Jurisdictions across the U.S. are snapping up algorithms as tools to help judges make bail and bond decisions. They're being sold as race- and gender-neutral assessments that allow judges to use science in determining whether someone will behave if released from jail pending trial.

For more than 30 years, the state of Nevada and local communities have rejected the Yucca Mountain project. In fact, the state has filed over 200 contentions against the Department of Energy's license application, challenging the adequacy of the department's environmental impact assessments.

We need quantitative assessments of the success of education. We need certification and qualifications both for teachers and for pupils. It is not a choice between quantity and quality, between access and excellence. Both of these will happen together if people really do believe in the importance of education to change lives.

You want practical assessments for easy to swallow logics that repeat the same old dialogue that doesn't cross the border of your comfort zone. Yet those limits reduce your intellect until it's been self-tailored to dance with the other puppets on societies string.

If we take the position that an assessment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism is not possible because we are all "on our own journey," then moral assessment becomes completely impossible or is speciesist. It is impossible because if we are all "on our own journey," then there is nothing to say to the racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobe, etc. If we say that those forms of discrimination are morally bad, but, with respect to animals, we are all "on our own journey" and we cannot make moral assessments about, for instance, dairy consumption, then we are simply being speciesist and not applying the same moral analysis to nonhumans that we apply to the human context.

A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge.

We've had risk assessments performed by Harvard University which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very very small.