02.26.10
Posted in science, society at 5:36 pm by site admin
Check out this short promo for a book called the Essential Engineer.
At its heart, and beyond the grudging tone and sometimes confounding structure, “The Essential Engineer” does strike a point that lies deep and solid as bedrock. The times we live in now call not so much for scientists to measure daintily the likelihood of the next pending disaster as for men and women of action — informed by science, certainly, but also by common sense, economic reality and the social good — to roll up their sleeves and start figuring out how to avoid that disaster. To an engineer like Petroski, that means that it is time to build. And to a very large degree, he’s right. From clean energy and sound roads to safe food and effective medicines, the domain of the engineer is vast, and the need for productive optimism has perhaps never been greater.
Petroski reminds us, quite rightly, that while scientists may ring the warning when it comes to potential disasters, “warnings are not solutions — nor are they necessarily a death knell. It will be the optimistic engineers who hear the warnings not as doomsday scenarios but as calls to tackle significant problems.” The warning bells are ringing clear and loud. One hopes that Petroski’s own alarm, calling engineers to creative arms, is heard as clearly as a klaxon.
Permalink
02.21.10
Posted in society at 10:43 pm by site admin
Check out this article by the Atlantic regarding the impacts of today’s recession to the social and cultural nature of America. Its a pretty good article with much insightful wisdom. Below are a few passages and the key thoughts I took from them. Definitely go read the article!
If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.
Ultimately, innovation is what allows an economy to grow quickly and create new jobs as old ones obsolesce and disappear. Typically, one salutary side effect of recessions is that they eventually spur booms in innovation. Some laid-off employees become entrepreneurs, working on ideas that have been ignored by corporate bureaucracies, while sclerotic firms in declining industries fail, making way for nimbler enterprises. But according to the economist Edmund Phelps, the innovative potential of the U.S. economy looks limited today. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, he and his co-author, Leo Tilman, argue that dynamism in the U.S. has actually been in decline for a decade; with the housing bubble fueling easy (but unsustainable) growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice. Phelps and Tilman finger several culprits: a patent system that’s become stifling; an increasingly myopic focus among public companies on quarterly results, rather than long-term value creation; and, not least, a financial industry that for a generation has focused its talent and resources not on funding business innovation, but on proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, and arcane financial engineering. None of these problems is likely to disappear quickly. Phelps, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the “natural” rate of unemployment, believes that until they do disappear, the new floor for unemployment is likely to be between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent, even once “recovery” is complete.
Forty years ago, Glen Elder, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and a pioneer in the field of “life course” studies, found a pronounced diffidence in elderly men (though not women) who had suffered hardship as 20- and 30-somethings during the Depression. Decades later, unlike peers who had been largely spared in the 1930s, these men came across, he told me, as “beaten and withdrawn—lacking ambition, direction, confidence in themselves.” Today in Japan, according to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development, workers who began their careers during the “lost decade” of the 1990s and are now in their 30s make up six out of every 10 cases of depression, stress, and work-related mental disabilities reported by employers.
Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’”
In her 2006 book, Generation Me, Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also expected that they would be earning $75,000 a year or more by age 30; the median salary made by a 30-year-old was $27,000 that year.) Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread.
These efforts have succeeded in making today’s youth more confident and individualistic. But that may not benefit them in adulthood, particularly in this economic environment. Twenge writes that “self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work,” and that “the ability to persevere and keep going” is “a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem.” She worries that many young people might be inclined to simply give up in this job market. “You’d think if people are more individualistic, they’d be more independent,” she told me. “But it’s not really true. There’s an element of entitlement—they expect people to figure things out for them.”
Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.”
All of these characteristics are worrisome, given a harsh economic environment that requires perseverance, adaptability, humility, and entrepreneurialism. Perhaps most worrisome, though, is the fatalism and lack of agency that both Twenge and Alsop discern in today’s young adults. Trained throughout childhood to disconnect performance from reward, and told repeatedly that they are destined for great things, many are quick to place blame elsewhere when something goes wrong, and inclined to believe that bad situations will sort themselves out—or will be sorted out by parents or other helpers.
Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and “a kind of bereavement” in its own right. Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home.
