The obesity conundrum

America seems to be obsessed with the issue of obesity. Hardly a week goes by without this being mentioned as a serious public health crisis and that urgent measures need to be adopted to combat it. One can hardly blame people who do not fit into the perceived body-size norm for feeling beleaguered by society’s pressures and feeling that they have to take all manner of measures, even extreme ones, to try and lose weight. But as I wrote last year, there a lot of myths surrounding weight and weight loss that work against the idea that losing weight and keeping it off is a straightforward matter.
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Computer passes Turing test for the first time?

[UPDATE: Other computer scientists are saying that the computer actually failed the test, and badly.]

People who have interacted with Siri, the helpful guide on the iPhone, are usually impressed with her ability to carry on what seems like a normal conversation. But it is not hard to discover that you are talking to a computer. How good would ‘she’ have to be to completely fool you?
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How a dishwasher works

A dishwasher is the most mysterious domestic appliance. You shut the door, turn it on, hear the sounds of sloshing water, and the dishes appear clean. I had assumed that it was something like a clothes washing machine in that it filled the container with water and then churned it around. But I noticed that our new dishwasher seemed to go into the sloshing sound mode pretty quickly, long before there would be time to fill the volume. So I was glad to come across this video where someone had placed a camera inside the dishwasher to reveal its secrets.
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The conjunction fallacy

Rob Brooks asks you to take a pop quiz:

When Jack was young, he began inflicting harm on animals. It started with just pulling the wings off flies, but eventually progressed to torturing squirrels and stray cats in his neighbourhood.

As an adult, Jack found that he did not get much thrill from harming animals, so he began hurting people instead. He has killed 5 homeless people that he abducted from poor neighbourhoods in his home city. Their dismembered bodies are currently buried in his basement.

Now, knowing what I have just told you about Jack, is it more probable that Jack is: A) A teacher. Or B) A teacher who does not believe in God?

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Co-ed lab rats

It is quite odd how some things that should be obvious are not so purely because tradition has deadened our sensibility. For example, it has long been standard practice for medical research on animals to use only male specimens since it was argued that the presence of female hormones would add another uncontrollable variable in the testing. This seemed reasonable enough that it was uncontroversial until people started finding that when the resulting medicines were used on women, unexpected things happened. The National Institutes of Health now demands that all testing be done on both males and females, something that seems glaringly obvious now.
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