The Daily Show on the anti-vaxxers

Jon Stewart looked at the recent outbreak of diseases that we once thought had been eliminated in the US and some of the reasons given by people behind the trend to not vaccinate children. Potential presidential candidate Rand Paul said the same kinds of things that Michele Bachmann said about vaccination back in 2012, and passed along stories that he had heard about children getting neurological problems from getting the vaccine. She was mercilessly ridiculed for it back then and it will be interesting to see if it will similarly come back to haunt Paul.
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From the “Well, duh!” files

A Utah lawmaker has questioned as to whether having sex with an unconscious person necessarily constitutes rape. He raised this issue during hearings on a bill that removed an ambiguity in current law by clearly stating that it was rape. Prosecutors had said that the existing ambiguity made it difficult to pursue charges in certain cases, and thus made women who had been drugged or intoxicated more reluctant to come forward
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John Kiriakou finally out of prison

Former CIA official John Kiriakou has been released from prison and will serve the remainder of his 30-month sentence under house arrest until May. His crime? Revealing the fact that the US tortured prisoners during the Bush-Cheney era. The Obama administration got him to plead guilty they way they usually do, by piling on charges under the Espionage Act, difficult to defend under, so that he faced the prospect of 45 years in jail and millions of dollars in legal fees.
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Why so few women in philosophy?

In general in US academia, the numbers of women in the arts, social sciences, and the humanities are less than men but not too far from equality. The one exception is philosophy, where the number of women dip dramatically to the level of the sciences.

The reality is that the discipline of philosophy lags far behind other disciplines in the humanities in terms of number of women undergraduate philosophy majors, graduate students, and tenured faculty members. The best numbers indicate that women make up 21% of academic philosophers compared to humanities as a whole where women are 41% of academics. Our numbers are comparable to the physical sciences, where there has been more recent interest and intent to elevate the numbers. Women are 20.6% of academics in the physical sciences and 22.2% of the life sciences.
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Some of the problems diagnosed include the long history of professional male philosophers’ criticisms of women’s rational capacity (Marilyn Friedman), implicit bias and stereotype threat (Jennifer Saul), belief in meritocracy (Fiona Jenkins), difficulty in establishing credibility and authority (Katrina Hutchinson), problematic pedagogy (Catriona Mackenzie and Cynthia Townley), microinequalities (Samantha Brennan), and silencing (Justine McGill). Combine and compound the effects of all these practices, and one has very large systemic problems.

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Using nanometer etching to change surface adhesion properties

What makes a surface attract or repel water that comes in contact with it is usually determined by the chemical coating on the surface. Teflon is an example of a chemical coating to which water adheres only slightly. Those waxes that are put on wood and metal surfaces that cause water to bead up and flow off rather than adhere to the surface are other examples of hydrophobic techniques.
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FCC chair comes out strong for net neutrality

The chair of the Federal Communication Commission Tom Wheeler has come out with what looks like a strong proposal in favor of net neutrality. This a really important development since the cable companies wanted to provide different levels of speed and service to different companies based on their ability to pay, rather than treating them all equally. In other words, the companies could provide the internet equivalent of a superhighway to (say) Netflix or Amazon while this blog gets shunted to a dirt road.
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Vaccination suddenly becomes a major political issue

The recent outbreak in measles cases has become a politically hot topic and brought to the forefront the problematic issue of balancing various rights. Politicians, especially in the Republican party, are having to dance around the issue to avoid stepping on the toes of their various bases of support and in the process have sometimes fallen flat on their faces. So as usual, they are trying to muddy the issue by blurring the lines between some fairly clear positions.
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Huckabee’s smarminess

The odious Mike Huckabee is continuing to make the rounds of interviews and trying to have it both ways on homosexuality. He seems to think that by smiling a lot and acting all folksy and telling people that he has gay friends, he can hide the fact that he is a hateful religious bigot who strenuously opposes giving equal rights (such as marriage) to the LGBT community.
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A pathetic response to Stephen Fry’s castigation of god

Stephen Fry’s recent lambasting in a widely-viewed televised interview of god as an “evil, capricious, monstrous, maniac” because of the fact that the world he supposedly created has all manner of evils (as one example he mentioned an insect that makes children blind by burrowing in their eyes) was bound to elicit responses from god-apologists.
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