With personal data becoming the world’s most valuable commodity, will users be the platform economy’s masters or its slaves?

Worse, the algorithmic processes being used often perpetuate gender and racial biases, and can be manipulated for profit or political gain. While we all benefit immensely from digital services such as Google search, we didn’t sign up to have our behaviour catalogued, shaped, and sold.

Just as landowners in the seventeenth century extracted rents from land-price inflation, and just as robber barons profited from the scarcity of oil, today’s platform firms are extracting value through the monopolisation of search and e-commerce services.

In the last half-billion years, life on Earth has been nearly wiped out five times—by such things as climate change, an intense ice age, volcanoes, and that space rock that smashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, obliterating the dinosaurs and a bunch of other species. These events are known as the Big Five mass extinctions, and all signs suggest we are now on the precipice of a sixth.

So, places that have been isolated for a long time. Those are very vulnerable. Species that have a very restricted range, that exist only in one spot in the world, those tend to be extremely vulnerable. They have nowhere to go and if their habitat is destroyed, say, then they’re gone.

I don’t think there’s any dispute that we are responsible for the elevated extinction rates we see now. There are very few, if any, extinctions that we know about in the last 100 years that would have taken place without human activity. I have never heard anyone argue, “oh extinction rates, that’s just a natural thing that would have happened with or without humans.” It’s just pretty much impossible to argue that.

“I feel hopeful seeing the power of all these people here today,” one teenager said of the protest, which drew tens of thousands of demonstrators.

The crowd totaled at least 60,000, according to an afternoon estimate from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office. In a sign of how difficult crowd sizes can be to pin down, organizers put the figure at 250,000. A permit had been issued for 5,000, prompting some organizers to joke that their efforts to publicize the event had been too successful.Sign up for the New York Today NewsletterEach morning, get the latest on New York businesses, arts, sports, dining, style and more.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued a statement on Friday that targeted climate change deniers. “Our young people understand climate change is no longer up for debate — it’s reality based in science.”

“Criticisms are not coming only from the Americans, they are coming a bit from everywhere, even from the curia,” the pope said.

wealthy conservative Catholics are exploiting the moral crisis caused by the Catholic sex abuse scandal to become the de facto leaders of an Americanist Catholic Church.

Their goal is to use the sex abuse scandal to push Pope Francis to resign, thus triggering a conclave to elect a new pope more aligned with American interests.

History guided them as they crafted the American system of governance. This included the European traditions they were partially rejecting, but also elements from an older generation of republics that they wished to copy, especially the Roman Republic.

Not surprisingly, then, Rome inspired many features of our own Constitution, including its checks and balances, bicameral legislature, term limits and age requirements. In some cases, the Founders copied terms straight out of the Roman constitution: words like senate, capitol and committee.

A tour through the artwork of the U.S. Capitol today reveals early Americans saw the Roman ideals of farming, working hard, raising strong families and participating in local government as the building blocks for a strong national republic.

European Union to trace the history of Islam in Europe. Convinced that the «way in which a society treats its minorities says a lot about it», the researcher took the lead of this groundbreaking project in Spain to document the spread of the Quran in Christian territories.

«Strong Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula has for sure left a footprint in Christian kingdoms. It is worth mentioning that Muslims were, during the Middle Ages, the vectors of a culture that was deemed superior to the one of the Christian West in general and to that of the Hispanic kingdoms in general»

But it is during the first half of the twentieth century that essayists, philosophers and historians got interested in answering questions related to the remains of Islamic culture in the Iberian Peninsula. Some of them realized that the Spanish culture was the outcome of the interaction between Muslims, Christians and Jews

Patriarchy is a system; it is not about individual behavior. That system is institutionalized; it is represented in the very structures of society (this is the more common dictionary definition of patriarchy, which equates the system with men holding positions of power).

The boys assembled themselves into hierarchies through taunting and insulting each other over any perceived weakness. Where each boy ranked socially was a measure of how “tough” he was perceived to be. Competition in the social order dominated everything, for example causing boys who had injuries to disguise them rather than seek medical care. Boys who seemed weak were showered with verbal and physical abuse.

That is because anthropologists immerse themselves in an alien culture, try to shed the preconceptions of their own and seek to understand how a strange society works. Only if you view anthropology as an exact science would you suspect scandal when two anthropologists disagree, however sharply.

But many historians remain skeptical. ''I strongly doubt that plate tectonics and the Big Bang might contribute to our understanding of history,'' Mr. Revel said after listening to Mr. Christian's talk at the convention.

''Unfortunately,'' he wrote, ''historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.''

To understand the last few thousand years of human history, he insisted, scholars need to understand the rest of the past as well, up to and including the Big Bang -- in short, the whole 14-billion-year span of time itself.

in which journalists fetishize centrism and deal making, and assume that the best of all possible legislation, regardless of its actual content

The trouble is that when you set out to “lead” a conversation, you often end up deciding where it goes, which side wins the arguments and even who gets to participate.

Rather, it’s that the press’s ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are willing to entertain, and the formal commitment to neutrality encourages self-deception about what counts as crusading.

The need for driverless farming equipment is intensifying, Mr. Cafiero said, because of a crushing labor shortage, which drives up wages and worker mobility.

Instead

, it adapts the sensors and actuators needed for driverless plowing to existing tractors produced by major manufacturers.That step is not as sci-fi as it might seem. From equipment automation to data collection and analysis, the digital evolution of agriculture is already a fact of life on farms across the United States.