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At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.

But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.

From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.

Previously our ignorance kept us from unraveling nature’s secret process; when the process is understood knowledge replaces mysticism. He sums this up succinctly:

Education is essential because religion is effectively a struggle for power.

Since God is invented by man, it is through man that he is made known. Make people believe in your story and you can write whatever narrative you’d like. 

the House quietly voted to undo rules that keep internet service providers — the companies like Comcast, Verizon and Charter that you pay for online access — from selling your personal information.

President Trump will be able to sign legislation that will strike a significant blow against online privacy protection.

The bill is an effort by the F.C.C.’s new Republican majority and congressional Republicans to overturn a simple but vitally important concept

But just being allowed to set foot in that locker room was a huge victory for the girl. She is transgender.

but the war over how to accommodate transgender students is far from over in her Chicago suburb.

on the grounds that they are “the opposite biological sex.” Their presence, the opponents argue, violates community standards of decency.

"Make contact with that part of America that doesn’t know any scientists. Put a face on the debate. Help them understand what we do, and how we do it. Give them your email, or better yet, your phone number...  The solution here is not mass spectacle, but an increased effort to communicate directly with those who do not understand the degree to which the changing climate is already affecting their lives. We need storytellers, not marchers."

“Madame, you are an experience, but not an argument.”

it has taken on renewed significance as the struggles on American campuses to negotiate issues of free speech have intensified — most recently in protests at Auburn University against a visit by the white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Lanzmann’s blunt reply favored reasoned analysis over personal memory.

a worthwhile—and necessary—discussion about whether anyone should read the ancient Greeks in the first place, and if so why and how.

As someone who took Hum 110 more than 20 years ago, the news from campus has made me reflect on what I learned in the course. The answers, both equally true, are that I didn’t learn very much—and that I learned everything.

I slogged through the Hum 110 readings and wrote the required papers, but I can’t say that the words of Herodotus, Sappho, or Homer really sank in.

The “punch a Nazi” thread that became popular earlier this year among the left-liberal journalistic class opened my eyes to this, as more than a few liberal thought leaders loved it when they saw a video of Richard Spencer being clocked by a masked thug.

How has political violence now become acceptable on lefty Twitter and among one in five college students? I’d argue that it’s too easy to overlook the influence of the neo-Marxist ideology now pervasive on countless campuses — specifically the late philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s concepts of “violence of defense” and “violence of aggression” in the context of what he called “repressive tolerance.” For parts of the New Left, racist democratic capitalism perpetuates so much systemic oppression that any defense of it or acquiescence in it amounts to violence against the victims. Therefore violence in defense of the victims is perfectly defensible. It just levels the playing field.

Hence it’s okay to punch a Nazi, but not okay to punch a communist. It’s defensible for an oppressed person of color to assault a white person but never the other way round. Hence a recent discussion in The Guardian about whether cold-cocking a racist is defensible: “A punch may be uncivil, but racism is worse.”

Leading economics scholars consider the influence of psychology on economics, discussing topics including pro-social behavior, conditional trust, neuroeconomics, procedural utility, and happiness research.

Summary Leading economics scholars consider the influence of psychology on economics, discussing topics including pro-social behavior, conditional trust, neuroeconomics, procedural utility, and happiness research. The integration of economics and psychology has created a vibrant and fruitful emerging field of study. The essays in Economics and Psychology take a broad view of the interface between these two disciplines, going beyond the usual focus on "behavioral economics." As documented in this volume, the influence of psychology on economics has been responsible for a view of human behavior that calls into question the assumption of complete rationality (and raises the possibility of altruistic acts), the acceptance of experiments as a valid method of economic research, and the idea that utility or well-being can be measured.

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’

Confirmation bias is typically viewed as an epistemically pernicious tendency. For instance, Mercier and Sperber (2017: 215) maintain that the bias impedes the formation of well-founded beliefs, reduces people’s ability to correct their mistaken views, and makes them, when they reason on their own, “become overconfident” (Mercier 2016: 110).

Information disorder in current information ecosystems arises not only from the publication of “fake news,” but also from individuals' subjective reading of news and from their propagating news to others. Sometimes the difference between real and fake information is apparent. However, often a message is written to evoke certain emotions and opinions by taking partially true base stories and injecting false statements such that the information looks realistic. In addition, the perception of the trustworthiness of news is often influenced by confirmation bias. As a result, people often believe distorted or outright incorrect news and spread such misinformation further. For example, it was shown that in the months preceding the 2016 American presidential election, organizations from both Russia and Iran ran organized efforts to create such stories and spread them on Twitter and Facebook (Cohen, 2018). It is therefore important to raise internet users' awareness of such practices. Key to this is providing users with means to understand whether information should be trusted or not.

In this section, we discuss how social networks increase the spread of biased news and misinformation. We discuss confirmation bias, echo chambers and other factors that may subconsciously influence a person's opinion. We show how these processes can interact to form a vicious circle that favors the rise of untrustworthy sources. Often, when an individual thinks they know something, they are satisfied by an explanation that confirms their belief, without necessarily considering all possible other explanations, and regardless of the veracity of this information. This is confirmation bias in action. Nickerson (1998) defined it as the tendency of people to both seek and interpret evidence that supports an already-held belief.

