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Although politics at the elite level has been polarized for some time, a scholarly controversy has raged over whether ordinary Americans are polarized. This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews – what guides people's view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in what Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe as authoritarianism. They show that differences of opinion concerning the most provocative issues on the contemporary issue agenda – about race, gay marriage, illegal immigration, and the use of force to resolve security problems – reflect differences in individuals’ levels of authoritarianism. This makes authoritarianism an especially compelling explanation of contemporary American politics. Events and strategic political decisions have conspired to make all these considerations more salient. - Todd Suomela

Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience. - Todd Suomela

In this important book, one of our boldest and most original thinkers charges that conventional explanations of poverty are mistaken, and that the anti-poverty policies built upon them are doomed to fail. Using science, history, fables, philosophical analysis, and common observation, Charles Karelis engages us and takes us to a deeper grasp of the link between consumption and satisfaction—and from there to a new and persuasive explanation of what keeps poor people poor. Above all, he shows how this fresh perspective can reinspire the long-stalled campaign against poverty. - Todd Suomela

Two Centuries of Darwin is the outgrowth of an Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences on January 16-17, 2009. In the chapters of this book, leading evolutionary biologists and science historians reflect upon and commemorate the Darwinian Revolution. They canvass modern research approaches and current scientific thought on each of the three main categories of selection (natural, artificial, and sexual) that Darwin addressed during his career. Although Darwin's legacy is associated primarily with the illumination of natural selection in The Origin, he also contemplated and wrote extensively about what we now term artificial selection and sexual selection. In a concluding section of this book, several science historians comment on Darwin's seminal contributions. - Todd Suomela

The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views, carried out in November 2009. The Survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students. The PhilPapers Metasurvey was a concurrent survey of professional philosophers and other concerning their predictions of the results of the Survey. The Metasurvey was taken by 727 respondents including 438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy graduate students. - Todd Suomela

This page is a catalogue that will be kept up to date pointing to selected sources of code and data related to climate science. - Todd Suomela

In the Uncertain Future, we let you input the full range of your uncertainties — and we show you the distribution over futures that your current, uncertain beliefs imply. We help you create your own picture of the uncertain future. - Todd Suomela

Philosophy & Theory in Biology (P&TB) is a peer-reviewed open-access online journal that brings together philosophers of science and theoretically inclined biologists to interact across disciplinary boundaries - Todd Suomela

Competition, therefore, is not the crux of the problem. The crux of the problem is profit-seeking and power-seeking. Without these elements, competition ensures that the workers act in the direction of general welfare (the so-called “invisible hand”). But when they are not removed, they ensure that competition steers economic activity towards those avenues which bring the most money and power in, regardless of them being peaceful or coercive, honest or dishonest. And the bigger the economic agents, or the bigger the outside sources of money and power, the less incentive they have to be peaceful and honest. - Todd Suomela

I am a novelist, (and a poet), who takes philosophy very seriously. That is to say, the study and examination of ideas, both in their genetic history, and in their contemporary creation, is central to my process of writing fiction and poem. The narrative, the description is exprimit out of this (to make a grammatical conflation). So these pages are a collection of my studies which began from out of a love of Deleuze and Guattari, I would say, though my debt to philosophy is much, much older. - Todd Suomela

Daniel Dennett is a brilliant and flashy writer, but his brilliance borders on sophistry. (In this regard, he is like Richard Rorty, another writer who knows how to sell books.) As John Searle rightly complains, he is not above "bully[ing] the reader with abusive language and rhetorical questions. . . ." (The Mystery of Consciousness, p. 115) An excellent example of this is the way Dennett dismisses substance dualism in the philosophy of mind. - Todd Suomela

Choice & Inference provides a platform for dialogue and news within the fields of formal epistemology and decision theory, broadly construed. Topics include (but are not limited to) uncertain and ampliative inference, frequentist statistics and modeling, coherence, paradoxes of belief and / or action, belief revision, disagreement and consensus, causal discovery, epistemology of religion, etc. And the formal tools used to pursue questions within these topics include (but are not limited to) game theory and decision theory, formal learning theory, probability theory and statistics, networks and graphs, and formal logic. - Todd Suomela

But as the great majority of faculty members learn--quickly or slowly depending on where they end up--the opportunity to do important science and gain major recognition only ever exists for a relative few--overwhelmingly those educated and employed at the most prestigious universities. The real issue in the distribution of recognition and prestige, Hermanowicz's meticulous research shows, is not the ability or drive of individual scientists but, to paraphrase the book's subtitle, "how institutions shape careers." - Todd Suomela

We might think of these as styles of sociological thinking.  One emphasizes the ordinariness of the phenomena, and looks at the chief challenges of sociology as embracing the tasks of description, classification, and explanation.  The other highlights the inherent obscurity of the social world, and conceives of sociology as an exercise in philosophical theory, involving the work of presenting, clarifying and critiquing texts and abstract philosophical ideas as well as specific social circumstances. - Todd Suomela

There are both benefits and drawbacks to creativity. In a social group it is not necessary for all members to be creative to benefit from creativity; some merely imitate or enjoy the fruits of others' creative efforts. What proportion should be creative? This paper contains a very preliminary investigation of this question carried out using a computer model of cultural evolution referred to as EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture)....For all levels or creativity, the diversity of ideas in a population is positively correlated with the ratio of creative agents. - Todd Suomela

