The scientific mind can best be understood in terms of autism. Why do scientists reject rationalism in favor of empiricism, relations of ideas in favor of matters of fact, conceptualism in favor of perceptualism? Why do they prefer their limited, fallible senses over reason and logic? Why do they deny the ontology of mathematics? The future of the world is now being driven by a group high on the autistic spectrum. How will this affect human progress?

Conspiracy theories are inevitable in complex human societies. And while they have always been with us, their ubiquity in our political discourse is nearly unprecedented. Their salience has increased for a variety of reasons including the increasing access to information among ordinary people, a pervasive sense of powerlessness among those same people, and a widespread distrust of elites. Working in combination, these factors and many other factors are now propelling conspiracy theories into our public sphere on a vast scale. In recent years, scholars have begun to study this genuinely important phenomenon in a concerted way. In Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, Joseph E. Uscinski has gathered forty top researchers on the topic to provide both the foundational tools and the evidence to better understand conspiracy theories in the United States and around the world. Each chapter is informed by three core questions: Why do so many people believe in conspiracy theories? What are the effects of such theories when they take hold in the public? What can or should be done about the phenomenon? Combining systematic analysis and cutting-edge empirical research, this volume will help us better understand an extremely important, yet relatively neglected, phenomenon.

The stunning history of autism as it has been discovered and felt by parents, children and doctors Nearly seventy-five years ago, Donald Triplett of Forest, Mississippi became the first child diagnosed with autism. In a Different Key tells the extraordinary story of the world his diagnosis created - a riveting human drama that takes us across continents and through some of the great social movements of the twentieth century. The history of autism is, above all, the story of families fighting for a place in the world for their children. It is the story of women like Ruth Sullivan, who rebelled against a medical establishment that blamed "refrigerator mothers" for causing autism, of fathers who pushed scientists to dig harder for treatments, of parents who forced schools to accept their children. But many others played starring roles too: doctors like Leo Kanner, who pioneered our understanding of autism, scientists who sparred over how to treat autism, and those with autism, like Temple Grandin and Ari Ne'eman, who explained their inner worlds and championed a philosophy of 'neurodiversity'. This is also a story of fierce controversy: from the question of whether there is truly an autism 'epidemic', and whether vaccines played a part in it, to scandals involving 'facilitated communication', one of many treatments that have proved to be blind alleys. And there are dark turns too: we learn about experimenters feeding LSD to children with autism, or shocking them with electricity to change their behavior; and the authors reveal, for the first time, that Hans Asperger, discoverer of the syndrome named after him, may have cooperated with the Nazis in sending disabled children to their deaths. By turns intimate and panoramic, In a Different Key takes us on a journey from an era when families were shamed and children were condemned to institutions, to one in which parents and people with autism push not simply for inclusion, but for a new understanding of autism: as difference rather than disability.

A clinical psychologist who regularly deals with some of society's most vulnerable exposes and debunks the predatory pseudoscience and grift of the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry and points us towards a better way to take care of our mental health. Can the unbroken gaze of a lone man on a stage in front of hundreds of people truly alleviate their mental distress? Can Berlin Wall pills or a coffee enema cure depression? Can we improve our mental health with past-life regression therapy, cold-water shock therapy, rebirthing therapy? Wellness grifters and alternative-health snake oil salesmen are everywhere these days, and when our medical systems are under stress (and we are, too!) these costly purveyors of false hope are worse than a waste of money—they can lead us to delay badly needed care from real professionals, exacerbate our conditions and, in the most tragic of cases, even kill us. Today, people looking to care for their mental health face a market with at least 600 “brands” of psychotherapy—and counting. Most are ineffective, and many could be harmful. There exist countless unregulated providers of mental health services in the $5.6 trillion USD wellness industry and alternative medicine community looking to exploit people’s financial and emotional vulnerabilities. The world of mental health care is very much caveat emptor: buyer beware. Having seen so many of his patients hurt by the pseudoscience circulating in the industry, Dr. Jonathan N. Stea is on a mission to expose its harm and protect the public from mental health misinformation. In a landscape of rampant burnout and at a time when mental health concerns are at a fever pitch, Mind the Science provides hope and real information to those who have been touched by mental illness, have been misled by false marketing, or are simply curious about the relationship between science and mental health.

Don has just been offered the position of vice president of marketing at McDonald's, but his life is about to change. He is visited by the ghost of Virgil, who takes him on a tour of of Hell and Purgatory, where what he sees will impel him to turn his back on corporate America forever. Inspired by football and television evangelism, McDonald's hires the ruthless Monte Feltro to destroy Palace Reno, an institution that stands in the way of fast food and pop culture monopolizing the American way of life. Don vows to save Palace Reno. He goes to Beatrice, its founder. A vicissitude takes them to a home for autistic children, where they discover the damning truth about the things that often happen to these children behind closed doors. Feltro finds them. He and Prosecutor Rupert G. Airy put Don, Beatrice, and the children on trial, claiming that Palace Reno is an international child pornography ring.

