Filtros: First Letter Of Last Name es F [Restablecer todos los filtros]
;
The Science Of Sexual Orientation,
Feb 11 2009
There are few issues as hotly contested — and as poorly understood — as the question of what makes a person gay or straight. It's not only a political, social, and religious question but also a scientific question, one that might someday have an actual, provable answer.
The handful of scientists who work in this under-funded and politically charged field will tell you: That answer is a long way off. But as Lesley Stahl reports, their efforts are already yielding tantalizing clues. One focus of their research is twins.
There are few issues as hotly contested — and as poorly understood — as the question of what makes a person gay or straight. It's not only a political, social, and religious question but also a scientific question, one that might someday have an actual, provable answer.
The handful of scientists who work in this under-funded and politically charged field will tell you: That answer is a long way off. But as Lesley Stahl reports, their efforts are already yielding tantalizing clues. One focus of their research is twins.
;
The war on paedos: grooming the public’s fears
The British government has just announced that paedophiles are to be treated in the same way as terrorists.
According to several sources, new legislation targeting paedophiles will be included in the Queen’s Speech. It appears that the UK prime minister, David Cameron, is determined to close a ‘loophole’ that permits paedophiles to publish and possess ‘manuals’ that offer tips to would-be predators on children about how to identify and groom their targets.
The new law would authorise the use of the kind of extraordinary sanctions used to target terrorists who download bomb-making manuals.
The adoption of the tactics and strategy of the war on terror for the crusade against paedophiles is symptomatic of a worldview in which the capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality has been lost.
The Lib-Con coalition government and many of its security advisers actually believe that the behaviour of terrorists and that of paedophiles share many common attributes.
The British government has just announced that paedophiles are to be treated in the same way as terrorists.
According to several sources, new legislation targeting paedophiles will be included in the Queen’s Speech. It appears that the UK prime minister, David Cameron, is determined to close a ‘loophole’ that permits paedophiles to publish and possess ‘manuals’ that offer tips to would-be predators on children about how to identify and groom their targets.
The new law would authorise the use of the kind of extraordinary sanctions used to target terrorists who download bomb-making manuals.
The adoption of the tactics and strategy of the war on terror for the crusade against paedophiles is symptomatic of a worldview in which the capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality has been lost.
The Lib-Con coalition government and many of its security advisers actually believe that the behaviour of terrorists and that of paedophiles share many common attributes.
;
Will "revolutionary" Diana Screen End Pedophile Menace?
Anxious to mend its reputation and plug the money drain, the Vatican just announced a new fix: Candidates for the priesthood will undergo psychological screening to determine their suitability for the job. Painting a pseudo-scientific veneer on the campaign, the Vatican said "expert" psychologists will screen select candidates on a case-by-case basis.
Gene Abel is a psychiatrist who invented the controversial Abel Screen, which measures sexual proclivities based on how long men look at visual images of different types of models. Abel is promoting a new "pass/fail" test called the Diana Screen as a "breakthrough in technology" that can accurately identify men who have molested children.
In the blogosphere I bumped into a group of sex offenders discussing how easy it is to beat the test.
The author finds a false positive rate of at least 50 percent. Even if it is just a screening test, psychologists should be cautious in administering a test with such a high false-positive rate and no published, peer-reviewed data on its reliability or validity.
More fundamentally, this type of testing raises philosophical issues about how far society should go in the name of protecting children, especially when most victimization is done not by teachers or amusement park workers but by family members.
Anxious to mend its reputation and plug the money drain, the Vatican just announced a new fix: Candidates for the priesthood will undergo psychological screening to determine their suitability for the job. Painting a pseudo-scientific veneer on the campaign, the Vatican said "expert" psychologists will screen select candidates on a case-by-case basis.
Gene Abel is a psychiatrist who invented the controversial Abel Screen, which measures sexual proclivities based on how long men look at visual images of different types of models. Abel is promoting a new "pass/fail" test called the Diana Screen as a "breakthrough in technology" that can accurately identify men who have molested children.
In the blogosphere I bumped into a group of sex offenders discussing how easy it is to beat the test.
The author finds a false positive rate of at least 50 percent. Even if it is just a screening test, psychologists should be cautious in administering a test with such a high false-positive rate and no published, peer-reviewed data on its reliability or validity.
More fundamentally, this type of testing raises philosophical issues about how far society should go in the name of protecting children, especially when most victimization is done not by teachers or amusement park workers but by family members.