Mission to Learn is a destination for lifelong learners in a hyper-connected, information-overloaded world. My view is that learning is not just about courses, or schools, or teachers. In fact, I’m not all that concerned here with formal education or professional development. Learning happens everywhere, all the time, and the Web has exploded the possibilities for all of us – as individuals, as organizations, as a society – to reach our full potential through lifelong learning. - Todd Suomela

Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age examines the consequences of the changes affecting research data with respect to three issues - integrity, accessibility, and stewardship-and finds a need for a new approach to the design and the management of research projects. The report recommends that all researchers receive appropriate training in the management of research data, and calls on researchers to make all research data, methods, and other information underlying results publicly accessible in a timely manner. The book also sees the stewardship of research data as a critical long-term task for the research enterprise and its stakeholders. Individual researchers, research institutions, research sponsors, professional societies, and journals involved in scientific, engineering, and medical research will find this book an essential guide to the principles affecting research data in the digital age. - Todd Suomela

Explore the combined collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center through hundreds of new features in ArtsConnectEd. Search over 100,000 resources in the Art Finder, including works of art, texts, audio, video, and interactive resources. Save and customize items in the redesigned Art Collector. Comment, tag and rate everything! - Todd Suomela

The distance puzzle is the surprising finding that the volume of trade has become increasingly sensitive to distance. This column shows that low-income countries, which increasingly trade with geographically closer partners, drive the finding. This regionalisation of trade for low-income countries may reflect progress – or problems. - Todd Suomela

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong. - Todd Suomela

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material... more... - Todd Suomela

Compensation, status, and press coverage of managers in the United States follow a highly skewed distribution: a small number of “superstars” enjoy the bulk of the rewards. We evaluate the impact of CEOs achieving superstar status on the performance of their firms, using prestigious business awards to measure shocks to CEO status. We find that award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, both relative to their prior performance and relative to a matched sample of non-winning CEOs. At the same time, they extract more compensation following the awards, both in absolute amounts and relative to other top executives in their firms. They also spend more time on public and private activities outside their companies, such as assuming board seats or writing books. The incidence of earnings management increases after winning awards. The effects are strongest in firms with weak corporate governance. - Todd Suomela

In his Reality Sandwich remarks, Davis wondered “what is gained by... believing that the wizards of a rather bloody jungle culture foretold our moment of rising C02 levels and suicide bombers.” Point taken. Premonitions of the End of Days and prophecies of a Space Odyssey-like leap in species consciousness, in 2012, are just the same old bedtime story -- a story we never seem to tire of hearing, about the moment (forever forestalled) when there will be “wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below,” as the Book of Acts has it -- when the sun will go dark and the moon will turn blood red and time shall be no more. The environmental crises and geopolitical pathologies of our times -- “rising C02 levels and suicide bombers” and the sufferings of the wretched of the Earth, like the Guatemalan Maya -- demand that we step up to our social responsibilities and engage passionately with the issues of our age. - Todd Suomela

This page contains links to some of the most useful free software and open-source software for operations research and industrial engineering. - Todd Suomela

The right combination of money and policies can make real progress in reducing the time to degree for earning humanities doctorates, but the six-year humanities Ph.D. is probably not in the cards. Those are among the key findings of one of the most ambitious efforts ever to reform the humanities Ph.D., as discussed in one of the most thorough (and frank) evaluations of such an effort. The reform effort was the Graduate Education Initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which spent about $85 million over a 10-year period on both financial aid and other enhancements at 54 doctoral departments at 10 leading research universities. Extensive follow-up explored not only the reasons that students succeeded or failed, sped through (or what passes for speeding through in a humanities Ph.D.) or languished, but also what happened to them after they left -- with or without a Ph.D. in hand. - Todd Suomela

Astrobiology, International Journal of Astrobiology, and Origins of Life.  In the process I’ve become converted to a more expansive version panspermia – life here probably originated outside our solar system. I’ve also learned: panspermia is no longer a marginalized view.  It may not yet be the majority opinion, but it shows up often in journal articles and conference proceedings, if not in summaries intended for wider audiences. - Todd Suomela

Do innovative products promote growth by increasing market efficiency? If we were in an Arrow-Debreu world, the answer would be yes, since these products will help span that space of the states of nature. But the incentives behind innovation move in the other direction. The objective in the design and marketing of innovative products is not market efficiency, but profitability for the banks. And market efficiency is the bane of profitability. - Todd Suomela

a group of eight bloggers who attended a discussion with "senior Treasury officials" in Washington. Several nice accounts of that meeting have already been posted (see roundup below). - Todd Suomela

"Next-generation projects will ori­ent to infill, urbanizing suburbs, and transit-oriented develop­ment. Smaller housing units-close to mass transit, work, and 24-hour amenities-gain favor over large houses on big lots at the suburban edge. People will continue to seek greater convenience and want to reduce energy expenses. Shorter commutes and smaller heating bills make up for higher infill real estate costs." - Todd Suomela

Over the last quarter century, the unionized workforce has changed dramatically, according to this new CEPR report. In 2008, union workers reflected trends in the workforce as a whole toward a greater share of women, Latinos, Asian Pacific Americans, older, more-educated workers, and a shift out of manufacturing toward services. - Todd Suomela

From the data Steuerle presents, we can calculate that within just five or six years, the average middle-class family will have to devote nearly one-third of its income to health care costs. That’s right: one-third. According to the CBO, the average family will earn $54,000 a year in 2016, when a moderate-priced family policy will cost $14,700. - Todd Suomela