ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 407

How Facebook, fake news and friends are warping your memory

By Laura Spinney

Strange things have been happening in the news lately. Already this year, members of US President Donald Trump’s administration have alluded to a ‘Bowling Green massacre’ and terror attacks in Sweden and Atlanta, Georgia, that never happened.

The misinformation was swiftly corrected, but some historical myths have proved difficult to erase. Since at least 2010, for example, an online community has shared the apparently unshakeable recollection of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, despite the fact that he lived until 2013, leaving prison in 1990 and going on to serve as South Africa’s first black president.

Memory is notoriously fallible, but some experts worry that a new phenomenon is emerging. “Memories are shared among groups in novel ways through sites such as Facebook and Instagram, blurring the line between individual and collective memories,” says psychologist Daniel Schacter, who studies memory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The development of Internet-based misinformation, such as recently well-publicized fake news sites, has the potential to distort individual and collective memories in disturbing ways.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Patchy Progress on Fixing Global Gender Disparities in Science

By Erin Ross

Although women are publishing more studies, being cited more often, and securing more coveted first-author positions than they were in the mid 1990s, overall progress towards gender parity in science varies widely by country and field. This is according to a massive report released on March 8 that is the first to examine such a broad swath of disciplines and regions of the world over time.

The report by the publisher Elsevier found that despite their moderate advances, women still published fewer articles than men, and were much less likely to be listed as first or last authors on a paper. Citation rates, however, were roughly equal: although female authors were cited slightly less than male authors, work authored by women was downloaded at slightly higher rates.

Elsevier used data from Scopus, an abstract and citation database of more than 62 million documents. The report’s authors broke the data down into 27 subject areas, and compared them across 12 countries and regions and two 5-year blocks of time: 1996–2000 and 2011–15. The report included only researchers who were listed as an author on at least one publication within either of the two five-year periods.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

“ATHE1ST” License Plate Request Rejected in Indiana; Now the ACLU May Get Involved

By Hemant Mehta

The ACLU may pursue litigation against the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles after they rejected Chris Bontrager‘s request for an “ATHE1ST” license plate.

Chris told me he wanted to get the “ATHEIST” plate (with an “I”), but the online system said it was unavailable. When he substituted the number “1” for the “I,” however, everything seemed fine. He paid the cost and waited for his new plates.

They never came. Instead, the BMV sent him a letter saying he needed to try again. While they didn’t give him a specific explanation, the letter explained that the only reasons a personalized plate could be rejected were being “offensive to good taste or decency,” misleading, or “improper.”

None of those reasons makes any sense when considering a license plate that merely says the A-word.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Google uses AI to help diagnose breast cancer

By Matt McFarland

Google announced Friday that it has achieved state-of-the-art results in using artificial intelligence to identify breast cancer. The findings are a reminder of the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, and its potential to improve global health.

Google used a flavor of artificial intelligence called deep learning to analyze thousands of slides of cancer cells provided by a Dutch university. Deep learning is where computers are taught to recognize patterns in huge data sets. It’s very useful for visual tasks, such as looking at a breast cancer biopsy.

With 230,000 new cases of breast cancer every year in the United States, Google (GOOGL, Tech30) hopes its technology will help pathologists better treat patients. The technology isn’t designed to, or capable of, replacing human doctors.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Question of the Week- 03/08/2017

Christine Arena and Jonathan Foley presented a five-point plan for winning the war being waged on science. What are some concrete steps you have taken, or recommend taking, that supports Arena and Foley’s plan? Or perhaps you know of a sixth recommendation that they didn’t think of! Let’s hear about it.

Our favorite answer will win a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

Biologists propose to sequence the DNA of all life on Earth

By Elizabeth Pennisi

WASHINGTON, D.C.—When it comes to genome sequencing, visionaries like to throw around big numbers: There’s the UK Biobank, for example, which promises to decipher the genomes of 500,000 individuals, or Iceland’s effort to study the genomes of its entire human population. Yesterday, at a meeting here organized by the Smithsonian Initiative on Biodiversity Genomics and the Shenzhen, China–based sequencing powerhouse BGI, a small group of researchers upped the ante even more, announcing their intent to, eventually, sequence “all life on Earth.”

