Word: particular
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...face, depending on the symbol he had chosen. All men were equally good at learning to pick the symbols that won them a smiley face, but some men were worse than others at avoiding the ones that resulted in sad faces. Those men, it turns out, had a particular gene variant, or allele, that reduces the density of receptors for dopamine - a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in motivation, pleasure and addiction - in certain areas of the brain. Brain scans also showed significantly less activity in those areas in response to the sad-faced negative feedback...
Like most scientific studies, the Science paper highlights what researchers don't yet know: the interplay of genes, dopamine and the process of learning is still mostly a mystery, and researchers are hesitant to guess how this particular genotype really affects any given individual - or that having it would even be a bad thing. "Under certain circumstances it might be positive [for a person] to ignore negative feedback and to persevere," says Ullsperger. Soldiering on in the face of setbacks, after all, is a key ingredient for success. In the end, these new findings may well be one of many...
Another question: Why are you so upset about this particular form of lawbreaking? After all, there are lots of laws, not all of them enforced with vigor. The suspicion naturally arises that the illegality is not what bothers you. What bothers you is the immigration. There is an easy way to test this. Reducing illegal immigration is hard, but increasing legal immigration would be easy. If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about�doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate...
...this specific brand of advocacy. Yet those that were the targets of student activism are now supposed to study and stoke it. This is not only ironic but impractical—a University’s job is to educate and cultivate students, not force them along a particular path with that education. If administrators really want to serve students and engage them politically, they would do best to focus on improving Harvard’s lagging academics and the student experience instead of trying to get students to protest...
...calls for a national boycott. Widely considered to be the antithesis to the über-Christian C.S. Lewis’s tales of Narnia, Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is filled with veiled denunciations of religion (and Catholicism in particular). In the books, the very epitome of evil is the Magisterium, an organization that mirrors the Catholic Church in its hierarchy and dogmatism...