Archive for June 2025

Should individuals who hear voices from some imaginary “god”, be setting educational policy in publics schools?

The mid-2000s was the era that shaped ketamine’s enduring image: at once illegal, medically risky, and wildly popular. Its ascendancy as a club drug was indicated by the emergence of dubstep, a genre that was immediately identified as both cause and effect of its spread. Like the drug itself, the sound combined a compulsive rush with a dislocated, mechanised aesthetic, darker and more disembodied than the ecstasy-fuelled styles that preceded it. The term “wonky” emerged to describe both the music and the chemical dissociation that enhanced it. Literary accounts of ketamine remained elusive, but the drug now had its bespoke soundtrack. In 2014 the UK government responded to its growing popularity by raising its legal status to class B. Since then, levels of use have continued to climb, most sharply among 18- to 24-year-olds, whose usage has tripled in the last nine years.

This behavior, which social scientists call “anticipatory compliance”, smoothes the way to autocracy because it gives the regime unlimited power without his having to lift a finger. Halting autocracy in its tracks demands a counter-strategy – let’s call it anticipatory noncompliance. Examples of anticipatory compliance are legion.

On Character AI, users can chat with bots designed to impersonate fictional characters. To a lonely or curious teenager, they seem almost indistinguishable from real people. The bots display emotion, flirt, and carry on personalised conversations…. Lawyers defending the AI company tried to throw the case out, arguing that chatbots deserve First Amendment protection – which protects free speech – and said ruling otherwise could have a “chilling” effect on the AI industry.

Everything we know about Cyprus paints a picture of warmth and connection. This is an island lauded for its welcome. A nation of family, community and neighbours who know not only our names, but those of our parents and grandparents. And we’re known worldwide as ‘The Island of Love’

School officials told the faculty Williams won’t accept new grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) until the agencies clarify new language requiring grantee institutions to certify they aren’t doing anything to “promote or advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) … in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws.”