"If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday were unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible; if they think that the ability to write down symbols and read manometers is fair grounds for superiority and pride, and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world — then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room; they live in an Ivory Laboratory more isolated than the poet's tower, and they are a plain menace to the society they belong to. They are a menace whether they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity."
This store surveillance camera captured the strong-arm robbery allegedly committed by Mike Brown; ten minutes later, he was shot and killed by a police officer responding to the robbery.
The following opinion piece, written by a police officer, is getting a lot of attention. I added some links to the referenced incidents, to provide some context.
"Since the shooting of Mike Brown, and the month-plus-long circus that followed, the number of law enforcement officers being shot in the line of duty has skyrocketed, but the average citizen has no idea this is happening.
The national media jumps all over a story where an 18-year-old criminal punk, who shot at a cop, is shot and killed. That criminal is made out to be some sort of victim by many outlets. That story is front-page news all over the country.
Did you know that in just three days last week, six cops were shot in the line of duty, one of whom was killed?
Oct. 7, Chicago: One officer, a captain, is shot in the face and chest. Other officers at the scene take fire and are pinned down by the suspect. [The suspect, wanted in 3 other shootings, was arrested. Another man, who happened to be with the suspect at the time the warrant was served, was killed by police at the scene. It is unclear whether or not he shot at the police. Witnesses say that he didn't. The wounded officer did not require surgery for his injuries.]
Oct. 8, North Las Vegas: An officer is shot during a gunfight with a suspect. [The suspect was shot and killed at the scene.]
Oct. 8, Phoenix: An officer on a traffic stop is shot in the face. The suspects flee; the officer calls for help. Two other officers arrive and start rendering aid, only to come under fire from the suspects who circled back and attacked the responding officers. [A week later, the bad guys have been identified but are still on the loose. UPDATE: They caught them.]
Oct. 8, Oklahoma City: Two officers are shot by a suspect during the same event. [The officers were responding to a reported hostage situation; the woman who was apparently the hostage was shot to death by a suspect who was then shot, but not killed, by an officer.]
Oct. 9, Midland County, Texas: Sgt. Mike Naylor is shot and killed while responding to a report of a sexual assault. [The officer was trying to talk a suspect, wanted for aggravated sexual assault on a child, out of a barricade situation. The suspect, after killing the officer, eventually surrendered. He was unharmed by the arresting officers and has been charged with capital murder.]
Where are those stories in the national news?
What does it say about the media who make a victim out of a criminal, and ignore the good guys being injured and killed trying to keep society safe?"
Well, for one thing, it used to be a whole lot more dangerous to be a cop in the U.S. -- especially when you consider that these are raw totals, not rates -- so the number of killed officers has been decreasing even as the number of police has been increasing.
That was quite a bloodbath during Prohibition and the Depression. And it seems like there was some "rally round the flag" effect during WWII -- or did we just conscript a lot of potential cop killers and turn 'em loose against the Nazis? There was a postwar uptick, but it wasn't until the 1970s (think Taxi Driver and The French Connection and Serpico) that all hell broke loose.
Since then, there seems to have been a steady decline in officer deaths in the line of duty. I'm sure that body armor and airbags have had something to do with it. The proliferation of SWAT teams may also have helped. Emergency medical services and Life Flight helicopters must also be playing a role. There may be more cops being shot but surviving wounds that would have been fatal in the 1970s. Lessons learned on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan could be saving lives in the U.S.
Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you and nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the taxman, yes, I'm the taxman
(That man is rough; now dig this)
Should five per cent appear too small
Just be thankful I don't take it all
(Taxman is something else, isn't he?)
'Cause I'm the taxman, yes, I'm the taxman
(Now dig this)
If you drive a truck, I'll tax the street
If you try to fix it, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk (now this is awful). I'll tax your feet
'Cause I'm the taxman
This is awful
Now don't ask me what it's for
If you don't wanna pay, pay some more
'Cause I'm the taxman, yes, I'm the taxman
(Now dig this)
Now my advice for those who die
(This is awful)
Beware of the pennies on your eyes
'Cause I'm the taxman, yes, I'm the taxman
And you're working for me and no one but me
The taxman is rough
He come and get you any time he wanna
Do you believe he come and get your old lady?
