Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"People will not be subject to age or disability discrimination when the going gets tough."

The new OCR action makes clear that doctors cannot issue a blanket DNR and cannot substitute their subjective beliefs about the quality of a disabled person's life over the person's own wishes.

"that discrimination against persons with disabilities will be absolutely forbidden and stereotypes about their usefulness should never be part of a discussion when we allocate care."

it would become a significant expansion of disability civil rights law.

But a final rule exists in draft form, according to a source at HHS, with hopes that new Biden Administration officials will pick it up.

include language to guarantee doctors will not pressure patients to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders and not exclude people from treatment based on their disability alone.

The steps taken by OCR to stop medical discrimination reflect the findings of a series of papers on bioethics and disability, issued by the National Council on Disability,

"Disability discrimination in health care is among the most insidious — with life and death consequences — and it's hard to root out,"

"sends an unequivocally clear message that we will not accept health care that relegates people with disabilities to last in line or 'lost cause.'"

China rejected demands for an international investigation after the Trump administration blamed Beijing for the virus’s spread, which plunged the global economy into its deepest slump since the 1930s.

The coronavirus’s exact origin may never be traced because viruses change quickly, Woolhouse said

pinning down an outbreak’s animal reservoir is typically an exhaustive endeavor that takes years of research including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.

he incident “raises the question if the Chinese authorities were trying to interfere,”

Beijing retaliated by blocking imports of Australian beef, wine and other goods.

A year after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, the city is now bustling, with few signs that it was once the epicenter of the outbreak in China. But some residents say they’re still eager to learn about its origin.

covering closely related viruses might help explain how the disease first jumped from animals and clarify what preventive measures are needed to avoid future epidemics.

“Now is not the time to blame anyone,” Shih said. “We shouldn’t say, it’s your fault

Animal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation. Many of the sorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee communication have counterparts in human 'body language'.

The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do

All present-day languages, including those of hunter-gatherer cultures, have lots of words, can be used to talk about anything under the sun, and can express negation. As far back as we have written records of human language - 5000 years or so - things look basically the same.

According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with.

So the properties of human language are unique in the natural world.

About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract (the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomically modern humans, about 100,000 years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds. But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began the

Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then (gradually or suddenly) switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.

. In an early stage, sounds would have been used to name a wide range of objects and actions in the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about new things

In order to achieve a large vocabulary, an important advance would have been the ability to 'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speech sounds - consonants and vowels - rather than unstructured calls.

These two changes alone would yield a communication system of single signals - better than the chimpanzee system but far from modern language. A next plausible step would be the ability to string together several such 'words' to create a message built out of the meanings of its parts.

This has led some researchers to propose that the system of 'protolanguage' is still present in modern human brains, hidden under the modern system except when the latter is impaired or not yet developed.

Again, it's very hard to tell. We do know that something important happened in the human line between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization.

One tantalizing source of evidence has emerged recently. A mutation in a gene called FOXP2 has been shown to lead to deficits in language as well as in control of the face and mouth. This gene is a slightly altered version of a gene found in apes, and it seems to have achieved its present form between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, if we are ever going to learn more about how the human language ability evolved, the most promising evidence will probably come from the human genome, which preserves so much of our species' history. The challenge for the future will be to decode it.

Since November 2020, travelers flying into China have to show neg

had previously been tested and found negative for coronavirus multiple times,

"I have been in contact with senior Chinese officials and I have once again made clear that the mission is a priority for WHO and the international team."

nothing is off limits

"We really need to have patience and not judge. It's meticulous work, it will take time,

the US would terminate its relationship with WHO,

"the investigation itself appears to be inconsistent" with its mandate.

As countries around the world struggle with new infection surges and outbreaks, China appears to be rebounding.

"more and more research suggests that the pandemic was likely to have been caused by separate outbreaks in multiple places in the world."

Modern academic science, he complains, has overvalued topics such as multiple dimensions and multiple universes, for which there is no evidence, and undervalued the search for life out there, not just in the form of extraterrestrial radio signals but in the form of chemical “biosignatures,” or even technological artifacts — such as, Loeb believes, Oumuamua.

