Australia votes on gay marriage law This means that when two men marry and raise a child, how will the identity of the new son be? Who will be his father and who will be his mother? What is the future of the child's sex? Many questions are raised by the mind about this type of law
Jerome Powell is the new chairman of the US Federal Reserve. The choice of making markets breathe a sigh of relief as Powell is a favorite of many investors.
Jerome is known for his calm comments on Fed monetary policy. He belongs to the Republican Party, has not opposed any central bank decision since May 2012 and has agreed to raise rates four times in five years.
64-year-old Jerome Powell oversaw banking regulation on Wall Street at the central bank. Unlike federal presidents Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, Powell did not get a doctorate, not an economist.
President Emmanuel Macaron called on Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and his family to France, the French presidency said in a statement.
"After talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, French President Emmanuel Macaron invited Saad Hariri and his family to France," the Elysee Palace said in a statement.
According to an Elysee source, Saad Hariri and his family will arrive in France in the "coming days". The source did not specify the date or circumstances of the visit.
The French president met with Saudi Crown Prince Prince Mohammed bin Salman last Thursday in Riyadh during a surprise visit not previously announced, where McCron addressed the Lebanese file in the wake of the resignation of Prime Minister Hariri.
The French president met on Tuesday with Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil in Paris and stressed during the meeting his hope that outgoing Prime Minister Saad Hariri would be able to return quickly to his country.
Lebanese President Michel Aoun rejected Hariri's resignation and accused Saudi Arabia earlier on Wednesday of holding him as a "hostage" and calling it a "hostile act."
Saudi Arabia denies holding Hariri or forcing him to resign.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The goalkeeper of the United States has been controversial after accusing former FIFA president Joseph Blatter of sexually harassing her on the sidelines of the 2013 FIFA World Cup.
The 31-year-old goalkeeper said the 81-year-old Blatter had been harassed before giving an award at the annual FIFA World Cup.
This was according to the newspaper "Expresso" Portuguese about Solo, which said that Blatter grabbed a sensitive part of her body, before her rise to the stage of the award for the best player in the world 2013
.
While former FIFA president Blatter considered these allegations absurd in his response to a question from an international news agency.
Solo has won the World Cup with her country once, and the Olympic gold twice. She pointed out in her remarks that sexual
harassment by males is a permanent problem in women's football.
Russia is moving ahead with legislation that threatens U.S. media outlets operating in the country.
The lower house of Russia's parliament approved an amendment Wednesday that clears the way for media outlets that receive funding from abroad to be designated as foreign agents.
The measure must go to the upper house of parliament before being signed by President Vladimir Putin.
It's the first tangible response to a move by the U.S. Department of Justice to require the firm that produces the U.S. branch of Russian television network RT to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
For weeks Russian government officials, including Putin, have promised a tit for tat response targeting American outlets operating in the country.
Related: Russian foreign ministry says retaliation against U.S. media could begin next week
The measure approved Wednesday does not specify which media outlets would be designated as foreign agents, or how the process would work.
There is a broad range of differences in people’s ability to visually recognize objects and faces—and those skills aren’t linked to general intelligence, a new study suggests.
Just because someone is smart and well-motivated doesn’t mean he or she can learn the visual skills needed to excel at tasks like matching fingerprints, interpreting medical X-rays, keeping track of aircraft on radar displays, or forensic face matching, the study implies.
“People may think they can tell how good they are at identifying objects visually,” says Isabel Gauthier, professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, who headed the study. “But it turns out that they are not very good at evaluating their own skills relative to others.”
The Novel Object Memory Test is based on individual’s ability to recognize greebles, ziggerins, and sheinbugs (top to bottom)—novel objects that Gauthier and her colleagues have invented to study visual intelligence. (Credit: Isabel Gauthier/Vanderbilt)
Greebles, sheinbugs, and ziggerins
In the past, research in visual object recognition focused largely on what people have in common, but Gauthier became interested in the question of how much visual ability varies among individuals. To answer this question, she and her colleagues had to develop a new test, which they call the Novel Object Memory Test (NOMT), to measure people’s ability to identify unfamiliar objects.
Gauthier first wanted to gauge public opinions about visual skills. She did so by surveying 100 laypeople using the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service.
Gauthier found that respondents generally consider visual tasks as fairly different from other tasks related to general intelligence. She also discovered that they feel there is less variation in people’s visual skills than there is in non-visual skills such as verbal and math ability.
The main problem that Gauthier and colleagues had to address in assessing individuals’ innate visual recognition ability was familiarity. The more time a person spends learning about specific types of objects, such as faces, cars, or birds, the better they get at identifying them. As a result, performance on visual recognition tests that use images of common objects are a complex mixture of people’s visual ability and their experience with these objects.
Importantly, they have proven to be a poor predictor of how well someone can learn to identify objects in a new domain.
Gauthier addressed this problem by using novel computer-generated creatures called greebles, sheinbugs, and ziggerins to study visual recognition.
Greebles are novel objects that Gauthier created in order to study visual memory and recognition. (Credit: Anne Rayner/Vanderbilt)
The basic test consists of studying six target creatures, followed by a number of test trials displaying creatures in sets of three. Each set contains a creature from the target group along with two unfamiliar creatures, and the participant is asked to pick out the creature that is familiar.
Analyzing the results from more than 2000 subjects, Gauthier and colleagues discovered that how well subjects could recognize one creature predicted their ability to recognize the other kind, although these objects were visually quite different. This confirmed the new test can predict the ability to learn new categories.
It’s not IQ
The psychologists also used performance on several IQ-related tests and determined that the visual ability measured on the NOMT is distinct from and independent of general intelligence.
“This is quite exciting because performance on cognitive skills is almost always associated with general intelligence,” Gauthier says. “It suggests that we really can learn something new about people using these tests, over and beyond all the abilities we already know how to measure.”
FACEBOOK.
followfollow.
followTWITTER.
followfollow YOUTUBE.
follow