The national divorce rate fell slightly in 2008, and that’s not unusual in a recession: divorce is expensive, and many couples delay it in hard times. But joblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and—when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis—poses “a profound challenge to marriage,” especially in lower-income communities. It may sound harsh, but in general, he says, “if men can’t make a contribution financially, they don’t have much to offer.” Two-thirds of all divorces are legally initiated by women. Wilcox believes that over the next few years, we may see a long wave of divorces, washing no small number of discarded and dispirited men back into single adulthood.
“We could be headed in a direction where, among elites, marriage and family are conventional, but for substantial portions of society, life is more matriarchal,” says Wilcox. The marginalization of working-class men in family life has far-reaching consequences. “Marriage plays an important role in civilizing men. They work harder, longer, more strategically. They spend less time in bars and more time in church, less with friends and more with kin. And they’re happier and healthier.”
Wilson, age 74, is a careful scholar, who chooses his words precisely and does not seem given to overstatement. But he sounded forlorn when describing the “very bleak” future he sees for the neighborhoods that he’s spent a lifetime studying. There is “no way,” he told me, “that the extremely high jobless rates we’re seeing won’t have profound consequences for the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods.” Neighborhood-specific statistics on drug addiction, family dysfunction, gang violence, and the like take time to compile. But Wilson believes that once we start getting detailed data on the conditions of inner-city life since the crash, “we’re going to see some horror stories”—and in many cases a relapse into the depths of decades past. “The point I want to emphasize,” Wilson said, “is that we should brace ourselves.”
Permalink
Posted in Evolution, society at 9:29 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing how men are more attracted to ovulating women. Men can unconsciously detect the scent of ovulating women.
Women looking for that special someone might want to think twice before spritzing Chanel No. 5. A new study suggests that a woman’s natural scent may be all she needs.
Recent research shows that a man’s testosterone levels, which are linked with sexual interest, are significantly higher when they smell the shirt of a woman who is ovulating.
Permalink
02.19.10
Posted in Sports at 10:49 am by site admin
Check out this article about how upset the coach for Russian figure skater Plushenko regarding his athlete not being awarded Gold. While I do understand that his program was not as clean as it could have been, I will have to agree with his coach about the quadruple…
Plushenko had previously claimed the quad and its variations are the future of figure skating. Mishin focused his accusations of thievery on the judging panel.
“Any judge who thinks this is the right champion is a Cyclops,” Mishin said. “Without the quad, there is no difference between the men’s competition and the women’s. Why not let them skate together? Why not have it as a unisex competition in the Olympics?”
Quad jumps are very difficult since they require tremendous leg strength. And there has been only one woman,Miki Ando (JPN) in 2002, to land one in competition. I think since very few athletes are able to accomplish quad jumps in the first place that there should be a more gratiutious awarding for them. Consider the risk. If they skater does not land the quad he basically gets 0 points. If he under-rotates, he gets very few points as well. Consquently, a safe skater would much rather perform a safe program consisting of triples and sophisticated footwoork techniques and artistry.
Permalink
02.18.10
Posted in Games, technology at 11:08 pm by site admin
Check out this page explaining the mechanics behind the Star Wars Force Trainer coming out later this year. While you don’t actually levitate objects directly using the power of your mind, it is pretty cool to have a toy that helps train you to focus your brain waves.
Ok. Seriously. How does it work?
The wireless headset reads your brainwaves through dry sensor technology and can determine the differences between alpha, beta, gamma and delta waves. This allows a chip inside the Force Trainer to use an algorithm to interpret the data and translate it to physical action, which in this case moves the Training Sphere into different sections of the cylinder.
Permalink
Posted in health, science at 12:11 pm by site admin
Check out this article about extreme breath holding.
A Swiss freediver held his breath underwater for 19 minutes and 21 seconds, according to news reports this week. The gasp-inducing feat beat the previous world record by 19 seconds, and blew away the record of 17 minutes and four seconds that magician David Blaine set on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in 2008.
Extreme breath holders rely on a combination of techniques and training. They train their body to slow down the heart and circulatory system. In comparison to traditional methods, this new wave of breath holders leverage modern technology and train in hyperbaric chambers.
