U.S.'s Fastest-Growing Religious Group is Apolitical

The New York Times reports that the United States' fastest-growing religious group, Pentecostals, is apolitical. Could the religious right's political involvement lessen if significant numbers adopt join Pentecostal churches?

There's also something to be learned about deliberative democracy from Pentecostals' practice of testimony-giving, by which people of widely varying educational attainment give rich descriptions of their lives. See Lynn Sanders' Against Deliberation (JSTOR) for an argument that rational discourse is an unrealistic expectation of some, and that testimony-giving should be accepted as legitimating dialogue. If memory serves, Iris Marion Young makes a similar argument.
A Sliver of a Storefront, a Faith on the Rise - New York Times

The prevailing image of evangelical Christians in America is one of militant churches and politically ambitious leaders, like the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who have built a national base of like-minded Christians determined to shape public policy, especially on sexual issues.But while Pentecostals strongly oppose abortion and gay marriage, they have a long history of shunning political involvement. Though some notable Pentecostals have run for office — John Ashcroft on the right and the Rev. Al Sharpton on the left — most politicians are seen as agents of the secular world.

“I think Pentecostals realize ultimately their trust is in God and not in politics,� said Loida Martell-Otero, a theology professor at Palmer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. “The people in power have traditionally rendered them powerless.�

National Sovereignty vs. the Entertainment Industry

What happens when national sovereignty violates business interests?

The Local - The Pirate Bay plans to buy island

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to circumvent international copyright laws.The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation', and claims to be outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country.

Logistic Regression with Stata Webcourse

Logistic Regression with Stata Webcourse: Lesson 2 - Logistic Regression with Categorical Predictors

One of the many handy ats.ucla.edu Stata tutorials. It taught me how the xi: command lets you easily control the comparison category in logistic regression with categorical variables; it's much more intuitive for me than the procedure in SPSS.

REWIRING NEUROSCIENCE

REWIRING NEUROSCIENCE

In the early 1990s, our long accepted (cc 1926) understanding of how a nerve encodes and conveys information was unexpectedly overturned by experiments on fast flying bats and insects. Around 1995, we began to realize we no longer knew what neurons actually do.In the decade since, many competing hypotheses have been advanced, suggesting various alternate neural encoding schemes. But the question of how a nerve communicates remains unanswered. It is a huge, gaping hole, at the most basic level, in our understanding of how the nervous system works.

This blog is about what would happen if, as a thought experiment, we were to rewire the human nervous system using a multichannel neuron. It explores the impact of this hypothetical "smarter" neuron on vision, memory and the brain.

New Year's Resolution: Blog My Surfing Procrastination

I resolve to get something out of my Web surfing by blogging each item I read online.

I reported the news professionally for five years and writing came easy and fast for me then. I've since gotten rusty. I hope forcing myself to write a least a sentence possibly dozens of time a day will improve things, and possibly motivate me to get more work and less surfing done.

I leave the irony of a New Year's resolution resolved on January 13 for you to savor.

tdaxp

A colleague of mine impresses me daily, but never more so than when I learned he writes
tdaxp, which features well-informed opinion on the Middle East along with book reviews like this:

Evolutionary Cognitivism, Introduction: Race of Man, Races of MenThis series is a companion to Biopsychological Development. What that series focused on my reaction to The Scientist in the Crib and The Emperor's New Clothes, this series centers on The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology. Of the three books assigned for the class, Origins is by far the most academic. It is a very competent synthesis of Cognitive Psychology's concepts of working memory, cognitive load, and the like with Evolutionary Psychology's era of evolutionary adaption, massive modularity, and such.

Political Psychology Syllabi

ISPP--Political Psychology Courses Syllabi
ISPP has a large number of political psychology syllabi online by the leading lights. Browsing through is a good way to find articles you haven't read.