In school, one learns about “the scientific method”—usually a straightforward set of steps, along the lines of “ask a question, propose a hypothesis, perform an experiment, analyze the results.”

That method works in the classroom, where students are basically told what questions to pursue. But real scientists must come up with their own questions, finding new routes through a much vaster landscape.

Since science began, there has been disagreement about how those routes are charted. Two twentieth-century philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, are widely held to have offered the best accounts of this process.

For Popper, Strevens writes, “scientific inquiry is essentially a process of disproof, and scientists are the disprovers, the debunkers, the destroyers.” Kuhn’s scientists, by contrast, are faddish true believers who promulgate received wisdom until they are forced to attempt a “paradigm shift”—a painful rethinking of their basic assumptions.

Working scientists tend to prefer Popper to Kuhn. But Strevens thinks that both theorists failed to capture what makes science historically distinctive and singularly effective.

Sometimes they seek to falsify theories, sometimes to prove them; sometimes they’re informed by preëxisting or contextual views, and at other times they try to rule narrowly, based on t

Why do scientists agree to this scheme? Why do some of the world’s most intelligent people sign on for a lifetime of pipetting?

Strevens thinks that they do it because they have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the “iron rule of explanation.” The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, “if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with”; from there, they must “conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone.”

, it is “the key to science’s success,” because it “channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment—all the fires fuming in the human heart—to one end: the production of empirical evidence.”

Strevens arrives at the idea of the iron rule in a Popperian way: by disproving the other theories about how scientific knowledge is created.

The problem isn’t that Popper and Kuhn are completely wrong. It’s that scientists, as a group, don’t pursue any single intellectual strategy consistently.

Exploring a number of case studies—including the controversies over continental drift, spontaneous generation, and the theory of relativity—Strevens shows scientists exerting themselves intellectually in a variety of ways, as smart, ambitious people usually do.

“Science is boring,” Strevens writes. “Readers of popular science see the 1 percent: the intriguing phenomena, the provocative theories, the dramatic experimental refutations or verifications.” But, he says,behind these achievements . . . are long hours, days, months of tedious laboratory labor. The single greatest obstacle to successful science is the difficulty of persuading brilliant minds to give up the intellectual pleasures of continual speculation and debate, theorizing and arguing, and to turn instead to a life consisting almost entirely of the production of experimental data.

Ultimately, in fact, it was good that the geologists had a “splendid variety” of somewhat arbitrary opinions: progress in science requires partisans, because only they have “the motivation to perform years or even decades of necessary experimental work.” It’s just that these partisans must channel their energies into empirical observation. The iron rule, Strevens writes, “has a valuable by-product, and that by-product is data.”

Science is often described as “self-correcting”: it’s said that bad data and wrong conclusions are rooted out by other scientists, who present contrary findings. But Strevens thinks that the iron rule is often more important than overt correction.

Eddington was never really refuted. Other astronomers, driven by the iron rule, were already planning their own studies, and “the great preponderance of the resulting measurements fit Einsteinian physics better than Newtonian physics.” It’s partly by generating data on such a vast scale, Strevens argues, that the iron rule can power science’s knowledge machine: “Opinions converge not because bad data is corrected but because it is swamped.”

Why did the iron rule emerge when it did? Strevens takes us back to the Thirty Years’ War, which concluded with the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648. The war weakened religious loyalties and strengthened national ones.

Two regimes arose: in the spiritual realm, the will of God held sway, while in the civic one the decrees of the state were paramount. As Isaac Newton wrote, “The laws of God & the laws of man are to be kept distinct.” These new, “nonoverlapping spheres of obligation,” Strevens argues, were what made it possible to imagine the iron rule. The rule simply proposed the creation of a third sphere: in addition to God and state, there would now be science.

Strevens imagines how, to someone in Descartes’s time, the iron rule would have seemed “unreasonably closed-minded.” Since ancient Greece, it had been obvious that the best thinking was cross-disciplinary, capable of knitting together “poetry, music, drama, philosophy, democracy, mathematics,” and other elevating human disciplines.

We’re still accustomed to the idea that a truly flourishing intellect is a well-rounded one. And, by this standard, Strevens says, the iron rule looks like “an irrational way to inquire into the underlying structure of things”; it seems to demand the upsetting “suppression of human nature.”

