Much of the NSA’s data collection efforts simply work to skim private information from the vast consumer caches held by corporations like Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
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Hon. Shira A Scheindlin has struck major blow to Michael Bloomberg’s and Ray Kelly’s racist and megalomaniacal “Stop and Frisk” policy. Bloomberg’s and Kelly’s policy acts in direct opposition to both the progress of our culture and of the laws they have sworn to uphold.
A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, conclude that rising temperatures and wetter seasons will aggravate regions across the world already prone to conflict.
Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with the credit system […]
A world in which great minds thought alike would be a dystopia.
The scientific mindset, Steven Pinker argues, is “indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.”
What’s the Big Idea? The words “learning” and “education” are unsexy in print – probably because for most people they unconsciously conjure up feelings of Dickensian dread and boredom. This […]
Water is among the natural resources—including oil, fish, timber, and minerals—that face increasing demand as a result of population increases and economic growth.
Looking over the summer blockbuster movies I see that “The Lone Ranger” flopped. The western, that iconic American genre, seems to be on the wane. Post-modern treatments, or westerns with […]
The country is the world’s largest polluter, but it is cleaning up faster than anyone else.
Some unconvincing reasons not to philosophize.
At Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky challenges the common assumption that automation is the cause of long-term unemployment.
Judah Folkman, the cancer researcher, is probably the most – one of the two or three most inspiring human beings I’ve ever met. I only spent two or three hours […]
Winston Churchill’s career reveals that he was pretty consistently wrong on issue after issue, place after place, time after time, and he was wrong for the same reasons he was right in May of 1940.
What would a great ad for a university of technology be? An ad, that itself, solves a problem through technology. This is exactly what the University of Engineering and Technology of […]
According to NASA estimates, up to 60 meteors per hour might be seen at the peak of the Perseid meteor shower on August 12.
The strongest determiners of depression, according to online search patterns, appear to be employment rates and climate patterns.
A survey of 240 young men and women has found that adult human crime victims receive less sympathy than do adult dogs, puppies, and human children.
In a new article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, professor Rik Pieters explains why shopping can make us lonely and why, once lonely, we turn to shopping to relieve our anti-social symptoms.
Science, along with evolutionary theory, may soothe the human soul in ways similar to religion by promoting a vision of the universe that is not random and chaotic but rather orderly and deterministic.
In a recent study of elderly people with poor blood flow, researchers found that drinking two cups of hot chocolate each day improved the seniors’ circulation, resulting in more blood flow to the brain.
By measuring the level of acetone gas in the breath, users of a new breathalyzer can tell if they are getting a good workout, helping to incentivize exercise and aid individuals in managing their diet.
MIT doctoral student Kuang Xu has created a mathematical formula that can reduce the amount of time injured people wait for medical attention in the emergency room by ten percent.
Using stem cells extracted from two separate cows, researchers in Germany have created the world’s first synthetic beef. The stringy protein was grown in laboratory conditions.
Even as the U.S. government continues to spend huge sums of money underwriting cancer research, public health agencies are failing to make people aware of a proven, well-tolerated, low-cost anti-cancer drug: aspirin.
A survey of recent health studies suggests that standing up at work may confer qualitatively unique health benefits, helping the body stay fit and avoid disease in ways that rigorous exercise cannot.
In an experiment in which individuals were asked to memorize pairs of words, those who engaged in mild exercise while learning the word pairs did significantly better than those who sat quietly.
You no doubt have seen it often enough, perhaps said it yourself: It’s a variation on “Only a bad person would do that!” Yet, we must also wonder about what […]
In a previous post, we set American Walt Whitman against Frenchman Arthur Rimbaud. Based on your feedback, Rimbaud won the first set narrowly. So now on to set #2: war.
Who will win this death match?