Culture

Solidarity from Paris. Alvaro

A thousand lashes for Raif Badawi, while the West stays silent on Saudi human rights

By Madawi al-Rasheed, London School of Economics and Political Science

Zehaf-Bibeau, the Islamist convert who recently killed a Canadian military reservist on duty in Ottawa, Canada, represents a type of attacker rarely discussed--a person so obsessed with an overvalued idea that it defines their identity and leads them to commit violence without regard for the consequences. Although it appears that the assailants in Paris had more ties with terrorist organizations, the individuals still fit the description of people acting on overvalued ideas.

Common wisdom and prior economic research suggest that an inventor filing a patent would want to keep the technical know-how secret as long as possible. But a new study of nearly 2 million patents in the United States shows that inventors are not as concerned with secrecy as previously thought. Researchers found that since 2000, most inventors when given the choice opted to disclose information about their patents before patent approval - even small inventors - and this disclosure correlates with more valuable patents.

It isn't that women don't want to work long hours or can't compete in highly selective fields, and it isn't that they are less analytical than men, scholars report about survey results on gender gaps in academia. It appears instead that women are underrepresented in academic fields whose practitioners put a lot of emphasis on the importance of being brilliant - a quality many people assume women lack.

A medical researcher at the University of Warwick has found the 2,500 year-old Pythagoras theorem could be the most effective way to identify the point at which a patient's health begins to improve.

In a new paper, Dr Rob Froud from Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick and Gary Abel from the University of Cambridge made the discovery after looking at data from ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves.

Last week's attacks in Paris, committed in the name of a god, reopen a badly-healed scar in Europe. The world once again turns towards religious fundamentalism. A new study shows that hostility towards other out-groups is not an isolated phenomenon among Muslims living in Europe; but nor is it a synonym of violence. According to the author of the study, Ruud Koopmans, director of the WZB Berlín Social Science Centre (Germany), "Islam is not the problem".

UK doctors subject to complaints procedures are at significant risk of becoming severely depressed and suicidal, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open.

Those referred to the UK professional regulator, the General Medical Council, seem to be most at risk of mental ill health, the findings suggest.

The researchers base their findings on an anonymised online survey of more than 95,000 UK doctors in 2012, all of whom were members of the British Medical Association (BMA).

With controversial headline "This brazen Islam" a French magazine in 2012 claimed Muslims were infiltrating hospitals, cafeterias, swimming pools, schools

By Mayanthi Fernando, University of California, Santa Cruz

Helicopter parenting may not be the best strategy for raising independent kids. But a healthy measure of clinginess and overprotectiveness could actually be advantageous when rearing dogs and cats, according to new research from UC Berkeley and California State University, East Bay.

A Web-based survey of more than 1,000 pet owners nationwide analyzed the key personality traits and nurturing styles of people who identified as a "cat person," a "dog person," "both" or "neither."

that patients admitted to hospital from care homes are commonly dehydrated on admission and consequently appear to experience significantly greater risks of in-hospital mortality.

Old and infirm people are at increased risk of dehydration, especially if they require assistance with drinking and, left to themselves, may not drink enough to avoid dehydration. Dehydration leads to high sodium levels, which can have severe consequences and which are an independent predictor of in-hospital mortality.

A new paper offers an explanation for why women fear face-to-face crime more than men, despite being less likely to experience it. The findings by Laurel Watson from the University of Missouri-Kansas City support the belief that women may have a greater fear of crime due to the potential of also being raped during these encounters. The researchers also found that sexual objectification plays a role in the ever-present perceived risk and fear of crime in women of both European-American and African-American descent.

Sometimes the response to the outbreak of a disease can make things worse -- such as when people panic and flee, potentially spreading the disease to new areas. The ability to anticipate when such overreactions might occur could help public health officials take steps to limit the dangers.

State higher education performance funding is falling short of its intended goals of raising student retention and degree completion rates at community colleges, according to new research published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. The results focused on Washington State's Student Achievement Initiative (SAI)--widely recognized as a model for performance accounting systems in the United States--and are in line with recent results in Tennessee and Pennsylvania indicating that performance funding has not improved retention and graduation rates.

A common claim about getting people to understand one another - or the plights of the handicapped - is to 'walk a mile in their shoes'. But using simulation to walk in the shoes of a person who is blind -- such as wearing a blindfold while performing everyday tasks -- has negative effects on people's perceptions of the visually impaired, according to a new paper.

Among nearly 375,000 U.S. women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, the likelihood of diagnosis at an early stage, and survival after stage I diagnosis, varied by race and ethnicity, with much of the difference accounted for by biological differences, according to a study.