Wednesday, October 10th, 2012
BEN FEARNOW, - WTIC - CBS Connecticut
Stephan: I suggest you read this report in this context. It is the latest data on the trend of the great schism that is occurring in the U.S. We are becoming two countries based on two very different conceptions of how the world works and on what values it should be based.
WASHINGTON — One-fifth of American adults have no religious affiliation, and this number is increasing rapidly.
The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a fast pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.
In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15 percent to just under 20 percent of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6 percent of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation (14 percent).
This large and growing group of Americans is less religious than the public at large on many conventional measures, including frequency of attendance at religious services and the degree of importance they attach to religion in their lives.
But the survey may be affected by a differing view of the words ‘religion
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Monday, October 8th, 2012
ALLISON YARROW, Assignment Editor and Staff Writer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast - The Daily Beast
Stephan: I have maintained for some years that you can tell the political leanings of most people on television just by looking at them with the sound turned off. In my view, for example, Republican women all tend to look like they have been lacquered after plastic surgery. The academic research in support of this view is now being published.
They’re calling it the Michele Bachmann effect. And no, it’s not the Minnesota congresswoman’s crusade to ban falafel from public schools. It refers to the relationship between a woman’s politics and her face.
Women politicians with ‘stereotypical feminine facial features
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Monday, October 8th, 2012
NEIL GERSHENFELD, - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: There is an enormous change in the nature of manufacturing going on, in which data can become a thing, and a thing can become data. It is going to fundamentally change the nature of society, permitting some small communities to thrive, while destroying the livelihood and infrastructure of others. On balance it is a positive trend, if thought is given as to how to prepare for this transition.
Neil Gershenfeld is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the head of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms.
A new digital revolution is coming, this time in fabrication. It draws on the same insights that led to the earlier digitizations of communication and computation, but now what is being programmed is the physical world rather than the virtual one. Digital fabrication will allow individuals to design and produce tangible objects on demand, wherever and whenever they need them. Widespread access to these technologies will challenge traditional models of business, aid, and education.
The roots of the revolution date back to 1952, when researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wired an early digital computer to a milling machine, creating the first numerically controlled machine tool. By using a computer program instead of a machinist to turn the screws that moved the metal stock, the researchers were able to produce aircraft components with shapes that were more complex than could be made by hand. From that first revolving end mill, all sorts of cutting tools have been mounted on computer-controlled platforms, including jets of water carrying abrasives that can cut through hard materials, lasers that can quickly carve fine features, and slender electrically charged wires that can make long thin cuts.
Today, numerically controlled machines touch almost every commercial […]
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Monday, October 8th, 2012
Eric W. Dolan, - The Raw Story
Stephan: It is in the nature of the American culture to not discuss religious beliefs or to impede in anyway anything done under the guise of religion. This was not what the Founders intended. Religion is not a free pass, and we are under assault by the fundamentalist Christians, preachers and laity, who make up the Theocratic Right. In a very real sense the only difference between these people and the Afghani Taliban is their choice of clothing. If you don't speak out against this, don't be surprised to discover your children are by intention being made willfully ignorant, and your daughters reduced to second class status. I am continually amazed at the passivity of the mass in this country.
Secular and science groups have urged the Ohio Supreme Court to rule against John Freshwater, an eighth-grade science teacher who was fired for teaching creationism instead of evolution in class.
‘Freshwater’s pedagogy serves no legitimate educational purpose in a public school science class, is scientifically unsound, and serves only impermissibly to advance a sectarian purpose, namely, to teach creationism in its tradition version of ‘creation science’ or its modern incarnation of intelligent design,
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Monday, October 8th, 2012
DENISE GRADY, ANDREW POLLACK, and SABRINA TAVERNISE , - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is the latest sordid story about America's Illness Profit System, and the corruption of regulatory oversight. It is becoming as difficult to know what is in your drugs as it is what is in your food. Think of yourself as an unwilling lab rat in a nationwide study.
Eddie C. Lovelace, a Kentucky judge still on the bench into his late 70s, had a penchant for reciting Shakespeare from memory and telling funny stories in his big, booming voice. But a car accident last spring left him with severe neck pain, and in July and August he sought spinal injections with a steroid medicine for relief.
Instead, Judge Lovelace died in Nashville in September at age 78, one of the first victims in a growing national outbreak of meningitis caused by the very medicine that was supposed to help him. Health officials say they believe it was contaminated with a fungus.
The rising toll - 7 dead, 57 ill and thousands potentially exposed - has cast a harsh light on the loose regulations that legal experts say allowed a company to sell 17,676 vials of an unsafe drug to pain clinics in 23 states. Federal health officials said Friday that all patients injected with the steroid drug made by that company, the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass., which has a troubled history, needed to be tracked down immediately and informed of the danger.
‘This wasn’t some obscure procedure being done in some obscure hospital,
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