Permalink
Posted in Environment at 12:07 pm by site admin
Check out this link about the blobfish. This is probably the crazies thing I’ve seen in a while.
Its hideously deformed body is quite boneless, a gelatinous orb hovering in the deep, covered in slime and mucus. But there’s something even worse.
Its face.
Most fish don’t really have faces. You’ve heard people refer to “fish eyes” or “fish lips,” or they say, “Oh, shut up, you old fish face.”
But the blobfish actually has a face. Not a fish face, but a human face, complete with lips and a big, bulbous nose.
A blobfish looks like some fat, drunken judge and may be highly intelligent. And therefore quite dangerous.
It frowns. It leers. Sometimes, it even drools.
“That’s gross!” said an editor around here who didn’t believe me. But once she saw the photos, she began gnawing the knuckles on her right hand in sheer, abject terror.
Permalink
01.13.10
Posted in society at 9:01 pm by site admin
Check out this page showing the most popular netflix rentals in several major cities in the US. In the New York area, some of the top movies appear to be Body of Lies, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Twilight. I think the ability to see into Netflix queues is a little bit of an invasion of privacy, but considering how general the info is, I don’t think its too bad.
Permalink
Posted in Evolution, health at 8:52 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing prions and the fact that they do mutate and evolve like viruses. Prions are degenerate proteins responsible for diseases such as “mad cow disease”, technically termed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD).
In the classic sense, prions, which are misfolded versions of the brain protein PrP, cannot mutate because they do not contain DNA or RNA. They can, however, give rise to variants with different properties, possibly due to differences in the folding, or shape, of the proteins. In the study, published December 31 in Science Express, researchers estimated the rate at which prion mutants can appear in cultured human nerve cells. In addition, the study suggests that once variants appear, they persist at low levels, giving rise to a heterogeneous prion population.
Permalink
01.10.10
Posted in science at 10:13 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how cell phone radiation may help protect against alzheimer’s disease.
The authors say previous studies have linked a possible increased risk of Alzheimer’s with “low-frequency” electro-magnetic exposure like the energy waves generated by power and telephone lines.
They say mobile phones emit “high frequency” electro-magnetic waves that are very different because they can have beneficial effects on brain function, such as increasing brain cell activity.
So the questions is would you rather die of brain cancer from prolonged cell phone usage, or live a demented final years of your life having alzheimer’s?
Permalink
01.08.10
Posted in Evolution at 10:11 pm by site admin
Found this article on wired.com titled Human Genome Is Part Bornavirus.
“Our whole notion of ourselves as a species is slightly misconceived,” says Robert Gifford, a paleovirologist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York City. Human DNA includes genetic contributions from bacteria and other organisms, and humans have even come to rely on some of these genes for basic functions like fighting infections.
In the new study, Japanese researchers found copies of the bornavirus N (for nucleoprotein) gene inserted in at least four separate locations in the human genome. Searches of other mammalian genomes also showed that the gene has hitched rides in a wide variety of species for millions of years.
“Clearly they provide a fossil record of bornavirus that was previously only available for retroviruses,” says John Coffin, a virologist at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston who coauthored the study. “It tells us that virus evolution doesn’t proceed the way many people have viewed it.”
Permalink
01.06.10
Posted in technology at 12:15 am by site admin
Check out this article about how freezing your hard drive can give you that extra time you need to save your data.
The running theory goes, your hard drive might be chugging it’s last death, clicking away its final moments, but there’s a chance you can save your data by freezing whatever parts are loosening up or losing contact together. You see, your hard drive contains a lot of moving parts. After spinning for so long, it’s only natural things can vibrate and get loose. Metal also expands as it gets hotter. Freezing the metal might just force everything back together again.
It sounds so ridiculous, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to prove that it can work, provided it’s a hardware problem and not a software problem.
Permalink
Posted in health, society at 12:11 am by site admin
A friend sent me this article titled Women Who Don’t Live Alone Add More Weight. Bottom line is that if your a women in a relationship, chances are you have gained at least 4lbs. If you have a baby, the number goes up..
After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner. The number of women with a baby but no partner was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.
Permalink
01.03.10
Posted in internet at 10:45 pm by site admin
The internet is overflowing with information and people trying to publish themselves and interact with their friends. Decided to do a little searching, and i stumbled on a World Map of Social Networking.
