Author: Will Truman

To investigate further, Leonie Rösner and Nicole Krämer at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany created a fake website for German football fans, and recruited users from a local university.

They then planted a false news story on the site stating that people would no longer be allowed to stand up at football matches. At the time, the idea of banning standing terraces in stadiums was a hot discussion topic in Germany. The researchers then let participants loose on the site’s forum.

Half of these could comment without registering, whereas the others had to use their Facebook accounts to do so. To some participants, all commenters appeared anonymous, while others saw Facebook profiles for everyone.

The forum was also manipulated so that some saw a civil discussion, whereas others were greeted with an atmosphere rich in offensive words, sarcasm, insults and slander – and many exclamation marks.

Rösner and Krämer found that language used by people who were anonymous was not necessarily more aggressive than with people who could be identified. On its own, anonymity is not usually enough to turn people into trolls.

What does seem to make people mean, though, is the behaviour of those around them. The tone set by other commenters was linked to the likelihood that a participant would use aggressive language to support their points

From: Fake football website reveals what makes us become nasty trolls | New Scientist

And those are just a few of the people who are calling out iffy science with Arnold funding. Laura and John Arnold didn’t start the movement to reform science, but they have done more than anyone else to amplify its capabilities—typically by approaching researchers out of the blue and asking whether they might be able to do more with more money. “The Arnold Foundation has been the Medici of meta-research,” Ioannidis says. All told, the foundation’s Research Integrity initiative has given more than $80 million to science critics and reformers in the past five years alone.

Not surprisingly, researchers who don’t see a crisis in science have started to fight back. In a 2014 tweet, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert referred to researchers who had tried and failed to replicate the findings of a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge as “shameless little bullies.” After Nosek published the results of his reproducibility initiative, four social scientists, including Gilbert, published a critique of the project, claiming, among other things, that it had failed to accurately replicate many of the original studies. The BMJ investigation, in turn, met with angry denunciations from nutrition experts who had worked on the US Dietary Guidelines; a petition asking the journal to retract Teicholz’s work was signed by more than 180 credentialed professionals. (After an external and internal review, The BMJ published a correction but chose not to retract the investigation.)

The backlash against Teic­holz also furnished one of the few occasions when anyone has raised an eyebrow at the Arnolds’ funding of science critics. On the morning of October 7, 2015, the US House Agriculture Committee convened a hearing on the controversy surrounding the dietary guidelines, fueled by the BMJ article. For two and a half hours, a roomful of testy representatives asked why certain nutrition studies had been privileged over others. But about an hour in, Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern leaned into his microphone. Aiming to defend the science behind the guidelines, McGovern suggested that the doubts that had been cast over America’s nutrition science were being driven by a “former Enron executive.” “I don’t know what Enron knows about dietary guidelines,” McGovern said. But “powerful special interests” are “trying to question science.”

From: Cancer Studies Are Fatally Flawed. Meet the Young Billionaire Who’s Exposing the Truth About Bad Science | WIRED

Criminals, crime, and the people who stop and perpetuate them.

On his left, Antoine takes up the tale. “The thing is, the political class don’t listen to people like us. People call us extremists, but we just want someone who will make sure that the lights stay on and not do something stupid, like take us out of the European union. Beyond that -“, he shrugs, “I am relatively happy. This is a great time to be alive, isn’t it? I still have all my teeth. There is no war.”

The final man, François, chips in. “I remember the “good old days”. Merde! Did you know our service stations only gave up those toilets where it’s two footplates and a hole about 15 years ago?” He shakes his head. “I would like a little more globalisation, frankly.”

The waiter brings over more drinks. Tahar is in his 20s and a Muslim. He has a simple explanation for Macron’s triumph. “These Le Pen voters are trapped in a exurban nativist bubble. They are out of touch with the needs and values of real French people, like me.” He is right. There are deep forces at work here, which have caused the triumph of innumerable centrists around the western world over the past few decades. Only a blinkered fool would try to deny this uncomfortable truth. Perhaps, I begin to wonder with prickling unease, it is just as legitimate an electoral strategy to appeal to young people, ethnic minorities and social liberals as it is to go for the votes of nativist whites? I shake my head to clear it. No. Saying that would be like saying that there is no hierarchy of citizenhood, and that every voter is of equal value.

