New Book Suggests Biases Are Widespread: “Men are better suited for math and science than women. Whites have more positive feelings toward other whites than blacks. The young are preferred over older people.

These are just a few of the biases discussed by social psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Thierry Devos in their article, ‘Implicit Self and Identity’, published in The Self: From Soul to Brain, Volume 1001 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Based on a recent Academy conference, the book offers the latest research from 16 experts in the areas of neuroscience, cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, anthropology, philosophy and theology. Their article is one of many that examine how the neurological aspects of our unconscious selves influence our explicit, psychological, social and spiritual selves.” —New York Academy of Sciences press release

Orang-utans ‘may die out by 2025’: “The orang-utan, Asia’s ‘wild man of the forests’, could disappear in just 20 years, a campaign group believes.

WWF, the global environment network, says in the last century the number of apes fell by 91% in Borneo and Sumatra.

Globally, it says, there were thought to be somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 orang-utans as recently as 1987.

But by 2001 that number had fallen by virtually half, to an estimated 25,000- 30,000 of the animals, more than half of them living outside protected areas.” —BBC

“Millions of harassed workers could have their worst fears confirmed about their bosses thanks to a new test to weed out the ‘corporate psycho’…

Two of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy have developed a new 107-point questionnaire to identify which desks those smooth-talking ‘snakes in suits’ might be hiding behind.” —BBC

Roger L. Simon:

“At the present moment, the Democratic Party seems to be headed over a cliff at ninety miles an hour. With Bush already sitting on extremely high poll numbers and the domestic and foreign situations breaking his way, the Democrats have two of their worst candidates in recent memory in the frontrunner positions—Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. They are particularly bad in the Internet Age.

What, you say, Howard Dean is bad on the Internet? He was and is the master of online fundraising and the first to recognize the power of blogs. Yes, indeed! But that’s only part of the story. And it’s not the more important part. The Internet is the greatest memory device we have ever had. It stores virtually everything for instant access—it’s very difficult to hide what you have said. Bloggers and others will dig it out and force the media to publicize it.

This is exceptionally dangerous for Dean who has defined himself and staked his nomination on being the Most Antiwar Candidate, when, among other things, quite a short time ago he was not. Today we see via Instapundit that Dean wrote a letter to Clinton advocating Milosevic be forcibly removed for humanitarian reasons, something he appears to have rejected for Saddam, even though the Iraqi leader was vastly more awful. Dean even advocated, in the case of Milosevic, going it alone without the United Nations.”

This is the flip side of the issue I discussed in my post below about the liberal hawks’ reconsiderations of their support for the Iraqi invasion. One and all, as the other rationales they supported evaporate, console themselves with the rote line about how we eliminated a heinous genocidal dictator without examining the moral ambiguities of that stance — which genocidal regimes are worst? where does one draw the line between those we are compelled to depose and those we tolerate? how much failure of diplomatic efforts, containment, and international cooperation is enough? how preemptive, as opposed to reactive, can an effort to remove a dictator be and be justified? how unilateral? who gets to decide? Can Dean bring coherent focus and intelligent discussion to these questions, now that he has been ‘outed’ on the issue (if you accept Reynolds’ take on it), and in so doing definitively articulate the differences between his foreign policy and the Bush regime’s?

Yes, that is billion. “The worldwide sale of ring tones, which started as a marketing gimmick for music labels and mobile phone companies, is roughly equivalent to 10 percent of the $32.2 billion global music market.” —CNN

John Brockman poses this year’s question to the luminaries of The Edge community: What’s your law?:

“There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy.

Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law.”

164 respondents to date. Unfortunately, Brockman exhorted his contributors not to be flippant in formulating their laws. This largely excluded the ironic and cynical and with that, IMHO, an important segment of observations about how the universe works.

Nicholas Humphrey

Humphrey’s Law of the Efficacy of Prayer:

In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.

[Think about it.]

… or else. —BBC

First fullscreen high resolution Quicktime VR from Mars. Needs to be seen!