Neurological Basis for Lack of Empathy in Psychopaths
By (ScienceDaily)
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When individuals with psychopathy imagine others in pain, brain areas necessary for feeling empathy and concern for others fail to become active and be connected to other important regions involved in affective processing and decision-making, reports a study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. Previous research indicates that the rate of psychopathy in prisons is around 23%, greater than the average population which is around 1%.
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When highly psychopathic participants imagined pain to themselves, they showed a typical neural response within the brain regions involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and the right amygdala. The increase in brain activity in these regions was unusually pronounced, suggesting that psychopathic people are sensitive to the thought of pain.
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Taken together, this atypical pattern of activation and effective connectivity associated with perspective taking manipulations may inform intervention programs in a domain where therapeutic pessimism is more the rule than the exception. Altered connectivity may constitute novel targets for intervention. Imagining oneself in pain or in distress may trigger a stronger affective reaction than imagining what another person would feel, and this could be used with some psychopaths in cognitive-behavior therapies as a kick-starting technique, write the authors.
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Leading climate change scientist brands sceptics 'irrational'
By Fiona Harvey
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Climate change sceptics who claim the dangers of global warming are small and far-off are "unscientific" and "irrational", and should not dissuade governments from tackling rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions, the author of the world's landmark review of economics and climate change said.
Lord Nicolas Stern told the Guardian: "It is astonishing, irrational and unscientific to suggest the risks are small. How can they say they know the risks are small? The clear conclusion from 200 years of climate science and observations show a strong association between carbon dioxide rises and global surface temperature.
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He said many economists had misread the impacts of future warming because their risk models were not good at taking this into account. He added that the effects of any delay in reducing greenhouse gases were of key concern, because delay means greater emissions and these will continue to wreak effects on the climate system long after the gases were first poured into the atmosphere.
"If delay did not matter, then we might have time to wait (before tackling emissions) but delay is dangerous, because of the effect on higher emissions," he said. Infrastructure, such as new fossil fuel power plants, buildings and transport networks would continue to require large volumes of fossil fuels, and building such fossil-fuel dependent new infrastructure now commits the world to higher emissions for decades to come.
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Myron Ebell, of the US Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Guardian: "Global warming, although it may become a problem some decades in the future, is not a crisis and is highly unlikely to become a crisis.
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The whitewashing of the environmental movement
By Katie Valentine
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The traditional environmental movement has a diversity problem.
That’s according to Van Jones, founder of Green for All and environmental and civil rights advocate. But Jones says it’s not just that the staffs of many large, mainstream environmental organizations have been historically mostly white – it’s that most of the smaller environmental justice groups are getting a fraction of the funding that the big groups receive.
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These environmental justice groups work on a smaller scale than the major mainstream groups like the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund – they’re groups like the Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles and West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT) in New York City, groups that are working towards improving the environmental health of their communities. Danielle Deane, Energy and Environment Program Director at the Joint Center, said the groups don’t always get the credit they deserve for their support of environmental issues.
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Jones said diversifying the donor lists of foundations that usually give to environmental groups would help black Americans in particular make their voices heard in the environmental movement. Polls show that, as a group, black Americans support environmental and climate change specific regulations as much or more than white Americans do. A 2010 poll [PDF] from the Joint Center found black Americans in four swing states supported action on climate change and a solid majority of respondents said they wanted the U.S. Senate to pass legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions before the 2012 election. The poll also found a majority of respondents said they would be willing to pay up to $10 per month more in electric rates if the extra charge if it meant climate change was being addressed, and more than 25 percent said they would pay an additional $25 per month.
A Yale poll [PDF] from 2010 yielded similar results: it found Hispanics, African Americans, and people of other races and ethnicities were “often the strongest supporters of climate and energy policies and were also more likely to support these policies even if they incurred greater cost.” It also found 89 percent of black respondents said they would strongly or somewhat support regulating carbon as a pollutant, compared to 78 percent of white Americans.
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YouTube Comments Will Soon Be Less Racist, Homophobic, and Confusing
By Brent Rose
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Right now, the way comments work on YouTube is that the last rando person who said anything is featured up toward the top. This person didn't necessarily say anything insightful, useful, or even intelligible. So why feature them? The new system will use algorithms to determine the people you most likely want to see up top. That includes comments from your friends, from the video creator, and from “popular personalities” (i.e. celebs of one type or another).
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The new conversation platform isn't actually powered by YouTube. It's powered by Google+. This actually makes a fair amount of sense. After all, maybe you want to put a comment on a video that your friends or followers can see, but you don't feel like being screamed at for your opinions by a bunch of anonymous internet trolls. When you comment on a YouTube video you'll be able to decide if you want it to be public, only visible to people within your Circles, or even just to specific people of your choosing. This will also enable content creators to start conversations that only their fans (or paying subscribers) can see, if they so desire.
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With filters, content creators will not only be able to assign people to an Approved list or a Blocked list (which will auto-approve or auto-reject comments, respectively), but they will be able to add keywords to a Blacklist. This will flag comments that contain those words (or words closely resembling them) and send them into a sort of limbo, where the content creator can go through and approve later, if they so desire. One might filter words commonly associated with hate-speech, or the word “spoiler,” or “stupid,” and so on.
Now, idiots are very good at intentionally misspelling horrible words to get them through filters, so we'll see how good YouTube's filters are are catching the variations, but really, anything that reduces the amount of intolerant and/or cruel jackassery on the internet is a good thing.
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Empty F-16 jet tested by Boeing and US Air Force
By Leo Kelion
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Boeing has revealed that it has retrofitted retired fighter jets to turn them into drones.
It said that one of the Lockheed Martin F-16 made a first flight with an empty cockpit last week.
Two US Air Force pilots controlled the plane from the ground as it flew from a Florida base to the Gulf of Mexico.
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The firm added that the flight attained 7Gs of acceleration but was capable of carrying out manoeuvres at 9Gs - something that might cause physical problems for a pilot.
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Boeing said that it had a total of six modified F-16s, which have been renamed QF-16s, and that the US military now planned to use some of them in live fire tests.
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Former pope denies covering up sexual abuse
By (Al Jazeera)
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Former Pope Benedict has denied that he tried to cover up sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests, in his first direct published comments since he stepped down in February.
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Victims groups have accused Benedict of not doing enough to stop the abuse of children by priests while he was pope and before when he was head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) rejected his assertion.
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"As head of CDF, thousands of cases of predator priests crossed his desk. Did he choose to warn families or call police about even one of those dangerous clerics? No. That, by definition, is a cover up," the SNAP statement said.
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