Word: progressism
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...spent on scientific research, and hope that the trend toward increasing research will continue. Not only will such research save lives, but it will also provide jobs, spur the economy, and maintain America’s competitive edge in the global community.Overshadowing all other opportunities for substantial progress this year was the financial crisis. Reviving the economy through government spending on education, infrastructure, and healthcare, along with tax cuts, rebates, and unemployment benefits was necessary. Though we were happy that Obama’s stimulus package passed the House of Representatives anyway, we were disappointed that...
...world. It was an exhilarating period leading some to proclaim naively that the insights of string theory would be so sweeping that the end of physics was near. Of course, as more-seasoned observers knew, the end was not near. Even today, while we’ve witnessed stupendous progress and the resolution of problems many thought beyond reach, a final assessment of string theory remains elusive...
This shift in gender ratios may have other, less heralded implications, however. Some of our own work has suggested that this shift may actually shorten men’s lives, reversing some of the historic progress our species has made in recent centuries. Across a range of species, skewed sex ratios result in intensified competition for sexual partners and this induces stress for the supernumerary sex. In humans, it seems, a 5 percent excess of males at the time of sexual maturity shortens the survival of men by about three months in late life, which is a very substantial loss...
Tallying the enemy's dead as a metric of battlefield progress was discredited for a generation in the U.S. military after the Vietnam debacle, but the body-count measurement appears to have been revived by the Army in Afghanistan. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the 101st Airborne Division has been publicizing each enemy death - for a total of nearly 2,000 - over the past 14 months. That news has already renewed the debate over the wisdom of relying on such numbers. "This isn't going to do anything to convince the American public that we're winning...
...notion of charting military progress by counting enemy dead was championed by then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who believed in analyzing all sorts of data to determine how the war was going. The emphasis on those numbers led to some commanders' emphasizing killing over winning and to inflated body counts - which often included counting civilian casualties as enemy dead. "The Army's selection of the body count as its primary metric may not only have contributed to losing the war, but in the end it proved so morally corrosive that it led to a crisis of soul-searching...