The True Believer

Richard Mulligan: from skeptic to true believer

For most people, the trip from the Whitehead Institute at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to Harvard Medical School is a two-mile bus ride. For Richard Mulligan, who late last year became the first director of the Harvard Gene Therapy Initiative, it seems like a voyage to a new world. It is daunting enough that Mulligan had to move from the MIT’s ‘research is all that counts’ at...

The violent true believer as a "lone wolf" - psychoanalytic perspectives on terrorism.

The existing research on lone wolf terrorists and case experience are reviewed and interpreted through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. A number of characteristics of the lone wolf are enumerated: a personal grievance and moral outrage; the framing of an ideology; failure to affiliate with an extremist group; dependence on a virtual community found on the Internet; the thwarting of occupation...

A Non-Believer Reads Religious Fantasy

Modeling human newspaper readers: The Fuzzy Believer approach

The growing number of publicly available information sources makes it impossible for individuals to keep track of all the various opinions on one topic. The goal of our Fuzzy Believer system presented in this paper is to extract and analyze statements of opinion from newspaper articles. Beliefs are modeled using the fuzzy set theory, applied after Natural Language Processing-based information e...

1 “ Test Everything ” : Sceptic and Believer in Ancient Mediterranean

Tim Whitmarsh, Cambridge, UK Were the atheoi atheists? Religious scepticism and Greek polytheism It is a truism that there are few exact ancient equivalents to the modern atheist, who denies all and any possible supernatural power. To reach that position, one has to have both a rigid, identifiable line of differentiation between the natural and the supernatural, and a more or less coherent conc...