In 2000, in a Texas prison, a corrections officer was sexually harassing Garrett Cunningham, touching him inappropriately during pat searches and making crude comments. Cunningham, as he told the commission, complained to prison authorities, but they told him that he was exaggerating, and that the officer was just doing his job. Soon after, the officer handcuffed Cunningham, pushed his face into a pile of laundry, and raped him. Cunningham weighed 145 pounds; the officer more than twice that. He said that if Cunningham ever tried to report the rape, he would have other officers write false charges against him, or else transfer him to a rougher unit where he would be raped by gang members “all the time.” Then he told Cunningham that the officials he had complained to previously were friends of his who would always take his side.

[...]

When Laura Berry told the Arkansas corrections officer who had raped her that she thought she might be pregnant, he forced her, according to the commission’s findings, to drink turpentine and quinine, hoping that would induce an abortion. After Kenneth Young was raped at knifepoint by a cellmate in Pennsylvania, he flooded the cell to attract the attention of officers, and as punishment was put in a “dry cell” for ninety-six hours, with no access to running water, a shower, or a toilet—forced “to live in his own excrement,” as a court later put it. Alisha Brewer told our organization, JDI, that she was raped by three different corrections officers as a twenty-two-year-old prisoner in Kentucky; she reported the last two incidents, and was punished with more than four months of punitive segregation and loss of sixty days of good time on her sentence.[9] Another prisoner who wrote to us, and who for obvious reasons prefers to remain anonymous, quoted the male officer who was abusing her: “Remember if you tell anyone anything, you’ll have to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life.” We get letters like this every day.

The piece also documents the opposition from correctional authorities and related associations to reform recommended by a committee that included them.

Rachel Corrie relatives sue Israel over her death

A court case brought by the family of Rachel Corrie, a US protester killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003, has begun in Israel.

At this very moment, a dozen boats in the town of Taiji, Japan, are heading out and rounding up hundreds of dolphins in a secluded cove. The fisherman will close off the cove with nets, and with the help of employees from various dolphinariums, they will try to find the next “Flipper” among their catch. The fishermen will snatch these beautiful creatures from their natural habitats, hoist them into nets, load them onto airplanes and drop them into a cement tank in the middle of Turkey, Korea or other nearby Asian countries.

In some ways, these animals are the lucky ones. These dolphins escaped the fate of many of their pod mates, who are brutally slaughtered with primitive harpoons — turning the cove into a scene straight from Melville’s “Moby Dick.”

Marching in the drizzle against wars in far-off countries, writing letters protesting the government’s latest reactionary policy, sitting through interminable meetings that keep sprouting Any Other Business. It may be noble, but political activism is hardly a barrel of laughs. And yet it makes you happier.

So find two university psychologists in new research that looks for the first time at the link between political activity and wellbeing. Malte Klar and Tim Kasser started by interviewing two sets of around 350 college students, both about their degree of political engagement and their levels of happiness and optimism. Both times, they found that those most inclined to go on a demo were also the cheeriest.

So there’s a link – but can politics actually make a person happier? In the third study, the academics took a bunch of students and divided them up into groups. The first were encouraged to write to the management of the college cafeteria asking for tastier food. The next lot wrote asking the cafe to source local or Fairtrade products. They were then tested on their wellbeing, and the group who had involved themselves in the political debate were far and away the strongest on the “vitality” scale: they felt more alive and enriched than those who merely complained about the menu.

(from Spiegel)

(source: izismile.com)

A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes – or a large forest’s worth – of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say.

Perhaps this might convince those on the Left, who feel forced to reason from “self-interest” alone, that anti-whaling is a good idea.

Remember that Fodor accepts evolutionary history; what he denies is that there is a theory or a science. So he accepts that some traits caused greater reproductive success, and even that there is a sense in which this fact explained why those traits became prevalent. What Fodor disputes is the mechanism: Darwinism, Fodor claims, has it that traits that would cause greater success are selected for — this is meant to explain why they became prevalent. And he has some pretty compelling arguments against this idea.

Now maybe Block and Kitcher are dancing around the claim that this is a mischaracterization of the commitments of Darwinism. I suspect that that critique might be right. But the way to evaluate it is to look at the details of how claims about selection are used in evolutionary biology. And anyway, they don’t say that that’s what they’re doing. They say that Fodor is committing to denying natural causation. And this just strikes me as way off.

I remember feeling that in the first series of responses to Fodor’s LRB article, penned primarily by biologists (but also by philosophers including Kitcher), were altogether missing Fodor’s point. That is not the case with this review.

Stereotypes are usually the last thing to change in the face of contradictory evidence. A case in point is the long held belief that boys are better at mathematics than girls.  

  Well a meta-analysis to be published in the journal Psychological Bulletin can be added to the pile of evidence that finds no significant gender difference in mathematical ability.