Terry Schiavo Euthanasia Case
Has anyone been following this story? It's probably going to be the biggest ethics case this year. Go to cnn.com for the latest. What's your take on the issue?
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Has anyone been following this story? It's probably going to be the biggest ethics case this year. Go to cnn.com for the latest. What's your take on the issue?
While we're being political, was the war in Iraq the result of top-down processing failures during the search for WMDs?
The other day I was looking for my retractable tape measure. It's yellow and is about the size of a deck of cards. So, I set out to look for these features. Scanning through the flotsam of toys that is our living room, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw an object that appeared to be my tape measure. As I moved forward, it turned out to be a yellow piece of a toy the same size.
Is this what happened as intelligence agencies looked for evidence of WMDs via sattelite photos -- essentially a complex visual search task? They were looking for and or wanted to find these WMDs, and so any visual evidence (pipes, laboratories, etc.) were falsely identified because of top-down goal settings. Maybe this is stating the obvious, but I thought it was an interesting application of cognition. What do you think?
We've all seen the instances in this current war of the execution of hostages by terrorists in Iraq. In the last few days, Italy negotiated the release (by paying a ransom) of one of their journalists who was being held hostage -- this is the one who came under fire from American troops while trying to exit the country.
America, some time ago, made the decision not to negotiate with hostage takers under any circumstance -- that is, they will not pay to have hostages released. Given what you now know about behaviorist principles of operant learning, is this a good decision?