How to Make Up Your Mind About an Issue

Living in a world of constant debate and disagreement, evaluating your own position on an issue of special or public importance[1] is sometimes straightforward when based on your beliefs, values, and general knowledge. However, other times it is much harder to make up your mind about an issue because the territory is new to you or to humanity in general, or there are many competing or controversial values and ideas that go into forming the issue under discussion or dispute. When making up your own mind about the issue, it's important to have studied the varied perspectives before reaching your own conclusion. Even then, you are best served by keeping an open mind about future directions and understandings as new information transpires.

In this article, you'll be presented with some basic elements on how to make up your mind about an issue, particularly where it is complicated, divisive, and perhaps even untested.

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First human-like robot to fly in space

Robonaut 2, which NASA hopes to launch Feb. 3 aboard the space shuttle Discovery on a flight to its permanent home on the International Space Station, will be the first humanoidlike robot to fly in space. Based on technology nurtured in part at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View and built jointly by the space agency and General Motors, the robot has a head, two arms and a humanlike chest and shoulders. It has fingers, thumbs and wrists with enough dexterity to grip a pen and write "hello."
Rob Heyde spent more than 10 years working as an engineer for computer giants Hewlett-Packard and Apple. But when manufacturing jobs began moving out of the valley, Heyde's career path went from high-tech to high in the sky above Silicon Valley. Heyde, 56, now spends three nights a week hovering above Santa Clara County and providing a bird's-eye view for cops on the city streets below.

Santa Clara County schools will receive nearly $821,000 for technology purchases, and San Mateo County schools will receive nearly $306,000, in the second phase of a settlement of an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.

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