic lesson of EMM is that it is very difficult—well nigh impossible—to beat the market consistently.

Mr. Derman gives an eloquent description of James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory in a chapter titled "The Sublime." He writes: "The electromagnetic field is not like Maxwell's equations; it is Maxwell's equations."

The use of sound is one of the most common methods of communication both in the animal kingdom and between humans.

human speech is a very complex process and therefore needs intensive postnatal learning to be used effectively. Furthermore, to be effective the learning phase should happen very early in life and it assumes a normally functioning hearing and brain systems.

Nowadays, scientists and doctors are discovering the important brain zones involved in the processing of language information. Those zones are reassembled in a number of a language networks including the Broca, the Wernicke, the middle temporal, the inferior parietal and the angular gyrus. The variety of such brain zones clearly shows that the language processing is a very complex task. On the functional level, decoding a language begins in the ear where the incoming sounds are summed in the auditory nerve as an electrical signal and delivered to the auditory cortex where neurons extract auditory objects from that signal.

Trump is thriving, tapping into the fears and anxieties that have erupted into the open in an extraordinary presidential campaign.

Trump's nativist rhetoric and hardline immigration stance is a relief for those who see a segment of the population "getting away" with breaking the law

he has such deep loyalty among his supporters that he could "stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."

Russell's paradox is based on examples like this: Consider a group of barbers who shave only those men who do not shave themselves. Suppose there is a barber in this collection who does not shave himself; then by the definition of the collection, he must shave himself. But no barber in the collection can shave himself.

We write this description of the set formally as x = { n: n is an integer and 3 < n < 7} . The objects in the set don't have to be numbers. We might let y ={x: x is a male resident of the United States }.

What became of the effort to develop a logical foundation for all of mathematics? Mathematicians now recognize that the field can be formalized using so-called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. The formal language contains symbols such as e to express "is a member of," = for equality and to denote the set with no elements.

That is to say, a critical mass of our interactions had moved to a realm where we’re all connected but no one’s in charge.

And, I would argue, 2016 will be remembered as the year when we fully grasped just how scary that can be — how easy it was for a presidential candidate to tweet out untruths and half-truths faster than anyone could correct them, how cheap it was for Russia to intervene on Trump’s behalf with hacks of Democratic operatives’ computers and how unnerving it was to hear Yahoo’s chief information security officer, Bob Lord, say that his company still had “not been able to identify” how one billion Yahoo accounts and their sensitive user information were hacked in 2013.

Facebook — which wants all the readers and advertisers of the mainstream media but not to be saddled with its human editors and fact-checkers — is now taking more seriously its responsibilities as a news purveyor in cyberspace.

Too many men still think a woman who cries is acting hysterical. For some baffling reason, punching a hole in the wall or another person in the face is a more culturally acceptable way to release pain than sobbing into a pillow. And politics is no different. Anger makes you a strong candidate while sadness makes you frail. The result is that many female politicians swallow their emotions in an effort to appear tough.

The stereotype that women are overly emotional, hormonal beings who are unfit to lead still exists. Powerful men like Obama and Biden who embrace their feelings on a public stage help to combat the ridiculous political stigma against sensitivity. Every time these political powerhouses become misty-eyed, they send the message that having human feelings doesn’t equal incompetence.

By being the kind of men who are unafraid to openly love one another and cry in public, they have sent a message to aspiring female politicians that being human doesn’t come with a penalty.

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.

This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.

It also recognized a potentially life-threatening aspect of campus culture: Penn Face. An apothegm long used by students to describe the practice of acting happy and self-assured even when sad or stressed, Penn Face is so widely employed that it has showed up in skits performed during freshman orientation.

While the appellation is unique to Penn, the behavior is not. In 2003, Duke jolted academe with a report describing how its female students felt pressure to be “effortlessly perfect”: smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful and popular, all without visible effort. At Stanford, it’s called the Duck Syndrome. A duck appears to glide calmly across the water, while beneath the surface it frantically, relentlessly paddles.

Citing a “perception that one has to be perfect in every academic, cocurricular and social endeavor,” the task force report described how students feel enormous pressure that “can manifest as demoralization, alienation or conditions like anxiety or depression.”

Readers of the Guardian Science pages may not have noticed the group called Historians for Britain, or a recent piece in History Today by David Abulafia asserting their belief “that Britain’s unique history sets it apart from the rest of Europe”.

It requires critical scrutiny from everyone with an interest in Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world, and in evidence-based political discussion.

Abilafia’s article is a classic example of an old-fashioned “Whiggish” narrative. It claims a uniquely moderate and progressive advance toward the development of British institutions, traced continuously from Magna Carta and isolated from the rages and radicalism of the Continent.

The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on philosophy derived from Europe and the English-speaking world. For example, of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy as part of their regular faculty. Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions. Indeed, of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy.

Given the importance of non-European traditions in both the history of world philosophy and in the contemporary world, and given the increasing numbers of students in our colleges and universities from non-European backgrounds, this is astonishing. No other humanities discipline demonstrates this systematic neglect of most of the civilizations in its domain. The present situation is hard to justify morally, politically, epistemically or as good educational and research training practice.

While a few philosophy departments have made their curriculums more diverse, and while the American Philosophical Association has slowly broadened the representation of the world’s philosophical traditions on its programs, progress has been minimal.

What did satisfy Haidt’s natural thirst for understanding human beings was social psychology.

Haidt initially found moral psychology “really dull.” He described it to me as “really missing the heart of the matter and too cerebral.” This changed in his second year after he took a course from the anthropologist Allen Fiske and got interested in moral emotions.

“The Emotional Dog and its Rational Trail,” which he describes as “the most important article I’ve ever written.”