Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America

One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas.

“When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,”

With less than two weeks to go, the race for the White House has narrowed as Hillary Clinton now has a three-point advantage over Donald Trump.

Compared to 2008, this is a more character driven election.  At that time, voters said issues were more important than personal qualities by a 71-14 percent margin.  

The Fox News Poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,309 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from October 22-25, 2016.  The survey includes results among 1,221 likely voters.  The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for results among both registered and likely voters.

If I felt guilty about exploiting my background to appeal to colleges looking to build a well-rounded class, I also felt grateful for the opportunity.

Yet for something so widely desired, what diversity means and why people want it remain unclear

Particularly in the U.S., where universities emphasize their “holistic” evaluations of applicants and, studies show, calibrate SAT scores depending on a variety of factors including race, legacy status, and athletic recruitment, she was curious how students justified the practice. Reasoning that elite colleges tend to espouse relatively progressive views and that their students—having gained entree to the world’s most prized institutions—would presumably have little reason to resent affirmative action, she decided this sample would provide insights into “the best-case scenario in terms of support for racial inclusion.”

Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation

Officials are scrutinizing the agent, Andrey Baranov, for bribery and corruption, according to several people familiar with the case who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

The investigators are looking into whether Mr. Baranov conspired with American marathon organizers — including New York City Marathon officials — to allow athletes using banned substances to compete in their events.

Deep in the Amazon, the rain forest once covered ancient secrets. Spread across hundreds of thousands of acres are massive, geometric earthworks. The carvings stretch out in circles and squares that can be as big as a city block, with trenches up to 12 yards wide and 13 feet deep. They appear to have been built up to 2,000 years ago.

“A lot of people have the idea that the Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans, and that’s obviously not the case.”

Dr. Watling and her team reconstructed a 6,000-year-old environmental history of two geoglyph sites in the Amazon rain forest. To do this, they searched for clues in soil samples in and around the sites. Microscopic plant fossils called phytoliths told them about ancient vegetation. Bits of charcoal revealed evidence of burnings. And a kind of carbon dating gave them a sense of how open the vegetation had been in the past.

The research team monitored the molecular changes closely as the disease developed. The illness was treated successfully while in its early stages, long before it might have been if Dr. Snyder had relied on a conventional visit to the doctor.

Currently, the price of human genome sequencing is typically about $4,000, said George M. Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School. But within a year, he said, it could be down to $1,000 or even less.

because he typically schedules checkups with his doctor only once every two or three years, the disease would have long remained undiagnosed had it not been for the case study. “Probably no one would have caught my glucose shooting up for at least 18 to 20 months,” he said. “By then, I could have had damage.”

exposure alone does very little to increase the vocabulary and background knowledge necessary to achieve true fluency

extrinsic cash incentives create temporary motives. “You do the work, you get paid. … Then the money stops. Do you still keep going to work?

In 1999, Deci analyzed 128 studies on incentives that overwhelmingly supported his point that providing extrinsic incentives to perform certain tasks decreased whatever intrinsic appeal they had

Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.

The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder then ever to sit down and focus on reading.

“The tablet is like a temptress,” said James McQuivey, the Forrester Research analyst who led the survey. “It’s constantly saying, ‘You could be on YouTube now.’ Or it’s sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.” Indeed, the basic menu for the Kindle Fire offers links to video, apps, the Web, music, newsstand and books, effectively making books (once Amazon’s stock in trade) just another menu option

researchers have determined virtually the entire genome of a fetus using only a blood sample from the pregnant woman and a saliva specimen from the father

That would allow thousands of genetic diseases to be detected prenatally. But the ability to know so much about an unborn child is likely to raise serious ethical considerations as well. It could increase abortions for reasons that have little to do with medical issues and more to do with parental preferences for traits in children.

The process is not practical, affordable or accurate enough for use now, experts said. The University of Washington researchers estimated that it would cost $20,000 to $50,000 to do one fetal genome today. But the cost of DNA sequencing is falling at a blistering pace, and accuracy is improving as well. The researchers estimated that the procedure could be widely available in three to five years. Others said it would take somewhat longer.

