All politicians lie. Some lie more than others. And since we're about populism and demagoguery in politics (quite a timely monthly topic indeed), let's see who are the most lying politicians, particularly presidential candidates, as per the FactCheck and other similar aggregates. What does the Truth-O-Meter have to say?

Source one.

As expected, ( Read more... )

There are so many shootings in the US, with so many victims, that the fact that the police are still wondering whether to treat the latest California massacre as an actual terrorist attack or not, does not appear to be that relevant at this point. We've got to put this in context, so here's some:

Number of people killed annually by firearms in the ( Read more... )

Europe is experiencing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Based on data from the United Nations, here's a clarification of the scale of the crisis.

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For many decades, humanitarian and development aid has been viewed in a very superficial way. Until ten years ago, when a young French researcher named Esther Duflo started a thorough investigation of the problem. She was idealist, tenacious, but also kind of discouraged at first. Because after 40 years of intensive development aid, and more than 3 ( Read more... )

Just to inject some facts into this debate:

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"We create models of reality and then insist that the models are reality. It is not that science, mathematics, and statistics do not provide useful information about the real world. The problem lies in making excessive claims for the validity of these methods and models and believing them to be absolutely certain." - William Byers, PhD ( Read more... )

The answer is YES.

A recent study from Rice University indicates that 15% of scientists at major research universities see science and religion in constant conflict.
They interviewed a scientifically selected sample of 275 participants, pulled from a survey of 2,198 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the natural and social sciences at 21 elite U ( Read more... )

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1957746,00.htmlRead more... )

Food. We all eat it and we all need it to sustain, but the eating habits of Americans have gotten worse.

Gallup published a poll on June 9 that shows declines from the same polling period the previous year. First, here's a graph showing the results from Jan. 2008 to the present time.


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Just a note for those who enjoy the user data:  based on some requests and further thoughts,  I've added data to the spreadsheet I  discussed Thursday.  Updates include:

* tag_user data (quickly find out which tags most often apply to a particular user's posts, this might help mahnmut  with his obsession lists, and which users have been given/have used a ( Read more... )