That taxman is a blip
VR Therapy for PTSD looks like something that the Space Marines in Aliens would use. It's not what it seems, though, like EMDR. It might work, but not for any high-tech reason. It's just Prolonged Exposure therapy (PE) in disguise. They suit the patient up, program the computer, and have him talk about the worst day of his life, over, and over, and over again. Just like the protocol for PE. But traditional psychotherapy doesn't require computer nerds or nearly as much electricity.
"On the public-policy front, Ekman’s work helped inspire an immense federal program in American airports called SPOT, for Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques. Costing about $200-million annually—$900-million in all since 2007—the program, run by the Transportation Security Administration, deploys more than 3,000 officers to look for behavioral cues in the faces and body language of airline passengers. Those deemed suspicious are pulled aside and, if they display more signs of duplicity during an interview, are referred to law enforcement.
But Ekman’s lie-detection work has recently taken some hard blows. He has long had academic critics (unmentioned in Blink) who say he has not proved that his behavior-based lie-detection techniques actually work. In November 2013, the Government Accountability Office took things up a notch by recommending that Congress cut the funding of the TSA program. The watchdog agency argued that neitherscholarship in general nor specific analyses of SPOT offered any proof that malign intent could be divined by looking at body language or facial cues.
Plenty of academics share this negative view of SPOT. "I really don’t think the current program at TSA is doing anything to protect us," says Charles R. Honts, a professor of psychology at Boise State University, who has consulted with the Department of Defense on behavioral observation.
This is the rare social-science debate in which lives are at stake. If the GAO is to be believed, a 10-year government investment has been a waste, and possibly a dangerous one, if it provided a false sense of security. Is the science behind the SPOT program so misbegotten that it should be abandoned? Or might it be a promising program with a few flaws? Ekman argues that the GAO failed to consider the most up-to-date and pertinent research on the subject, and that pulling behavioral-detection officers out of airports would amount to "open season for terrorists." But his critics say the world’s most famous lie detector has been stretching the truth a bit himself, offering an exaggerated account of his findings to a credulous press and policy makers."
This would have certainly fit Carl Sagan's definition of "A Celebration of Ignorance."
The U.S. government spends millions on a "spot the terrorist by examining body language" program that doesn't work. Before that, it spent millions on a "combat-harden our soldiers' minds" program that doesn't work. Why is any of this a surprise? For nearly 50 years, the U.S. government has been spending billions a year on a free pre-school for poor children program that doesn't work. Should we blame psychologists such as Paul Ekman and Martin Seligman for lining up at the money-filled troughs?
Aside from incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese women and children and going to the moon and then stopping ingloriously, what has the federal government ever done that worked?
"A Spanish woman has been forced to confess to cheating on her husband-to-be on her hen night with a dwarf stripper after she gave birth to a baby with dwarfism.
Her husband believed the baby was his and that it had been conceived during the honeymoon but his wife confessed to the infidelity after he repeatedly questioned doctors as to how the baby could have been born with dwarfism.
The woman has not been named, but according to local reports she felt compelled to tell her husband after questions were raised by friends who had accompanied her on the hen night, which took place at the beginning of the year."
It seems appropriate to link now to the excellent blogpost by Gene Expression that deflates the urban myth that 30% of all births are cases of "misattributed paternity." In the United States, the actual rate of men raising children whom they believe are their biological offspring but are not, is less than 1% (.08). [Which, of course, means that it happens.]
The crazy 30% rate comes from data from paternity testing firms. Obviously they have a biased sample -- only men who are highly suspicious that the kid they are raising is not theirs would pay for these tests (or appear on the Maury Povich show). And still, these highly suspicious fellows find out that 70% of the time, it actually is their kid.
Here's a link to an excellent explanation of dominant v. recessive genetic inheritance. (Too bad the author didn't read the question closely enough -- the reader is asking about how his kid got dwarfism, not worrying about whether or not his kid could get it. The author assures him that the kid is unlikely to get it -- but he already has it!) This post from The Tech at Stanford explains that most cases of dwarfism are caused by genetic mutations (in either the father's sperm or mother's egg), and not by inheritance as we usually think of it.