Descartes, in short, would have had good reasons for resisting a law that narrowed the grounds of disputation, or that encouraged what Strevens describes as “doing rather than thinking.”

In fact, the iron rule offered scientists a more supple vision of progress. Before its arrival, intellectual life was conducted in grand gestures.

Descartes’s book was meant to be a complete overhaul of what had preceded it; its fate, had science not arisen, would have been replacement by some equally expansive system. The iron rule broke that pattern.

by authorizing what Strevens calls “shallow explanation,” the iron rule offered an empirical bridge across a conceptual chasm. Work could continue, and understanding could be acquired on the other side. In this way, shallowness was actually more powerful than depth.

it also changed what counted as progress. In the past, a theory about the world was deemed valid when it was complete—when God, light, muscles, plants, and the planets cohered. The iron rule allowed scientists to step away from the quest for completeness.

The consequences of this shift would become apparent only with time

In 1713, Isaac Newton appended a postscript to the second edition of his “Principia,” the treatise in which he first laid out the three laws of motion and the theory of universal gravitation. “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses,” he wrote. “It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.”

What mattered, to Newton and his contemporaries, was his theory’s empirical, predictive power—that it was “sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea.”

Descartes would have found this attitude ridiculous. He had been playing a deep game—trying to explain, at a fundamental level, how the universe fit together. Newton, by those lights, had failed to explain anything: he himself admitted that he had no sense of how gravity did its work

Strevens sees its earliest expression in Francis Bacon’s “The New Organon,” a foundational text of the Scientific Revolution, published in 1620. Bacon argued that thinkers must set aside their “idols,” relying, instead, only on evidence they could verify. This dictum gave scientists a new way of responding to one another’s work: gathering data.

Quantum theory—which tells us that subatomic particles can be “entangled” across vast distances, and in multiple places at the same time—makes intuitive sense to pretty much nobody.

Without the iron rule, Strevens writes, physicists confronted with such a theory would have found themselves at an impasse. They would have argued endlessly about quantum metaphysics.

ollowing the iron rule, they can make progress empirically even though they are uncertain conceptually. Individual researchers still passionately disagree about what quantum theory means. But that hasn’t stopped them from using it for practical purposes—computer chips, MRI machines, G.P.S. networks, and other technologies rely on quantum physics.

One group of theorists, the rationalists, has argued that science is a new way of thinking, and that the scientist is a new kind of thinker—dispassionate to an uncommon degree.

As evidence against this view, another group, the subjectivists, points out that scientists are as hopelessly biased as the rest of us. To this group, the aloofness of science is a smoke screen behind which the inevitable emotions and ideologies hide.

At least in science, Strevens tells us, “the appearance of objectivity” has turned out to be “as important as the real thing.”

The subjectivists are right, he admits, inasmuch as scientists are regular people with a “need to win” and a “determination to come out on top.”

But they are wrong to think that subjectivity compromises the scientific enterprise. On the contrary, once subjectivity is channelled by the iron rule, it becomes a vital component of the knowledge machine. It’s this redirected subjectivity—to come out on top, you must follow the iron rule!—that solves science’s “problem of motivation,” giving scientists no choice but “to pursue a single experiment relentlessly, to the last measurable digit, when that digit might be quite meaningless.”

If it really was a speech code that instigated “the extraordinary attention to process and detail that makes science the supreme discriminator and destroyer of false ideas,” then the peculiar rigidity of scientific writing—Strevens describes it as “sterilized”—isn’t a symptom of the scientific mind-set but its cause.

The iron rule—“a kind of speech code”—simply created a new way of communicating, and it’s this new way of communicating that created science.

Other theorists have explained science by charting a sweeping revolution in the human mind; inevitably, they’ve become mired in a long-running debate about how objective scientists really are

In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science

Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens’s rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That’s because it isn’t intellectual but procedural. “The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think,” he writes, “but on what arguments they can make in their official communications.”

Like everybody else, scientists view questions through the lenses of taste, personality, affiliation, and experience

geologists had a professional obligation to take sides. Europeans, Strevens reports, tended to back Wegener, who was German, while scholars in the United States often preferred Simpson, who was American. Outsiders to the field were often more receptive to the concept of continental drift than established scientists, who considered its incompleteness a fatal flaw.

Strevens’s point isn’t that these scientists were doing anything wrong. If they had biases and perspectives, he writes, “that’s how human thinking works.”

Eddington’s observations were expected to either confirm or falsify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend the path of light, subtly shifting the stellar pattern. For reasons having to do with weather and equipment, the evidence collected by Eddington—and by his colleague Frank Dyson, who had taken similar photographs in Sobral, Brazil—was inconclusive; some of their images were blurry, and so failed to resolve the matter definitively.

it was only natural for intelligent people who were free of the rule’s strictures to attempt a kind of holistic, systematic inquiry that was, in many ways, more demanding. It never occurred to them to ask if they might illuminate more collectively by thinking about less individually.

In the single-sphered, pre-scientific world, thinkers tended to inquire into everything at once. Often, they arrived at conclusions about nature that were fascinating, visionary, and wrong.

How Does Science Really Work?Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?By Joshua RothmanSeptember 28, 2020

Friday’s report encompasses 144 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena from 2004 until this year and offers almost no conclusive interpretation for the sightings. “They very clearly demonstrate an array of aerial behaviors, which makes it very clear to us that there are multiple types of unidentified aerial phenomena that require different explanations,” one of the officials said.

“The potential of this report was actually significant,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “It could have come up with something that was incontrovertible evidence for extraterrestrial flight. That was the implicit promise here. But in the end, it didn’t go any farther than reports made in the 1950s. We can explain some of these things, but we can’t explain them all.”

We have seen the rise of massively multiplayer adventures such as World of Warcraft, where global arching narratives are woven into the largely player-directed quests, and we have seen plenty of interesting live story experiments, such as the mostly single-player adventure Dark Souls allowing players to leave messages to each other within the game.

For Season 10, Epic was always building toward something vast and catastrophic and upped the narrative signalling accordingly. Throughout the last months players have been able to find audiotapes hidden around the map in which The Visitor has made recordings about his attempts to fix a loop in time and prevent a singularity. It sounds like the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, echoing back the most extreme theories from the fanbase itself

Fortnite has been criticised as a shallow, cynical machine of compulsion, its trendy dances and outlandish outfits a means of ensnaring younger players. But as a purveyor of new forms of storytelling, in which the community is left to construct its own narrative based around subtle semiotic systems and climactic events, it is a fascinating innovator.

But Fortnite is playing with storytelling concepts, tropes and systems while also providing a piece of blockbuster entertainment for millions of mostly teenage players. It’s like a new Marvel superhero movie being performed entirely in interpretive dance.

When Chapter 2 inevitably begins, bringing a new landscape with new gameplay features, it will be interesting to see where Epic goes next on its somewhat transgressive storytelling odyssey. It is, after all, quite hard to top the end of the world as a narrative device.

It’s a slippery number, however. Measurements using different techniques have produced different results, and the numbers show no sign of converging even as researchers refine their observations

the theorists are intrigued. They hope the Hubble Constant confusion is the harbinger of a potential major discovery — some "new physics."

“Any time there’s a discrepancy, some kind of anomaly, we all get very excited,”

“Where’s it all going to go? How’s it all going to end? That’s a big question,”

One idea floating around is that there could have been something called Early Dark Energy that skewed the appearance of the background radiation

“New physics might be that there’s some form of energy that acted in the earliest moments of the evolution of the universe. You’d get an injection of energy that’d then have to disappear,”

Leavitt, a then-obscure employee of the Harvard College Observatory, discovered that the intrinsically brighter stars have longer periods. This insight — Leavitt’s law — allows astronomers to know the Cepheid’s absolute luminosity, then gauge the distance to the star based on how bright or faint it appears.

just to be clear: The Hubble Constant in question is the rate of expansion in our “local” universe, not the rate of expansion when the background radiation was first emitted billions of years ago. Over time, the Hubble Constant isn’t constant.)

