Sometime soon, a lab mouse could wake up thinking he had snuggled up to a girl mouse the night before. But he hadn’t. The memory would be fake.
Scientists have successfully implanted a false memory into a mouse’s brain — a seemingly far-fetched idea reminiscent of a science fiction film.
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“If mice had Hollywood, this would be ‘Inception’ for them,” said one of the lead researchers, MIT neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, whose study was published online Thursday in the journal Science.
Ramirez and his colleagues tagged brain cells associated with a specific memory and then tweaked that memory to make the mouse believe something had happened when it hadn’t.
Do These Studies Explain the “Success” of Many of Those in the 1%?
And all along we were taught to believe that poor people are the most unethical.
Abstract:
Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals
were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study3), take valued goods from mothers (study4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
As I head off to a rally for Trayvon Martin, I notice a column by Bob Koehler in which he says the unpaid work of slaves in the United States is now estimated at $1.4 trillion. Oddly, that's not terribly far from the $1.2 trillion or so, possibly more now, that we spend each year preparing for and fighting wars. If we abolished war we could perhaps afford to compensate descendants of those victimized by slavery. If we abolished prisons, we'd have at least another $100 billion. And, of course, we'd have all those savings again the next year and the next year and the next year.
I wrote a review recently of a film called Copperhead, and I brought up the idea of compensated emancipation. Wouldn't it have been wiser, I asked, to have compensated the slave owners than to have fought the Civil War. Since then, a number of readers have been sending me information on the extent to which compensated emancipation was discussed, proposed, or attempted — some of which I was unaware of.
Ethical behavior in the intelligence community is an important consideration. What does the Department of Defense do to assist its personnel in navigating the often-churning waters of day-to-day decision making?
The Department of Defense publishes in Microsoft Word format a compendium of stories about ethical lapses in the Department of Defense and other US government agencies. The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failures is a Department of Defense publication. The 2012 update is located at http://goo.gl/784oP. The case examples range from simple fraud to bizarre exchanges of inside information for “personal” (sexual) services. The Wall Street Journal makes a copy of the 2007 version of the document available at its Web site at http://goo.gl/yJBcF.
You can find a compendium of related publications on the DoD Guidance page. An interesting summary of the “rules” for ethical conduct may be found in Cindy Van Rassen’s Ethics/Professional Responsibility” delivered at the 2012 40th Annual Symposium on Government Acquisition. At the time, Ms. Van Rassen was the Associate General Counsel for the Missile Defense Agency. The PowerPoint presentation was available online on July 22, 2013.
Does the Encyclopedia of Ethical Failures help minimize lapses in judgment? One hopes that the information programs provide a useful function.
In a surprise last minute move, the European Union set forth a strong set of economic sanctions against Israel, leaving that nation both surprised and reeling.
The sanctions, stimulated by what the EU refers to as “Israeli intransigence” regarding peace talks with the Palestinians, cover all financial dealings, loans, awards, transfer of “instruments” and severely limiting economic cooperation between Israel and all EU member nations starting in 2014.
The sanctions are against any Israeli “economic activity,” not just within what has been referred to as the “occupied territories” but broad areas of Israel that had been designated for the establishment of an “Arab State” in 1949.
U.S. whistleblower and international hero Bradley Manning has just been awarded the 2013 Sean MacBride Peace Award by the International Peace Bureau, itself a former recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, for which Manning is a nominee this year.
A petition supporting Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize has gathered 88,000 sinatures, many of them with comments, and is aiming for 100,000 before delivering it to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo. Anyone can sign and add their comments at ManningNobel.org