Notables would be Facebook for the US and many other countries, Orkut for Brazil, and QQ for China.
Permalink
Posted in society at 10:32 pm by site admin
While I’m not normally a big fan of the economist, I found this article about Women in the workforce:
Female power to be a pretty interesting read.
THE economic empowerment of women across the rich world is one of the most remarkable revolutions of the past 50 years. It is remarkable because of the extent of the change: millions of people who were once dependent on men have taken control of their own economic fates. It is remarkable also because it has produced so little friction: a change that affects the most intimate aspects of people’s identities has been widely welcomed by men as well as women. Dramatic social change seldom takes such a benign form.
The article talks about a good deal about the progress women have made in the workforce. However, there are some limitation caused by the biological differences between men and women:
This no doubt owes something to prejudice. But the biggest reason why women remain frustrated is more profound: many women are forced to choose between motherhood and careers. Childless women in corporate America earn almost as much as men. Mothers with partners earn less and single mothers much less. The cost of motherhood is particularly steep for fast-track women. Traditionally “female” jobs such as teaching mix well with motherhood because wages do not rise much with experience and hours are relatively light. But at successful firms wages rise steeply and schedules are demanding. Future bosses are expected to have worked in several departments and countries. Professional-services firms have an up-or-out system which rewards the most dedicated with lucrative partnerships. The reason for the income gap may thus be the opposite of prejudice. It is that women are judged by exactly the same standards as men.
The article focused on the rights and power of women in the workforce, and also the life decision of career or family, but I think the article neglects the changing attitude regarding kids in industrialized societies. Having a kid puts your life on hold. This is more true for women, since we place the duty of childrearing on women. So regardless of your goals for your career, if your life is about you, what you can do, and the adventures you can find, its a hard sell to put your life on hold to nurse the next generation.
Permalink
12.25.09
Posted in health at 9:27 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how stress levels in a mother can cause stress-induced sex selection in children.
A recently published study, however, suggests this ain’t necessarily so. According to Ralph Catalano of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues, writing in the American Journal of Human Biology, stress-induced sex selection can take place long after conception and implantation.
Permalink
Posted in Education at 9:06 pm by site admin
Check out this article on games for thinkers. Top three on the list are:
- Chesss
- Scrabble
- Monopoly
Of the top 3, the top two are really easy to play on the go on your mobile phone. One of my favorite games (not in the top 10), is Go. Go is an intense game. Its simplistic enough for a four year old to learn, but complex enough that there is still not any robust Go AIs that can go head to head with the masters of the game.
Permalink
11.30.09
Posted in health at 1:11 pm by site admin
This article on USA Today talks about how routing cancer screenings do more harm then good. Sometimes its not that simple to know what is going on with the body.
There’s growing evidence that cancer screenings aren’t always helpful — and can sometimes be harmful, say Lisa Schwartz and Steve Woloshin of the Veterans Affairs Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt.
•Last year, the task force said men over age 75 shouldn’t be screened for prostate cancer, noting that men this age are more likely to die of something else before a prostate tumor could harm them. In March, two long-running and highly anticipated studies found that prostate cancer screening saves few, if any, lives but may hurt countless men by leading them to undergo therapies that can cause impotence, incontinence and even death.
Permalink
Posted in Unfiled at 1:06 pm by site admin
Check out this short article about spicing up your life by moving out of your comfort zone. Just a reminder to not simply go through life on autopilot….
If you want a more interesting life then you have to take some risks. If you want to be more adventurous in your thinking then you should be more adventurous in your activities. Deliberately push yourself out of your routine. Try things that you do not normally try. Do things that you have never done before. Do things that scare you.
Here are some ideas for pushing yourself out of your personal rut.
* Take salsa dancing lessons
* Try a new sport.
* Drive a different route to work every day for a month.
* Learn to knit.
* Perform in a karaoke bar.
* Learn a foreign language.
* Talk to somebody new every day. Listen to them carefully.
Permalink
07.30.09
Posted in science at 7:19 am by site admin
Check out this article about human emit visible light.
Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.
and also:
The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.
Permalink
