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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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