Their plan, which does not yet have funding dedicated to it specifically but could cost at least several billions of dollars, has been dubbed the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP). Harris Lewin, an evolutionary genomicist at the University of California, Davis, who is part of the group that came up with this vision 2 years ago, says the EBP would take a first step toward its audacious goal by focusing on eukaryotes—the group of organisms that includes all plants, animals, and single-celled organisms such as amoebas.

That strategy, and the EBP’s overall concept, found a receptive audience at BioGenomics2017, a gathering this week of conservationists, evolutionary biologists, systematists, and other biologists interested in applying genomics to their work. “This is a grand idea,” says Oliver Ryder, a conservation biologist at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research in California. “If we really want to understand how life evolved, genome biology is going to be part of that.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Why we pretend to know things, explained by a cognitive scientist

By Sean Illing

Why do people pretend to know things? Why does confidence so often scale with ignorance? Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive science at Brown University, has some compelling answers to these questions.

“We’re biased to preserve our sense of rightness,” he told me, “and we have to be.”

The author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, Sloman’s research focuses on judgment, decision-making, and reasoning. He’s especially interested in what’s called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” This is how cognitive scientists refer to our tendency to overestimate our understanding of how the world works.

We do this, Sloman says, because of our reliance on other minds.

“The decisions we make, the attitudes we form, the judgments we make, depend very much on what other people are thinking,” he said.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

The New Atheists of the Philippines

By Michael French

Among filthy puddles of rainwater in a slum in Alabang, a district just south of the Philippines’ capital city of Manila, a young woman named Jahziel Tayco Ferrer was teaching a science lesson. A group of children sat around her on a cracked basketball court, taking shelter from the fierce midday sun in a gazebo that had been erected as a makeshift classroom. Their lesson that day was about the water cycle—an appropriate subject, I thought, given how many of the slum’s narrow alleyways were still partly flooded from the previous night’s rains.

Educational aid projects like this one are common enough in the Philippines, where more than 26 million people live in poverty. They are, more often than not, run by Christian groups. Ferrer is a rare exception: She’s an atheist.

As one of two women running a community project to provide the children of Alabang with education and food, Ferrer wants to help the local youth—but she also has her own agenda. She’s a volunteer for Humanist Alliance Philippines, International (HAPI), one of three secular organizations trying to gain a foothold in Filipino society. Their weekend “schools” and food programs are part of a concerted effort by atheists to promote secular, humanist values in a society dominated by religion.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

IBM’s online quantum machine gets faster

By Jane Wakefield

IBM has made its quantum computing system commercially available to businesses and beefed up an existing system used by the research community.

The firm is hoping to boost the numbers of people able to use such computers.

The machine, based in New York, has been available via the internet since May last year.

Future applications include the discovery of new materials and medicines as well as making artificial intelligence much more powerful.

Tricky problem

Since the system went online last year, more than 40,000 users have run over 275,000 experiments on it.

While the system it has made publicly available is currently only as powerful as a standard laptop, it is an important first step, said IBM scientist Dr Jerry Chow.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

See the Best Fossil Octopus Ever Found

By Brian Switek

A good cephalopod fossil is hard to find. Although ammonite shells, belemnite guards and other indicators of hard body parts are abundant in the fossil record, paleontologists seldom get to see the characteristic soft-tissue anatomy of these many-armed swimmers. Finds are so rare that one from 1982 still stands out: a 165-million-year-old fossilized octopus uncovered in France.

J. C. Fischer and B. Riou named the eight-armed invertebrate Proteroctopus ribeti and described its suckers to the delight of other paleontologists. But despite its unprecedented level of detail, the fossil looked deflated—an animal preserved as a squished version of its former self. That made it difficult to figure out the particulars of the specimen’s anatomy and how it related to other octopuses. More than three decades later paleontologist Isabelle Kruta of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris and her colleagues have provided more detail about what this emblematic cephalopod looked like when alive. They reconstructed the animal in 3-D using synchrotron microtomography, a high-definition imaging technique.

Reinflated and restored, Proteroctopus most likely falls within a major octopus group called Vampyropoda—which contains the common octopus as well as the vampire “squid.” With the new images, the researchers found that Proteroctopus looked something like today’s deep-sea forms of Vampyropoda—with a few differences. For instance, the ancient specimen has eight arms and a fin sticking out on either side of its body. Proteroctopus also lacks an ink sac, like the modern Vampyroteuthis. But the suckers of this Jurassic invertebrate are obliquely offset from one another rather than occurring side by side as in many extant octopuses. The study was published last fall in Palaeontology.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.