In recent years, scholars have argued that the ability of people to choose which channel they want to watch means that television news is just preaching to the choir, and doesn’t change any minds. However, this book shows that the media still has an enormous direct impact on American society and politics. While past research has emphasized the indirect effects of media content on attitudes – through priming or framing, for instance – Dan Cassino argues that past data on both the public opinion and the media side wasn’t detailed enough to uncover it. Using a combination of original national surveys, large scale content analysis of news coverage along with data sets as disparate as FBI gun background checks and campaign contribution records, Cassino discusses why it’s important to treat different media sources separately, estimating levels of ideological bias for television media sources as well as the differences in the topics that the various media sources cover. Taking this into account proves that exposure to some media sources can serve to actually make Americans less knowledgeable about current affairs, and more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. Even in an era of declining viewership, the media – especially Fox News – are shaping our society and our politics. This book documents how this is happening, and shows the consequences for Americans. The quality of journalism is more than an academic question: when coverage focuses on questionable topics, or political bias, there are consequences.

This book demonstrates that the COVID 19 pandemic asks for a a global approach to bioethics. it describes how the pandemic affects the experience of being in a world that is intrinsically characterized by global connectivity. It demonstrates that a moral vision is necessary to articulate this experience of connectedness. Subsequently, a perspective of global bioethics is introduced, which provides a broader framework than mainstream bioethics, since it highlights the significance of both vulnerability and solidarity. Through a unique global perspective the book addresses the moral challenges of the pandemic, and places the confrontation with death, disease and disability within a wider framework of ethical concerns. This book is of important in the public debate on infectious diseases, and of relevance to health professionals, global health educators, public health experts,as well as policy makers.

A textbook your students will want to read. "If you would like students to understand hard political concepts, this work makes it accessible for them. By using pop culture, we can open ideological ideas and students are not bound by their own preconceived ideas." —Leah Murray, Weber State University A Novel Approach to Politics turns the conventional textbook wisdom on its head by using pop culture references to illustrate key concepts and cover recent political events. Adopters of previous editions are thanking author Douglas A. Van Belle for some of their best student evaluations to date. With this Sixth Edition, Van Belle brings the book fully up-to-date with current events and policy debates, international happenings, and other assorted ‘intergalactic’ matters. Van Belle tackles the most tumultuous political periods in recent history head-on, encouraging students to engage with ideas, arguments, and information that makes them uncomfortable. Employing a wide range of references from Brooklyn Nine-Nine to The Good Place to Ready Player One, students are given a solid grounding in institutions, ideology, and economics. To keep things grounded, the textbook nuts and bolts are still there to aid students, including chapter objectives, chapter summaries, bolded key terms, and discussion questions. Included with this title: The password-protected Instructor Resource Site (formally known as SAGE Edge) offers access to all text-specific resources, including a test bank and editable, chapter-specific PowerPoint® slides.

With science denial as a rising danger to public health, Sara E. Gorman and Jack M. Gorman analyze society's resistance to scientific evidence relating to health and safety, and the tools to combat these tendencies. Why do some parents decide not to vaccinate their children? Why do some people keep guns at home, despite ample evidence that doing so increases the risk of a gun-related injury? And why do people use antibiotics for illnesses that antibiotics cannot possibly alleviate? When it comes to health, many people believe that science is wrong, that the evidence is incomplete, and that unidentified hazards lurk everywhere. In Denying to the Grave, Sara Gorman and Jack Gorman explore the psychology of health science denial. Using several examples as case studies, they propose six key principles that may lead people to reject "accepted" health-related wisdom: the charismatic leader; fear of complexity; confirmation bias; fear of corporate and government conspiracies; causality and filling the ignorance gap; and the nature of risk prediction. This fully updated and expanded new edition of Denying to the Grave reviews the most recent research on health science denial, offering a brand new chapter on how the contemporary "assault on science" waged by certain political administrations has eroded public trust in national health and science agencies, such as CDC, FDA, and EPA. Also new to this edition is a chapter investigating the relationship between health crises and misinformation, and what happens to science denial amidst a global public health crisis. Finally, the book proposes a novel approach to counteracting misinformation and improving our ability to understand and accept scientific consensus. In an era in which trust in science has become more important, and yet more elusive, than ever before, Denying to the Grave sheds light on why we often choose to ignore scientific evidence, pointing the way toward a new understanding of how science should be conveyed to the public in order to save lives with existing knowledge and technology.

This book provides an overview of fake news detection, both through a variety of tutorial-style survey articles that capture advancements in the field from various facets and in a somewhat unique direction through expert perspectives from various disciplines. The approach is based on the idea that advancing the frontier on data science approaches for fake news is an interdisciplinary effort, and that perspectives from domain experts are crucial to shape the next generation of methods and tools. The fake news challenge cuts across a number of data science subfields such as graph analytics, mining of spatio-temporal data, information retrieval, natural language processing, computer vision and image processing, to name a few. This book will present a number of tutorial-style surveys that summarize a range of recent work in the field. In a unique feature, this book includes perspective notes from experts in disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, medicine and politics that will help to shape the next generation of data science research in fake news. The main target groups of this book are academic and industrial researchers working in the area of data science, and with interests in devising and applying data science technologies for fake news detection. For young researchers such as PhD students, a review of data science work on fake news is provided, equipping them with enough know-how to start engaging in research within the area. For experienced researchers, the detailed descriptions of approaches will enable them to take seasoned choices in identifying promising directions for future research.