At the dawn of the 21st century, this Standard Model seemed to pass every observational test. And any disparities in the measurement of the Hubble Constant would surely be ironed out with further observations, scientists assumed. They had even nailed down the age of the universe precisely: 13.8 billion years.

“We felt really good,”

He added, jokingly, “We should have stopped taking data.”

“We are wired to use our intuition to understand things around us,” Riess said. “Most of the universe is made out of stuff that’s completely different than us. This adherence to intuition is often wildly unsuccessful in the universe.”

driving is already one of the more dangerous activities Americans undertake on a daily basis. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “drowsy driving” was a factor in 91,000 crashes, resulting in 50,000 people injured and 810 deaths in 2017, so it’s theoretically possible that what some of these videos are showing us is disaster averted, not disaster in motion.

Tesla once generated widespread good will by promising affordable electric cars that would make the world cleaner and safer. But over time, its image was tarnished by missed deadlines, worrying crash reports, signs of a cultlike corporate culture and a chief executive, Elon Musk, who habitually exaggerates progress while announcing extravagant new ideas. This was hardly the institution you would want determining the future of highway safety.

These technologies — and the companies that engineer them — keep turning out to be less benign than imagined. We fell in love with Amazon, but now we miss the local stores it closed. We couldn’t resist the convenience of Uber and Lyft, but now we’ve seen their effect on public transit and drivers. “Jetsons”-esque smart-home technology turned out to be riddled with glitches and vulnerable to hackers.

Tech companies have hollowed out old industries, shredded privacy, disregarded regulations and created new vectors for the spread of misinformation and extremism, and now there is a sense that choices we have already made — tectonic shifts already in motion, terms of service already accepted — may be changing us in ways that we are only beginning to process, ready to leap up and bite us in the collective behind.

It’s hard to imagine a more potent visual metaphor for this feeling than a human lulled to sleep inside a hunk of metal and glass, hurtling down a highway under the control of proprietary algorithms beamed on board from Palo Alto

These videos are magnetic not just because of the eerie images they contain, but also because, watching them, we can’t actually be sure what we’re seeing. Is this danger or safety or both at once? Perhaps in a different era we would have cried out in excitement: How cool! Today we are more tempted to gasp in shock and call out a warning: Wake up!

The genes of the oldest known residents of the Caribbean link them with the earliest populations that settled in Central and South America.

Part of the problem is that scientists have yet to find ancient DNA in the Caribbean that is more than 3,000 years old

The other problem is that ancient DNA is still scarce on the Caribbean coast of the mainland.

About 2,500 years ago, the archaeological record shows, there was a drastic shift in the cultural life of the Caribbean. People started living in bigger settlements, intensively farming crops like maize and sweet potatoes. Their pottery became more sophisticated and elaborate. For archaeologists, the change indicates the end of what they call the Archaic Age and the start of a Ceramic Age.

The skeletons from the Ceramic Age largely shared a new genetic signature. Their DNA links them to small tribes still living today in Colombia and Venezuela.

We don’t know a lot about these languages, although some words have managed to survive. Hurricane, for example, comes from hurakán, the Taino name for the god of storms.

The people bearing Ceramic Age ancestry came to dominate the Caribbean, with almost no interbreeding between the two groups.

These words bear a striking resemblance to words from a family of languages in South America called Arawak. The DNA of the Ceramic Age Caribbeans most closely resembles that of living Arawak speakers.

the new DNA findings had surprised him in many ways, giving him a host of new questions to investigate.

Over the course of the Ceramic Age, for example, strikingly new pottery styles emerged every few centuries. Researchers have long guessed that those shifts reflect the arrival of new groups of people in the islands. The ancient DNA doesn’t support that idea, though. There’s a genetic continuity through those drastic cultural changes. It appears that the same group of people in the Caribbean went through a series of major social changes that archaeologists have yet to explain.

Dr. Reich and his fellow geneticists also discovered family ties that spanned the Caribbean during the Ceramic Age. They found 19 pairs of people on different islands who shared identical segments of DNA — a sign that they were fairly close relatives. In one case, they found long-distance cousins from the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, separated by over 800 miles.

“The original idea was that people start in one place, they establish a colony someplace else, and then they just cut all ties to where they came from,” Dr. Keegan said. “But the genetic evidence is suggesting that these ties were maintained over a long period of time.”

