After approving NBC buyout, FCC Commish becomes Comcast lobbyist Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, plans to step down—and right into a top lobbying job at Comcast-NBC. The news, reported this afternoon by the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and Politico, comes after the hugely controversial merger of Comcast and NBC earlier this year. At the time, Baker objected to FCC attempts to impose conditions on the deal and argued that the "complex and significant transaction" could "bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms." Four months after approving the massive transaction, Attwell Baker will take a top DC lobbying job for the new Comcast-NBC entity, according to reports. The response of groups like Free Press was expected in its anger, but not without merit. Such cash-ins, of course, are a bipartisan affair in Washington. Update: Comcast has issued an official announcement.
What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness by Clark Whelton I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel. Uh-oh. My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Then came 1985. The first applicant was a young man from NYU. In 1985, I thought of “like” as a trite survivor of the hippie sixties. As the interviews proceeded, it grew obvious that “like” had strengthened its grip on intern syntax. “Columbia?” “And you’re majoring in . . .” “English?”
Theory of mind and the belief in God. - By Jesse Bering The scientific jury is still out on whether our species is unique among social mammals in being able to conceptualize mental states—other species, such as chimps, dogs, scrub jays and dolphins, may have some modest capacity in this regard. But there's absolutely no question that we're much better at it than the rest of the animal kingdom. We are natural psychologists, exquisitely attuned to the unseen psychological world. Reasoning about abstract mental states is as much a trademark of our species as walking upright on two legs, learning a language, and raising our offspring into their teens. There is a scientific term for this way of thinking—"theory of mind." As a human being, you're prone to overextending your theory of mind to categories for which it doesn't properly belong. The most famous example of this cognitive phenomenon of seeing minds in nonliving objects, however, is a 1944 American Journal of Psychology study by Austrian researchers Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel.