06.22.11
Posted in health, society at 9:35 pm by site admin
Check out this article stating the FDA now deems silicon breast implants reasonable safe to use. The funniest parts of this are:
“Based on the totality of the evidence, the FDA believes that silicone gel-filled breast implants have reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness when used as labeled,” the agency said.
This is a loaded statement. The safety part I get.. But effectiveness?? And what is considered to be the effectiveness of implants?? And then, ‘when used as labeled’… I didn’t know there was a proper use of breast implants, much less a label.. Guess its not like those pesky labels on the mattress that you don’t want to cut..
The other interesting point the FDA makes is:
“Breast implants are not lifetime devices. The longer a woman has silicone gel-filled breast implants, the more likely she is to experience complications,” the FDA said.
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05.16.11
Posted in society at 6:13 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing the correlation of religion, education level, and financial standing in the US.
Many factors are behind the discrepancies among religions, but one stands out. The relationship between education and income is so strong that you can almost draw a line through the points on this graph. Social science rarely produces result
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04.11.11
Posted in Evolution, society at 9:04 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing some of the more recent trends in technological indoor farming.
The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker, or a sprawling complex in the Saudi desert.
Advocates say this, or something like it, may be an answer to the world’s food problems.
“In order to keep a planet that’s worth living on, we have to change our methods,” says Gertjan Meeuws, of PlantLab, a private research company.
The world already is having trouble feeding itself. Half the people on Earth live in cities, and nearly half of those — about 3 billion — are hungry or malnourished. Food prices, currently soaring, are buffeted by droughts, floods and the cost of energy required to plant, fertilize, harvest and transport it.
And prices will only get more unstable. Climate change makes long-term crop planning uncertain. Farmers in many parts of the world already are draining available water resources to the last drop. And the world is getting more crowded: by mid-century, the global population will grow from 6.8 billion to 9 billion, the U.N. predicts.
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03.21.11
Posted in society at 6:29 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about how US citizens are ignorant of the way our government works.
For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed—and they’ve changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. While isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind our own business. What happens in China and India (or at a Japanese nuclear plant) affects the autoworker in Detroit; what happens in the statehouse and the White House affects the competition in China and India. Before the Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains instead. And where we once relied on political institutions (like organized labor) to school the middle classes and give them leverage, we now have nothing. “The issue isn’t that people in the past knew a lot more and know less now,” says Hacker. “It’s that their ignorance was counterbalanced by denser political organizations.” The result is a society in which wired activists at either end of the spectrum dominate the debate—and lead politicians astray at precisely the wrong moment.
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03.06.11
Posted in society at 9:13 pm by site admin
Check out this article about a different take on the story discussed in Tyler Cowen’s eBook The Great Stagnation.
But his evidence can also be used to tell a related story. It could be that the nature of technological change isn’t causing the slowdown but a shift in values. It could be that in an industrial economy people develop a materialist mind-set and believe that improving their income is the same thing as improving their quality of life. But in an affluent information-driven world, people embrace the postmaterialist mind-set. They realize they can improve their quality of life without actually producing more wealth.
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02.24.11
Posted in Education, society at 7:47 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing how focusing on your child’s reading ability at a young age can impair the development in other life skills.
Patricia Appel, a learning specialist at Glenelg’s primary school, said that many times, if pre-kindergarten children learn a word, it’s simply a picture they’re internalizing.
“Then, as they enter school, it’s almost re-learning,” she said. “We still have to back them up and teach them phonics and syntax.”
She added that with early readers, teachers try to even out the other skills the children need to be successful in the classroom.
“This year we have two pre-kindergarten boys who can’t hold a pencil and write but read at a first-grade level,” she said. “We try to boost up the areas that are weaker to make a child more balanced.”
The author points out that reading is a great pastime as well.. And is not simply a learn to read or hold a pencil. Just a reminder that time is limited and there is always an opportunity cost associated with everything we do.. Even as a toddler.
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02.11.11
Posted in society, technology at 11:24 pm by site admin
Check out this article about exabytes.
So much digital data now moves around the globe that those who endeavor to measure it employ a new – or new to non-nerds – term.
Meet the exabyte.
How much data is an exabyte? It’s a billion gigabytes – and it signifies just how digital and data-intensive the world has become.
In 2007, the global capacity to store digital information – on computer hard disks, smartphones, CDs and other digital media – totaled 276 exabytes, a new report finds.
How much is that? Imagine a stack of CDs – each holding an album’s worth of digital music – shooting from the top of your desk to 50,000 miles beyond the moon.
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01.04.11
Posted in society at 8:34 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how America has messed up raising its children. Not really quite my forte, but think the lessons here are applicable in many real world situations..
As the G.I. Generation gave their Baby Boomer children more freedom from oppression and repression, the Baby Boomers have given their Generation Y/Millennials freedom from responsibility and accountability for their actions. They have moved past indulging them directly to spoiling them. And rather than letting their children face the consequences of their actions, Baby Boomers have more often bailed out their Gen Y/Millennial children. And when children feel no responsibility or accountability for their actions, the next step is for them to feel and act entitled — entitled to act according to how they feel and to what will immediately gratify them, and entitled to not do whatever they don’t want to do. It is this attitude that would give rise to the Parent-Teenager dialogue that opened this blog.
What We Can and Need to Do About It
An initial step that might be helpful is to reach a consensus between parents and their children as to what terms related to personal responsibility mean. Here are ten terms that come to mind for me:
- Commitment: the level of dedicated action(s) you continue to take after your enthusiasm for an enterprise stops.
- Accountability: taking full responsibility for your actions by owning up to the negative or failed results, taking action to make up for it to the person(s) you let down, and learning what you did wrong so that it doesn’t occur again.
- Maturity: how well you are able to resist an irresistible impulse and instead have and exercise judgment and do the reasonable thing. In the brain we refer to this as exercising one’s executive function.
- Honesty: this is simply telling the truth according to the facts as you understand them. You know honesty best, when you tell a lie. Pathological liars lie whenever they are trying to get their way and take advantage of a situation. Compulsive liars lie both when the are trying to get their way and when they are trying to get out of facing the consequences of their actions.
- Forthrightness: this is coming forward and telling the truth and revealing untruths that you become aware of. It’s believing and following Justice Louis Brandeis words: “Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant.”
- Character: what you do when you are frustrated, angry, annoyed, afraid and/or bored and nobody is watching and your chance of getting caught is close to nil.
- Sacrifice: what you do unto others who will not (immediately) be able to pay you back by doing unto you.
- Compassion: what you feel unto others who will not be able to do more than say, “Thank you.”
- Thinking ahead and planning: overcoming the aversion to anything that causes you to forego immediate gratification.
- Listening: and then pausing to consider what you’ve heard before rejecting it, tuning out or competing with it (a skill every generation needs to learn).
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11.17.10
Posted in society at 11:59 am by site admin
Checkout <a href=”http://centerforinvestigativereporting.org/blogpost/20101110oldfashionedpoliceworkthebestwaytonabterroristsstudysays”>this article</a> discussing how old police techniques are the best way to catch terrorists.
Most terrorist plots are still foiled using traditional law-enforcement legwork, says a new study by researchers at the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions, made up of university scholars and the nonprofit firm RTI International.
Contributors to the report examined 86 plots over the last decade, nearly 70 percent of which failed. In more than 80 percent of thwarted schemes, law enforcement became aware at the first signs of trouble, or the government received tips from ordinary citizens, not from counterterrorism intelligence gathering.
Investigators caught nearly one in five of the planned attacks accidentally while responding to suspicious behavior or everyday crimes like parole violations and traffic stops, the report noted. The researchers acknowledge, however, that they may be underestimating the role of intelligence because some foiled plots are never publicized.
The report also stated:
The report’s findings show how personal information collected in massive databases without a specific threat in mind may not always contribute meaningfully to the war on terror. Homeland security officials hope such systems will enable them to detect crime and terrorism early by showing patterns that common police work might otherwise miss.
The Department of Homeland Security has spent over $426 million on dozens of fusion centers across the country for collecting, analyzing, and merging data across localities and agencies. But the centers have come under fire for among other things not developing policies that protect privacy and civil liberties and for targeting peace activists and lobbying groups.
There’s also a risk that intelligence analysts will be overwhelmed by data – several failures allowed the Christmas Day bomber to board a Detroit-bound plane wearing explosives in his underwear, a Senate panel concluded earlier this year. In that case, passengers with sharp eyes caught what professional terror-watchers missed.
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11.16.10
Posted in Environment, society at 11:15 am by site admin
For the sake of a sesame seed, you drop the watermelon.
Check out <a href=”http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2010/11/15/china_trip/index.html”>this article</a> talking about the apparent cliche between China’s quest for sustainable development and the indulgence of luxury (that they also condemn the west for).
But even more revealing was a comment the ambassador made a little later. In China, he said, greenhouse gas emissions were a result of economic activity aimed at “development.” In the West, it was all about “luxury.”
Of course, just moments earlier, our group had driven past a Lamborghini dealership in downtown Beijing, just a few blocks from a Gucci store so imposing that it made the Forbidden City palace structures I can see from my hotel window look paltry. On the macro level, I can’t disagree with Ambassador Chen. China is still a developing nation where per capita incomes, while growing fast, are far below those enjoyed in advanced industrialized nations. But you can’t spend 10 minutes in Beijing without coming to the conclusion that China is hell-bent on pursuing exactly the same development arc as any other decadent, luxury seeking Western country. It is a cliché to note this, but the city is utterly transformed from 20 years ago. Millions and millions of bicycles have been traded in for sleek sedans.
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11.10.10
Posted in health, society at 7:57 pm by site admin
A 10-year-old Romanian girl has given birth in Spain, according to news accounts. The father is also a minor. Authorities don’t consider it a case of rape, and officials are deciding whether the girl and her family can keep the child.
The baby, born last week in the southern city of Jerez de la Frontera, weighed 6 pounds, 4 ounces. Micaela Navarro, the Andalusia region’s social affairs minister, said mother and child, whose gender was not revealed, are doing fine.
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09.14.10
Posted in health, society at 1:17 pm by site admin
Check out this article talking about Japan’s missing centenarians.
In August, the Justice Ministry ordered a review of records that found about 77,000 people who would be at least 120, and 884 people who would be 150 or older. The head count followed a flurry of reports about how elderly people are falling through the cracks in Japan as its population ages rapidly and family ties weaken.
In all, the survey of family registration records nationwide found that 234,354 centenarians were still listed as alive, but their whereabouts were unknown, the ministry said.
Because listings of people over 120 are almost certainly the result of lax bookkeeping, the ministry instructed local offices to attach a note to those records saying the people were unaccounted for, a ministry official said.
A ministry official said many of the missing people had probably died, lost touch with relatives or moved overseas. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing ministry policy.
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07.14.10
Posted in society at 8:54 am by site admin
Check out this article thats says obese men die about eight years earlier than non-obese men. While the article is pretty much your normal read of being overweight can be bad for your health, I found the following part quite interesting:
“As the obesity epidemic is still progressing rapidly, especially among children and adolescents, it is important to find out if obesity in early adulthood has lifelong mortality effects,” said the study’s leader, Esther Zimmermann, a researcher at the Institute of Preventive Medicine, Copenhagen University Hospital and the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.
The “obesity epidemic”? While I do agree obesity is fairly widespread these days, I find it odd to lump it with communicable traits and diseases (with which traditionally associate the concepts of spreading and epidemics. Point being is how do you spread obesity? Everyone has the innate ability to be obese (a combination of heredity, upbringing, lifestyle, and life view). When an obese person becomes skinny, do we say the disease has gone into remission? And if we are making value judgements on what is healthy and not, we should make judgements on fast food, junk food, sweets, lack of exercise, excessive television, etc.
I decided to take a quick look at dicitonary.com, and found there is a second definition that is applicable (even though there are multiple denotations, I believe the implied connotation gives us the wrong view).
- Also, ep·i·dem·i·cal. (of a disease) affecting many persons at the same time, and spreading from person to person in a locality where the disease is not permanently prevalent.
- extremely prevalent; widespread.
I think we need to take a step back and start re-evaluating our lifestyle decisions from the ground up. Lets focus on eating healthy, and teaching our kids good eating habits. There is no concept of full and mileage with food. We need to reframe how we eat and why we eat. Eat to live, and not live to eat.
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07.07.10
Posted in society, technology at 9:15 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how to camouflage yourself from facial recognition technology. The gist is that these technologies rely on general facial pattern with very specific composition and contrast of colors.
If you change the contrast in certain parts of your face — either through a watermark or by wearing a strategically-placed sticker or facepaint, recognition technology can’t identify that your face is a human face.
“It breaks apart the gestalt of the face,” he said. “That’s what original camouflage was supposed to do.”
Harvey said he got his idea from studying camouflage methods use during World War I and World War II. His project, CV Dazzle, is based on the original dazzle camouflage used by the military to hide ships in the 1940s.
While the flashy geometric patterns don’t seem like they could obscure a thing, they thwarted the enemy’s ability to tell the make or size of the ship. Similarly, zebra camouflage does little to blend the animal into the background of the savannah. But when zebras are in herds, predators like lions have difficulty picking out animals from the herd. (Dazzle camouflage was eventually phased out by the military as aviation technology and rangefinders improved.)
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05.25.10
Posted in society at 9:58 pm by site admin
Check out this article about the “selling out” and productive versus degenerate culture.
Being a ghetto cracker, regardless of race, is the pursuit of a lifestyle of self-sabotage that undermines human dignity and despises the morality that undergirds civil society. Selling out one’s dignity and future to regressive moral standards is the way of the ghetto cracker.