Rather than being made up of isolated communities, in other words, the Caribbean was a busy, long-distance network that people regularly traveled by dugout canoe. “The water is like a highway,”

The genetic variations also allowed Dr. Reich and his colleague to estimate the size of the Caribbean society before European contact. Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomew sent letters back to Spain putting the figure in the millions

The DNA suggests that was an exaggeration: the genetic variations imply that the total population was as low as the tens of thousands.

now, with a population of about 44 million people, the Caribbean may contain more Taino DNA than it did in 1491.

Dr. Aviles and his colleagues have uploaded the ancient Caribbean genomes to a genealogical database called GEDMatch. With the help of genealogists, people can compare their own DNA to the ancient genomes. They can see the matching stretches of genetic material that reveal their relatedness.

Mulling over past “what ifs” helps us better plan for the future.

“That’s a very important, very distinctive human ability,”

That means separating actual events from possible events and pretend play helps children do that. What would happen if I could use this banana to call my grandma? What if this pencil could take flight

by pretending, children are practicing deciphering others’ emotions and beliefs. But an alternate hypothesis is that pretend play helps kids develop a skill known as counterfactual reasoning.

Open the box, they told the kids, and you’ll be able to play with the toy.

They asked a quarter of the children to pretend to be someone else while they completed the task — Batman or an intrepid adventurer like Dora the Explorer.

And the kids did get frustrated. In an odd twist, none of the keys actually worked

The children who pretended to be the hardworking fictional characters stayed calmer. They also spent more time trying to open the box and tried more keys.

For kids, of course, play isn’t about learning or planning or regulating emotions. It’s about having fun. Play may be “evolution’s way of building in an insurance policy” to learn and develop, said Dr. Feigenson. It’s so enjoyable that most kids can’t resist, and along the way they develop the skills they need to succeed as adults.

Sacks is, at heart, a philosopher. But he is a philosopher looking not for answers but for increasingly grander questions.

It is only the wisest among us who search not only for answers but also for questions.

Our brain was designed to make binary decisions—fight or flight—and avoid dangers,” Barnett says. But modern life with its ample choices and options doesn’t match how our brains naturally process information—explaining some ultimately self-defeating reactions such as impulsivity or inaction.

. In the 17th century, even Galileo writes about why, in a game with three dice, the number 10 should come up more than the number 9. It’s an observation that one would only be able to detect after thousands of rolls, but the reason behind it involves how many combinations of numbers can add up to each different option.

All these changes in dice come about, says Eerkens, “as different astronomers are coming up with new ideas about the world, and mathematicians are starting to understand numbers and probability.” Which came first: Did people begin to intuitively understand what true chance felt like, and adjusted dice accordingly, or did it trickle out from what would eventually become known as the scientific community?

And it does make you wonder: Would you know that fair dice should fall equally on each side, or that in a three-dice game, it’s better to bet on 10 than nine, if someone hadn’t told you?

Walmart, the country’s largest retailer by revenue, is seeking to attract wealthier shoppers, ramping up efforts to better compete with Amazon online. It is wooing premium brands to walmart.com; late last year it announced plans to start selling products from department store Lord &

And last week it replaced many of its private-label clothing brands with new, slightly more expensive and fashion-forward versions.

Lower-income consumers have been the fastest-growing segment of online shoppers, analysts say, but still face potential impediments. They may lack internet access, banking resources like credit cards—SNAP cards can’t be used to pay online—and safe places to deliver a package.

Anglin is an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s. Anglin admires these predecessors, who saw themselves as revolutionaries at the vanguard of a movement to take back the country. He dreams of a violent insurrection.

Anglin has the internet. His reach is exponentially greater, his ability to connect with like-minded young men unprecedented.

Anglin and his ilk like to talk about the Overton Window, a term that describes the range of acceptable discourse in society.