In an era when everyone seems eager to point out instances of “fake news,” it is easy to forget that knowing how we make sense of the news is as important as knowing how to spot incorrect or biased content

While the ability to analyze the credibility of a source and the veracity of its content remains an essential and often-discussed aspect of news literacy, it is equally important to understand how we as news consumers engage with and react to the information we find online, in our feeds, and on our apps

People process information they receive from the news in the same way they process all information around them — in the shortest, quickest way possible

According to the Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis (also known as linguistic relativity) language does not only reflect our way of thinking, but is also able to shape it. This hypothesis became known in the 1950s. People from different cultures and languages view the world differently and organize their reality differently. The way that they think is influenced by the grammar and vocabulary of their language

? In the Arapaho culture, for example, there is only one word for “father” and for “uncle” (2). Does this now mean that a child of this culture does not differentiate between his/her own father and the uncle? I (personally) do not think so, but this is something that the anthropologists have to answer. As so often, I think that the answer is somewhere in between. There are certainly many concepts that depend very strongly on language

Many American families are in the political situation that the Watterses find themselves in, even if most families don’t work out their differences on TV. According to a survey conducted a year ago by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, 39 percent of Americans said some political diversity exists within their family. And an ABC News survey found that the 2016 campaign made family relationships and friendships more tense for a roughly similar percentage of Americans.

My colleague Ashley Fetters wrote earlier this year about how family members might discuss their conflicting political views. Suggestions included “abandon[ing] the idea of winning an argument or convincing other people of the wrongness of their positions” and “deliberately distanc[ing] themselves from the full platform of policy positions supported by their chosen political party and instead examin[ing] each issue individually.

. The purpose of this review article is to summarize recent researches focusing on phantom limb in order to discuss its definition, mechanisms, and treatments.

The incidence of phantom limb pain has varied from 2% in earlier records to higher rates today. Initially, patients were less likely to mention pain symptoms than today which is a potential explanation for the discrepancy in incidence rates. However, Sherman et al.4 discuss that only 17% phantom limb complaints were initiated treated by physicians. Consequently, it is important to determine what constitutes phantom pain in order to provide efficacious care. Phantom pain is pain sensation to a limb, organ or other tissue after amputation and/or nerve injury.5 In podiatry, the predominant cause of phantom limb pain is after limb amputation due to diseased state presenting with an unsalvageable limb. Postoperative pain sensations from stump neuroma pain, prosthesis, fibrosis, and residual local tissue inflammation can be similar to phantom limb pain (PLP). Patients with PLP complain of various sensations including burning, stinging, aching, and piercing pain with changing warmth and cold sensation to the amputated area which waxes and wanes.6 Onset of symptoms may be elicited by environmental, emotional, or physical changes.

The human body encompasses various neurologic mechanisms allowing reception, transport, recognition, and response to numerous stimuli. Pain, temperature, crude touch, and pressure sensory information are carried to the central nervous system via the anterolateral system, with pain & temperature information transfer via lateral spinothalamic tracts to the parietal lobe. In detail, pain sensation from the lower extremity is transported from a peripheral receptor to a first degree pseudounipolar neurons in the dorsal root ganglion and decussate and ascend to the third-degree neurons within the thalamus.7 This sensory information will finally arrive at the primary sensory cortex in the postcentral gyrus of the parietal lobe which houses the sensory homunculus.8 It is unsurprising that with an amputation that such an intricate highway of information transport to and from the periphery may have the potential for problematic neurologic developments.

The Feynman trap—ransacking data for patterns without any preconceived idea of what one is looking for—is the Achilles heel of studies based on data mining. Finding something unusual or surprising after it has already occurred is neither unusual nor surprising. Patterns are sure to be found, and are likely to be misleading, absurd, or worse.

A standard neuroscience experiment involves showing a volunteer in an MRI machine various images and asking questions about the images. The measurements are noisy, picking up magnetic signals from the environment and from variations in the density of fatty tissue in different parts of the brain. Sometimes they miss brain activity; sometimes they suggest activity where there is none.A Dartmouth graduate student used an MRI machine to study the brain activity of a salmon as it was shown photographs and asked questions. The most interesting thing about the study was not that a salmon was studied, but that the salmon was dead. Yep, a dead salmon purchased at a local market was put into the MRI machine, and some patterns were discovered. There were inevitably patterns—and they were invariably meaningless.

The (relatively) new technology of the 1930s was the radio. “It is the miracle of radio that it welds 60,000,000 Germans into a single crowd, to be played upon by a single voice,”

the conviction that an opponent embodies an irredeemable evil, and that his destruction is therefore an act of indubitable good. That spirit of certitude that dominated the politics of the 1930s is not so distant from us today.

Scientists and journalists live for facts. Our methods may be very different, but we share a deep belief that by questioning, observing and verifying, we can gain a truer sense of how the world works.

So when people question the scientific consensus on issues such as climate change, vaccine effectiveness or the safety of genetically modified organisms (SN: 2/6/16, p. 22), it’s no surprise that one of the first inclinations of journalists and scientists has been to think, hey, these doubters just don’t know the facts.

Many animals store food to use in times of scarcity, but humans are stockpilers too — individuals routinely keep money in the bank (or under their mattress) and cans in the pantry. However, in some individuals, this collecting behavior is taken to extremes in the form of compulsive hoarding — collecting excessive amounts of objects that have little or no value. Preston found that, across species, including humans, anxiety and threats appear to increase the motivation to acquire and collect food and goods

Responses to positive and negative feedback in the ventral striatum were greatly reduced under stress as compared to when there was no stress, suggesting that stress may dampen your perception of the subjective value of a decision.

Gaining a better understanding of how stress affects decision making is critical not only for psychological science, but has important, real-world implications

The intuitive notion of a “photographic” memory is that it is just like a photograph: you can retrieve it from your memory at will and examine it in detail, zooming in on different parts. But a true photographic memory in this sense has never been proved to exist.

Most of us do have a kind of photographic memory, in that most people's memory for visual material is much better and more detailed than our recall of most other kinds of material.

Sorry to disappoint further, but even an amazing memory in one domain, such as vision, is not a guarantee of great memory across the board.