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Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions. As a result, people recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way, in particular for emotionally significant issues and established beliefs. Biased search, interpretation and recall have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (disagreeing parties diverging further when they are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (beliefs persisting after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the primacy effect (data encountered early in a series being given more weight) and illusory correlation (people falsely perceiving an association between two events or situations). Explanations for these biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. This can lead to disastrous decisions, especially in organizational, military and political contexts. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

55 Water Street

... that New York City's largest office building (pictured) is owned by an Alabama pension fund?
... that Victória Pitts from Brazil portrayed characters in all three parts of Puccini's Il trittico at the Oper Frankfurt in 2022, including Zita in Gianni Schicchi?
... that Sharp Corporation produced three official variants of Nintendo's Famicom in Japan, one of which was a television set that was subsequently released in the United States?
... that the US Special Envoy for Afghan women and girls, Rina Amiri, is a former refugee who told US Senator John Kerry that "the Afghan population is not the Taliban"?
... that the main activity of the short-lived parliament of Central Lithuania of 1922 was to request annexation by Poland?
... that Emma Reaney is the only Notre Dame Fighting Irish swimmer to win an NCAA championship?
... that sales declined after Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? was renamed by its American publisher, so the original title was restored in subsequent editions?
... that model Patsy Pulitzer was called one of the "World's Loveliest Sportswomen" after catching a 1,230-pound (560 kg) black marlin, a then world-record fish for a woman?

In the news

William Ruto

William Ruto (pictured) is elected President of Kenya.
In Giza, Egypt, a church fire spreads to a nursery killing 41 people, including at least 18 children.
Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, is critically injured after a stabbing at a speech in the United States.
A mass fish kill occurs in the river Oder in Poland and Germany.

On this day

August 19

Bonnie Prince Charlie

1274 – Shortly after his return from the Ninth Crusade, Edward I was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey, nearly two years after his father's death.
1745 – Bonnie Prince Charlie (pictured) raised the Jacobite standard at Glenfinnan, Scotland, in an attempt to regain the British throne for his father, beginning the Jacobite rising of 1745.
1759 – Seven Years' War: At the Battle of Lagos, British ships, having damaged several French vessels the previous day, pursued the remainder of the fleet to Lagos, Portugal, and continued the battle there in violation of Portuguese neutrality.
2002 – Second Chechen War: A Russian Mil Mi-26 was brought down by Chechen separatists with a man-portable air-defense system near Khankala, killing 127 people in the deadliest helicopter crash in history.
2017 – Around 250,000 farmed non-native Atlantic salmon were accidentally released into the wild near Cypress Island, Washington.

Abu Yazid (d. 947)
Bernard Levin (b. 1928)
Linus Pauling (d. 1994)

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From today's featured list

mewithoutYou

The discography of mewithoutYou, an American rock band, includes seven studio albums, a live album, and seven extended plays. The band was formed in 2001 as a side project to The Operation, an alternative band active from 1999 to 2001 that shared most of its members with mewithoutYou. The first undisputed release by the band was I Never Said That I Was Brave which was released on Kickstart Audio in 2001. Over the next year, the band signed to Tooth & Nail Records and released their debut album, [A→B] Life. Brother, Sister and It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright, mewithoutYou's third and fourth studio albums, moved away from the emo and hardcore-punk influences of their earlier work and featured less abrasive vocals by Aaron Weiss. The band left Tooth & Nail in 2011 and released their fifth album, Ten Stories, a concept album about the crash of a circus train, on their own Pine Street Records in 2012. In 2018, mewithoutYou released their final studio album, [Untitled], and their only live album, [A→B] Live. The band announced that they will disband at the conclusion of their farewell tour on August 20, 2022. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

The Hunting of the Snark is a nonsense poem by the English writer Lewis Carroll, telling the story of ten characters who cross the ocean to hunt a mysterious creature known as the Snark. The poem was published in 1876 with illustrations by Henry Holiday. This is the tenth plate from his illustrations, accompanying "Fit the Eighth: The Vanishing", in which things end badly for the Baker, one of the hunters:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Illustration credit: Henry Holiday; restored by Adam Cuerden

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