They’d been tugging at that window for years only to watch, with surprise and delight, as it flew wide open during Donald Trump’s candidacy. Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been

Until the Roof massacre, Burkholder hadn’t thought about the “adorable,” “happy-go-lucky” boy in her class who loved dinosaurs. Anglin was a normal kid back then, whose only remarkable quality was his extraordinarily nasal voice—it was so bad that Burkholder thought he might have a sinus problem, and raised the issue with his mother, Katie, at a parent–teacher conference.

y all outward appearances, Andrew Anglin had an ordinary, comfortable childhood, at least until adolescence. He grew up in a big house in Worthington Hills, an upper-middle-class neighborhood, where he collected X-Men comics, played computer games, ate burgers at the original Wendy’s restaurant, and got into music with his best friend, West Emerson. And he loved to read. One book that left a deep impression on him was Weasel, which tells the story of a boy in frontier Ohio seeking revenge against a psychopath who, having run out of American Indians to murder, takes to slaughtering white homesteaders.

A declared atheist, he styled his reddish hair in dreadlocks and favored jeans with 50-inch leg openings. He often wore a hoodie with a large fuck racism patch on the back.

Anglin was one of only two vegans at Linworth

But people who knew Anglin in high school told me that, for reasons that were unclear, his behavior became erratic and frightening sometime around the beginning of his sophomore year at Linworth

The deal allows Airbus to sustain annual production at six planes, which it described as the minimum at which losses are manageable.

The bleak outlook for the A380 was punctuated late last year when the first of the jets put into operation was placed in long-term storage after Singapore Airlines opted not to extend an initial lease period. The carrier is the second biggest A380 customer, having ordered 24.

Boeing also has struggled to win orders for its biggest plane, the 747-8, leading to production cuts. For Airbus, the A400M cutback comes after years during which the company struggled to get the military transport out the door and develop some of the promised technical features. Airbus said it would build 15 of the planes this year, after delivering 19 last year. It plans to build 11 of the planes in 2019, and eight annually thereafter.

Airbus Chief Financial Officer Harald Wilhelm said last month said that lowering build rates for the A400M and the A380 would keep them in production and buy time to secure further deals.

Of the 32 teams in the NFL, just four have a nonwhite head coach. Of the five head coaching vacancies in the offseason, just one was filled by a nonwhite person when Ron Rivera, who is Hispanic, was hired by Washington

The NFL has been criticized for its response to former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem over the 2016 season to protest police brutality and racial injustice. When Kaepernick became a free agent in 2017, no team offered him a contract and he accused team owners of colluding to keep him from being signed.

Now, clubs will be required to interview at least two minority candidates for head coach vacancies; at least one minority candidate for any of the three coordinator vacancies; and at least one external minority candidate for the senior football operations or general manager position.

Minority and female applicants must also be included in the interview processes for senior level front office positions such as club president and senior executives in communications, finance, human resources, legal, football operations, sales, marketing, sponsorship, information technology, and security positions.

Regulatory review and approval. If a medication or drug is proven safe and effective in clinical trials, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gets involved to evaluate the vaccine and administer an approval. The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations reports that, typically, 1 in 10 experimental vaccines make it all the way through regulatory approval.

Each one of those steps can take years, and a potential vaccine can get stalled indefinitely at any one of them.

There's not a whole lot that can be done to speed up the process and still arrive at a safe and effective vaccine. Currently, most medical and public health experts say we're at least 12 to 18 months away from having a usable vaccine against COVID-19.

Because of the lengthy timeline associated with vaccine development, nearly three dozen companies and academic institutions around the world are now directing resources towards the search

While these new approaches could speed a vaccine to market, it does raise some ethical questions about safety. It's also unclear just yet whether the rush will result in an effective vaccine faster

"In the beginning of the process, the research usually involves searching through tons of sources of data to uncover opportunities that may not be so obvious.

The trial will assess "safety and antibody production, meaning that testing various doses' safety and whether these doses are producing an immune response. This phase 1 trial is not studying the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing coronavirus infection. That will come at a later phase of the research,

But the sense of urgency surrounding the need for a safe, effective vaccine to prevent COVID-19 is driving public health officials, private pharmaceutical companies and others to work as quickly as they can to find a solution. The sooner these vaccines and other medications can be tested, the sooner we might have a viable vaccine that can halt a global pandemic that shows few signs of slowing on its own. But right now, experts say that it will take at least a year and likely longer before such a vaccine is available