From: Deep in Macron Country

Khalid Zafrain came to the U.S. legally as a refugee from Sudan and helped federal agents break up a passport counterfeiting ring—a ring which helped a woman flee the U.S. after allegedly murdering her five-month-old baby.But despite his work as an informant, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to deport him.Zafrain is currently being held at the Farmville Detention Center in central Virginia, awaiting deportation proceedings. His story points to a broader challenge for immigration enforcers: As President Donald Trump pushes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to amp up deportations of immigrants convicted or suspected of crimes, ICE agents will increasingly rely on the immigrant community for help with their law enforcement mandate. And at a time when immigrants’ trust in ICE couldn’t be lower, the agency’s decision to try to deporting one of the few immigrants who actually helped them won’t make that any easier.

From: This ICE Informant Is About to Get Deported – The Daily Beast

Noonan called it.

Sometimes secrets are justifiable. But that seems only to be the case in a circumscribed sphere of knowledge. And—in the United States, at least—information remains classified for only so long before it becomes legally accessible to the average citizen and the press. This fact alone suggests an acknowledgement of certain short term risks associated with knowledge, while also admitting that over the long run we value knowledge over its absence or suppression. So, with these concessions in mind, let us further interrogate our intuition.

Would it be better not to know that the Earth orbits the sun? Before Copernicus revived the heliocentric hypothesis, widely accepted by ancient Greek philosophers, Europeans in Christendom could reasonably assume that they were the center of the solar system. Galileo’s observations helped rob us of this comforting myth. Clear thinking clergy at the time certainly guessed what the consequences might be. The leader of the most powerful religious organization on the planet, the Pope, felt that we would all be better off not knowing. At play was a moral calculus intended to sort out whether certain knowledge might be dangerous. In this case, it might cause people to lose their faith (or erode the power of the church, somehow). Of course, the heretics were correct about our place in the solar system. But the rumor of civilization’s great moral demise was vastly overstated.

We may have lost our centrality to the universe, but we retained our special stature as beings created in the image of the Almighty. In 1859, however, that changed too. Charles Darwin upset our intuitions in a way most people still haven’t fully grasped. Darwin understood the subversive consequences of his theory clearly, which partly explains why he waited so long to publish his book on evolution by natural selection, and why he confided to his friend Joseph Hooker that it was like “confessing to a murder” to show that species are not immutable, and that evolution is not a synonym for progress.

From: Is It Ever Better Not to Know? | Quillette

Knowing that Macron went through certain kinds of hell to win his happiness makes it all the more interesting—moving, even—to see him emerging as a powerful champion of the modern family in its many...

Germany’s top prosecutor Tuesday said two soldiers and an accomplice plotted high-profile assassinations that would be blamed on a migrant, escalating a controversy over right-wing extremism in the military that is weighing on the...

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a robotic system that built the basic structure of a building in less than 14 hours. The dome-like structure is 50 feet in diameter and 12 feet high.

The prototype is essentially a vehicle with a large industrial robotic arm for reach, and a smaller arm for dexterity. Different tools can be attached to the smaller arm, such as a welding system or a spray head that shoots out building materials like foam.

“With this process, we can replace one of the key parts of making a building, right now. It could be integrated into a building site tomorrow,” said Steven Keating, co-author of a paper published in the journal “Science Robotics.”

From: New MIT robot can 3D print entire building structure in less than 14 hours – May. 2, 2017

African-American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and ’50s and even into the ’60s, by the Federal Housing Administration, gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained. So … the Daly City development south of San Francisco or Levittown or any of the others in between across the country, those homes in the late 1940s and 1950s sold for about twice national median income. They were affordable to working-class families with an FHA or VA mortgage. African-Americans were equally able to afford those homes as whites but were prohibited from buying them. Today those homes sell for $300,000 [or] $400,000 at the minimum, six, eight times national median income. …

So in 1968 we passed the Fair Housing Act that said, in effect, “OK, African-Americans, you’re now free to buy homes in Daly City or Levittown” … but it’s an empty promise because those homes are no longer affordable to the families that could’ve afforded them when whites were buying into those suburbs and gaining the equity and the wealth that followed from that.

The white families sent their children to college with their home equities; they were able to take care of their parents in old age and not depend on their children. They’re able to bequeath wealth to their children. None of those advantages accrued to African-Americans, who for the most part were prohibited from buying homes in those suburbs.

From: A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America : NPR