Month: August 2017

Far Right and National Security

Published by Sam

White supremacists’ armed protests against the removal of a Virginia memorial to the Confederacy left one dead and more than thirty injured after a driver plowed into counterdemonstrators. With more demonstrations planned, greater attention should be paid to the threat from far-right radicals, says Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia who focuses on extremism and democracy. “Within the U.S. the threat from the far right is bigger than that from jihadists,” Mudde says. But despite this, he says, the U.S. government has long devoted insufficient resources to domestic far-right movements, and many of these groups now feel emboldened by Donald J. Trump’s presidency. How do you characterize the demonstrators in Charlottesville? The vast majority were either white supremacists or white nationalists, but they were relatively diverse in terms of views both on the political system and on race, from people who by and large want to dominate if not exterminate non-whites to people who want to hold onto white privilege. Neo-Nazis don’t believe in democracy. The so-called alt-right has elitist views …

Decline of academic books in print

Published by Sam

The print-format scholarly book, a bulwark of academia’s publish-or-perish culture, is an endangered species. The market that has sustained it over the years is collapsing. Sales of scholarly books in print format have hit record lows. Per-copy prices are at record highs. In purely economic terms, the current situation is unsustainable. So, what does the future look like? Will academia’s traditional devotion to print and legendary resistance to change kill off long-form scholarship? Or will academia allow itself to move from print-format scholarly books to an open-access digital model that could save, and very likely rejuvenate, long-form scholarship? Sales down. Prices up First, let’s look at some of the sales trends. Take the book-centric academic field of history as an example. In 1980, a scholarly publisher could expect to sell 2,000 copies of any given history book. By 1990, that number had plummeted to 500 copies. And by 2005, sales of a little over 200 copies worldwide had become the norm. From my own field – library and information studies – the numbers are no …

Censoring Richard Dawkins

Published by Sam

A notoriously vocal critic of religion and the author of The God Delusion, Dawkins’ invite was rescinded because, according to KPFA, his comments on Twitter and elsewhere had “offended and hurt … so many people” in relation to their religious identity. In a letter of apology to those who had bought tickets to attend the event, and as a preemptive response to criticism, the station also stated: “While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech.” Dawkins responded to the claims in an open letter posted on his website. He denied that he had used such abusive speech against Islam, stressing that any critique he had made had instead been aimed at Islamism. He also challenged KPFA to provide evidence of their claims against him. Counter speech or gagging? The station’s decision follows a now-familiar pattern of similar incidents of no-platforming at various institutions. Responses to such cases are easy to predict, with those in favour lauding the decision not to provide a public platform for offensive views. Those who fiercely …

The hacker ethic

Published by Sam

The arrest of a British cybersecurity researcher on charges of disseminating malware and conspiring to commit computer fraud and abuse provides a window into the complexities of hacking culture. In May, a person going by the nickname “MalwareTech” gained international fame – and near-universal praise – for figuring out how to slow, and ultimately effectively stop, the worldwide spread of the WannaCry malware attack. But in August, the person behind that nickname, Marcus Hutchins, was arrested on federal charges of writing and distributing a different malware attack first spotted back in 2014. The judicial system will sort out whether Hutchins, who has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty, will face as much as 40 years in prison. But to me as a sociologist studying the culture and social patterns of cybercrime, Hutchins’ experience is emblematic of the values, beliefs and practices of many hackers. The hacker ethic The term “hacking” has its origins in the 1950s and 1960s at MIT, where it was used as a positive label to describe someone who tinkers with computers. …

Exploring the benefits in LGBT marriage

Published by Sam

For decades, researchers have studied the benefits of marriage, finding that married people are likely to be healthier, wealthier and wiser than their unmarried peers. But these studies reflected those who were allowed to marry. Only recently – when states started passing laws guaranteeing same-sex couples the right to marry – could researchers begin to examine how marriage impacted the health of LGBT Americans. At the University of Washington School of Social Work, our team has conducted the first national study that explores the relationship between marriage, health and quality of life for LGBT adults 50 and older. The findings reaffirm some of the health benefits associated with marriage in the general population. But they also highlight many of the unique barriers LGBT Americans continue to face. The benefits of marriage persist Survey data from the study – titled “Aging with Pride: National Health, Aging, and Sexuality/Gender Study (NHAS)” – analyzed responses from 1,821 LGBT older adults who lived in states with legalized same-sex marriage and access to federal benefits (32 states plus the District …

Quantum consciousness

Published by Sam

The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain—which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer. As recently as 10 years ago, Fisher’s hypothesis would have been dismissed by many as nonsense. Physicists have been burned by this sort of thing before, most notably in 1989, when Roger Penrose proposed that mysterious protein structures called “microtubules” played a role in human consciousness by exploiting quantum effects. Few researchers believe such a hypothesis plausible. Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California, San Diego, memorably opined that one might as well invoke “pixie dust in …

Atheists must communicate better

Published by Sam

Atheism is so often considered in the negative: as a lack of faith, or a disbelief in god; as an essential deprivation. Atheism is seen as being destitute of meaning, value, purpose; unfertile ground for growing the feelings of belonging needed to overcome the alienation that dogs modern life. In more extreme critiques, atheism is considered to be another name for nihilism; a fundamental negation of existence, a noxious blight on creation itself. Yet atheists – rather than flippantly dismissing the insights of theologians – should take them seriously indeed. Humans, by dint of being human, are confronted with baffling questions about meaning, belonging, direction, our connection to other humans and the fate of our species as a whole. The human impulse is to seek answers, and to date, atheism has been unsatisfactory in its response. The shackles of humanism Atheist values are typically defined as humanistic. If we look to the values of the British Humanist Association, we see that it promotes naturalism, rational debate, and the pre-eminence of evidence, cooperation, progress and individual …

Fahrenheit 451 an evergreen dystopian science fiction

Published by skeptic

There’s a reason dystopian science fiction is evergreen—no matter how much time goes by, people will always regard the future with suspicion. The common wisdom is that the past was pretty good, the present is barely tolerable, but the future will be all Terminator-style robots and Idiocracy slides into chaos.

Every few years political cycles cause an uptick in attention being paid to classic dystopias; the 2016 Presidential election pushed George Orwell’s classic 1984 back onto the bestseller lists, and made Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale a depressingly appropriate viewing event.

Doctor vs Crowdsourced AI diagnosis app

Published by Sam

Shantanu Nundy recognized the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis when his 31-year-old patient suffering from crippling hand pain checked into Mary’s Center in Washington, D.C. Instead of immediately starting treatment, though, Nundy decided first to double-check his diagnosis using a smartphone app that helps with difficult medical cases by soliciting advice from doctors worldwide. Within a day, Nundy’s hunch was confirmed. The app had used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and filter advice from several medical specialists into an overall ranking of the most likely diagnoses. Created by the Human Diagnosis Project (Human Dx)—an organization that Nundy directs—the app is one of the latest examples of growing interest in human–AI collaboration to improve health care. Human Dx advocates the use of machine learning—a popular AI technique that automatically learns from classifying patterns in data—to crowdsource and build on the best medical knowledge from thousands of physicians across 70 countries. Physicians at several major medical research centers have shown early interest in the app. Human Dx on Thursday announced a new partnership with top medical profession organizations …