College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.

While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities

They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.

The ability of people like Mr. Lefevre to create anonymous Twitter accounts underscores concerns about the veracity of what is published and the identity of authors. It also raises questions about whether publishers are blurring the line between real life and the made-up kind.

At the time, an account called @CondeElevator had sprung up, supposedly chronicling the goings-on in the elevator of the media company Condé Nast. “I thought, ‘This is ridiculous that people are infatuated with Condé Nast. If they only saw the elitist, sexist and out-of-touch things bankers say.’ People had no idea what it is really like.”

He said his intent was neither to mock nor glamorize Wall Street. “I do not have an agenda to paint the people or this culture one way or the other,” he said, adding that he was “always a cynical banker” when he worked on Wall Street but “I loved it. We did a lot of crazy stuff. It’s not like I had a great epiphany along the way.

A New York Times review of hundreds of child firearm deaths found that accidental shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate, because of idiosyncrasies in how such deaths are classified by the authorities.

The National Rifle Association cited the lower official numbers this year in a fact sheet opposing “safe storage” laws, saying children were more likely to be killed by falls, poisoning or environmental factors — an incorrect assertion if the actual number of accidental firearm deaths is significantly higher.

The rifle association’s lobbying arm recently posted on its Web site a claim that adult criminals who mishandle firearms — as opposed to law-abiding gun owners — are responsible for most fatal accidents involving children. But The Times’s review found that a vast majority of cases revolved around children’s access to firearms, with the shooting either self-inflicted or done by another child.

The emerging popular consensus about our biological predisposition to warfare is troubling. It is not just scientifically weak; it is also morally unfortunate, as it fosters an unjustifiably limited vision of human potential.

Conflict avoidance, reconciliation and cooperative problem solving could also have been altogether “biological” and positively selected for.

Chimpanzees, we now know, engage in something distressingly akin to human warfare, but bonobos, whose evolutionary lineage makes them no more distant from us than chimps, are justly renowned for making love instead.

we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang

We computed the average response rates for each category of student (e.g., white male, Hispanic female), dividing the number of responses from the professors by the number of emails sent from students in a given race or gender category.

Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities

the latest poll from Pew on American attitudes toward other faiths. The researchers asked a panel of more than 3,200 nationally representative adults to take a "feeling thermometer" about religious groups in America, rating their level of "warmth" or "coolness" toward Jews, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, evangelicals, atheists, and more

Why, despite the anti-Semitism that still exists in the United States, are Americans mostly down with the Jews?

despite the home-team advantage of the Christians in the survey, who made up more than two-thirds of the sample, Jews got the highest overall ratings. A good chunk of the respondents said they don't even know any Jewish people; only 60 percent said they'd ever met a Jew.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”

his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Ancient squirrel's nest leads to discovery of giant virus

The virus has been at rest for 30,000 years about 30 meters deep in the Siberian permafrost. Astrobiologists using it as kind of stand-in for Mars have taken core samples looking for life. Claverie said he stumbled on research that described reviving a plant from a seed that had been buried for 30,000 years.

it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst. I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents.

First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling. I haven't been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don't know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there's Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I've taken hundreds of crash courses this way. After I've gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph. I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.

Officials here want this Boston suburb to become the first city in the United States to systematically track people’s happiness. Like leaders in Britain, France and a few other places, they want to move beyond the traditional measures of success — economic growth — to promote policies that produce more than just material well-being

To draw up its questions, Somerville turned to a neighbor, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor who wrote the 2006 best seller “Stumbling on Happiness.” Dr. Gilbert, who donated his time, is also helping the city do a more detailed telephone survey, using a randomized sample of Somerville’s 76,000 residents.

The survey that was mailed with the census asks people to rate the nuts-and-bolts aspects of their communities — the police, the schools, the availability of affordable housing — as well as the “beauty or physical setting” of Somerville, an industrial town full of triple-decker houses. The city wants to know: “Taking everything into account, how satisfied are you with Somerville as a place to live?”