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"Happily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newtonâs later life â his career as a criminal investigator. Not really âP.I.â, as Newton was acting in his capacity as a government official, the Warden of the Mint. The story is closer to something from Law and Order or CSI â remarkably close, in fact. "
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"As a hiring manager, I literally don’t know what to do with [the Ricci decision]. I’m compelled by law to ferret out disparate impact, but forbidden by law from doing anything about it. Pre-emptive compliance with disparate impact will fail to meet the "strong basis" standard, since I can’t prove I’d lose a lawsuit until I actually lost it. (As Kennedy put it, "[f]ear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions." (p.33) I can’t just be afraid of losing; I have to actually lose.) "
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"[L]egal experts note that one category of case the justices tend to take is a dispute in which the federal appeals courts are coming up with different approaches to the same issue. And for that reason, many advocates for Christian students and advocates for gay students had expected that the Supreme Court this week would agree to resolve a legal dispute involving the anti-bias policies of many public colleges and Christian student groups that want the right to ignore parts of those policies"
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"The cunning of the human mind when presented with only duct tape and chip clips is nothing short of amazing."
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"First, the starting point of the whole article is unwarranted. Where is the evidence that something is wrong with modern science? How do you know that we have too few "revolutionary" scientists and too many "normal" scientists? This lacking basis, incidentally, is the same problem I have with Lee Smolin’s call for more "risky" research. While I am sympathetic to the argument and personally tend to agree, it’s not a scientific statement and anecdotes can’t replace data. How do we know it’s worse today than yesterday? Who determines whether we need more "revolutionary scientists?" Will somebody calculate a percentage? Who? Based on what? And wouldn’t one expect that to depend on the field of research? And on the status of that field?"
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Congratulations to Ed Yong.