Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
During the past academic year, an upsurge of student activism, a movement of millennials, has swept campuses across the country and attracted the attention of the media. From coast to coast, from the Ivy League to state universities to small liberal arts colleges, a wave of student activism has focused on stopping climate change, promoting a living wage, fighting mass …
Yesterday I spoke at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, NECSS, a “celebration of science and critical thinking” held May 12-15 in New York City. Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, whom I met recently, got me invited, and he might regret that, because I decided to treat the skeptics skeptically. I originally titled my talk “Skepticism: Hard Versus Soft Targets.” The references …
More than 2,000 doctors across the United States have endorsed a detailed proposal [3] for transforming America’s broken for-profit health care system into a publicly funded, universal model that would knock down all barriers to treatment. Just published in the American Journal of Public Health by a 39-member Working Group on Single-Payer Program Design, and signed by a growing number of physicians and …
What are the tools we can call in to assist with the patterns of harm we see playing out globally? You might think that existing tools are not enough to prevent and disrupt our existing norms. What do we have? We have over 500 treaties, conventions, protocols and resolutions specifically pertaining to the environment – yet none of them is …
It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins. The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand …
LONDON, 21 May, 2016 – One of Antarctica’s great glaciers could become unstable if global warming continues at the present pace. As warm seas wash the ice shelf, the land-based mass of ice could begin to retreat, cross a critical threshold in the present century and then withdraw 300 kilometres inland. In the course of doing so it would spill …
In a world infected with a plethora of immoral multinational corporations, it is hard to think of two corporations who have more nefarious histories than Bayer AG and Monsanto. Considering this, it is a harrowing prospect that the two corporations could potentially strike a deal in the near future. As Bloomberg reported earlier this month, Bayer AG – the German pharmaceutical and chemical …
As the political pundits keep reminding us, this might be called the “hate” election. Both major parties’ presumptive nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, have historically high net unfavorable ratings – so high that voters are said to be casting their ballots against a candidate rather than in favor of one. The question seems to be: Whom do you hate …
I am reporting here the results of a small survey that I carried out last week among the members of a discussion forum; mainly experts in renewable energy (*). It was a very informal poll; not meant to have statistical value. But some 70 people responded out of a total of 167 members; so I think these results have a certain …
In the past several days, the news media have been reporting from airports such as O’Hare or LAX where the lines to go through security are longer than the waiting list for Hamilton. Many of the folks standing in those lines have reported missing flights, which then creates flights that are overcrowded with the folks from the earlier connections that didn’t get made. Watching people …
