AreYou Biased?
Take this three-minute psychological test and you may be surprised.
POSTED ON OCTOBER 23, 2007 BY RYAN RICHARDSON
Recently I sat down at my desk to take a psychological test. I brought up a web site at Harvard University, read the instructions, and began. The test was actually pretty simple. If I saw a picture of a dark-skinned person I hit the “E” key on my keyboard. If I saw a picture of a light-skinned person I hit the “I” key. Next I had to distinguish between positive words like “beautiful” and “wonderful” and negative words like “painful” and “awful.” Then the test got a little harder.
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Is Marriage A Basic Civil Right?
Loving v. Virginia and its impact on race relations, immigration and same-sex marriage.
POSTED ON OCTOBER 17, 2007 BY RYAN RICHARDSON
In 1967 a Virginia couple forever changed the way this country would deal with bigotry and matrimony. Compared to Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia is not very well known. But that may be about to change.
In June, 1958 Mildred Jeter, a woman of mixed African, Native American, and European descent, and Richard Loving, a white race car driver went to the District of Columbia to marry one another. Five weeks after returning to their home in Virginia, the Lovings were charged with violating the State's “Racial Integrity Act,” which criminalized interracial marriage. The couple pled guilty and received a suspended sentence, on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return.
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Got Chips?
Human identification implants are here. But should they be?
POSTED ON OCTOBER 16, 2007 BY RYAN RICHARDSON
In the last thirty years, millions of identification microchips have been implanted in livestock, dogs, cats, racehorses and even fish. They are commonly used in payment devices too - fixed to car windshields to allow drivers to pay tolls, or hidden in handy little wands, such as Exxon-Mobile’s “Speedpass,” Chase's "Blink," or MasterCard's "PayPass". They are even embedded in library books and the new U.S. passports. So it should have been no big deal last year when two employees of CityWatcher.com used microchips to gain access to sensitive company vaults. The difference was the microchips were embedded in their forearms. Sean Darks, the company’s chief executive, compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting.
But are these chips really that innocuous?
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The 28th Amendment
Should Americans be able to amend the Constitution without Congress? The framers thought so.
POSTED ON OCTOBER 15, 2007 BY RYAN RICHARDSON
Did you know that the United States Constitution can be amended without a single vote from Congress? Under Article Five, there are two different ways an amendment can be proposed and two different ways it can be ratified. Either mode of proposal can be used with either mode of ratification, meaning there are a total of four different combinations that can occur. But in the 231 years since the Constitution took effect, with one exception, it has always been amended in exactly the same way. Why?
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