The author’s intent is better explained at the end of the article:
There is, however, an alternative vision of black American culture that recognizes the dual values of moral and economic responsibility. The July issue of Black Enterprise magazine does not promote misleading racial dichotomies but celebrates living wisely. The pages are filled with articles about investment strategies, starting businesses, homeownership, and a profile of black astrophysicist Neil Tyson, who received a PhD from Columbia University in 1991. There are ads featuring the Harlem Book Fair, the American Black Film Festival, and Morehouse College. Hard work, pursuing education, the virtues of prudence, integrity, self-discipline, humility, and the advantages of marriage and family are all part of the fabric that supports the activities celebrated in this alternative expression of the black community.
This is not “selling out”; it is “buying in.” Buying in to the fact that authentic blackness is not being a ghetto cracker. Buying in embraces a worldview that understands our common human nature and what it means to live in a way that is truly fulfilling–a worldview that promotes dignity, work, marriage, family, and healthy community. The real sell-out is the one who urbanizes counterproductive moral values and behaviors. They are people like Russell Simons, Puff Daddy, 50 Cent, the Ying Yang Twins, and others who encourage minorities to adopt the attitudes of the Southern, redneck cracker culture of the past while claiming authentic blackness. Being a chocolate covered antebellum redneck of the past is not being “black”; it is simply “selling out” disguised as hip hop.
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05.24.10
Posted in health, society at 9:56 pm by site admin
Check out this article that talks about how people who work 10+ hours a day are much more likely to develop heart disease or have a heart attack than those that don’t. The study seemed to be a bit limited and did not factor in other possibly relevant factors. In any case, bottom line, don’t work so much. Having balance is good.
The study doesn’t say how, exactly, long hours at work might affect heart health. To try to pinpoint the effect of work time, Dr. Virtanen and her colleagues took a range of health factors into account in their analysis, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diet and exercise, and whether or not the participants smoked. They also factored in the workers’ rank and salary, since socioeconomic status has been linked to heart health.
In some ways, the people who worked overtime were healthier than those who worked just seven hours a day. They were less likely to drink heavily and smoke, for instance, and they got more exercise. On the other hand, they tended to sleep less and reported experiencing more stress, having more demanding jobs, and having less control over their work.
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05.18.10
Posted in Environment, society at 11:04 pm by site admin
Check out this article talking about the presence of carcinogens all around us in today’s technologically modern era.
Some 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and they include Democrats and Republicans alike. Protecting ourselves and our children from toxins should be an effort that both parties can get behind — if enough members of Congress are willing to put the public interest ahead of corporate interests.
One reason for concern is that some cancers are becoming more common, particularly in children. We don’t know why that is, but the proliferation of chemicals in water, foods, air and household products is widely suspected as a factor. I’m hoping the President’s Cancer Panel report will shine a stronger spotlight on environmental causes of health problems — not only cancer, but perhaps also diabetes, obesity and autism.
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04.26.10
Posted in health, society at 8:25 pm by site admin
Check out this article questioning if there is a link between chocolate and depression. So much for chocolate just being when you are feeling unsatisfied.
When the researchers controlled for other dietary factors that could be linked to mood — such as caffeine, fat and carbohydrate intake — they found only chocolate consumption correlated with mood.
It’s not clear how the two are linked, the authors wrote. It could be that depression stimulates chocolate cravings as a form of self-treatment. Chocolate prompts the release of certain chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine, that produce feelings of pleasure.
There is no evidence, however, that chocolate has a sustained benefit on improving mood. Like alcohol, chocolate may contribute a short-term boost in mood followed by a return to depression or a worsened mood. A study published in 2007 in the journal Appetite found that eating chocolate improved mood but only for about three minutes.
It’s also possible that depressed people seek chocolate to improve mood but that the trans fats in some chocolate counteract the effect of omega-3 fatty acid production in the body, the authors said in the paper. Omega-3 fatty acids are thought to improve mental health.
Another theory is that chocolate consumption contributes to depression or that some physiological mechanism, such as stress, drives both depression and chocolate cravings.
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04.15.10
Posted in society at 10:13 am by site admin
Check out short this article on how older people have more social wisdom than younger people. So time to start listening to your elders… Atleast for social problems..
While the researchers expected wisdom to increase with age they were surprised at how strong the results were for disputes in society, Nisbett said. “There is a very large advantage for older people over younger people for those.”
Lynn A. Hasher, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, called the study “the single best demonstration of a long-held view that wisdom increases with age.”
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04.08.10
Posted in Religion/Philosophy, society at 9:19 pm by site admin
Check out this link about the Dalai Lama’s 18 rules for living:
At the start of the new millennium the Dalai Lama apparently issued eighteen rules for living. Since word travels slowly in the digital age these have only just reached me. Here they are.
- Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
- When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
- Follow the three Rs:
- Respect for self
- Respect for others
- Responsibility for all your actions.
- Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
- Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
- Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
- When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
- Spend some time alone every day.
- Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
- Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
- Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
- A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
- In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
- Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
- Be gentle with the earth.
- Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
- Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
- Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
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