tisiwoota

1. Debunking the Tipping Point.
Turns out the influence of “influentials” is over-hyped.

2. The Engineering Mentality and Terrorism.
Sociological study concludes that “in the Middle East, the mindset of engineers mixes with religiosity — and a lack of professional opportunity — to produce a toxic, combustive psychology.”

3.
DNA Used to Construct Inanimate Nanocreations
Using DNA to drive crystal assembly. Pretty cool!

This is a major and fundamental step toward building functional “designer” materials using programmable self-assembly. This “bottom-up” approach will allow scientists to take inorganic materials and build structures with specific properties for a given application, such as therapeutics, biodiagnostics, optics, electronics or catalysis.

4.
FDA Faces Major Backlog
Scary.

In the last 14 years, the drug agency has lost 1,311 employees and nearly $300 million in appropriations to inflation while Congress has passed more than 100 laws defining or expanding its regulatory responsibilities. The agency now regulates about $1 trillion worth of goods, or 25 cents of every dollar spent by consumers.

The agency’s field inspection force has suffered, particularly in the area of food. In 1973, the F.D.A. undertook 34,919 food inspections; in 2006, that number had dropped to 7,783.

As the share of imported food, drugs and devices has soared, the number of agency import inspectors has plunged, to 380 in 2006 from 531 in 2003. Although 80 percent of the nation’s drug supply is now imported, the F.D.A. last year inspected only 30 of more than 3,000 foreign drug plants. It inspected 100 of 190,000 foreign food plants.

5.
Review of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror.
Stephen Miles is a great speaker, and the complicity of medical personnel is too often overlooked in talking about torture.

Miles examines medical reports on prisoners, notes discrepancy, omission, and inconsistency in its multitude. Shocking events, such as the government classifying only “two of twenty-three self-hangings as attempted suicides”, are revealed for what they are: medical complicity in cover-up. . . [M]edical personnel were far more involved in the ‘torture lite’ that occurred under the supervision of the American military: medical personnel monitored ‘patients’ to insure they could be tortured without dying; they used prior medical knowledge to devise torments for particular prisoners; and they used their expertise to cover-up evidence of torture, both on paper and on the bodies of those who were its victims. As Miles succinctly puts it, “[t]orturers need medical accomplices to keep prisoners alive as trauma is inflicted, to predict how severely detainees can be twisted, and to see that torture evaporates, leaving behind neither scars nor documentation.”

1. Darwin’s Surprise.
Scientists bring back extinct retroviruses to see what they can learn about modern viruses such as HIV.

2. Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters
Andrew Sullivan’s piece on why we need to transcend Boomer-politics.

3. Field Trials Aim to Tackle Poverty
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is pioneering the concept of randomized trials, more commonly associated with drug safety tests, to assess what works and what doesn’t in development and poverty interventions.

4.
Epigenetics May Explain PTSD in Offspring of Holocaust Survivors?
The abstract of the paper itself states: “Though the majority of our work has focused on adult offspring of Holocaust survivors, recent observations in infants born to mothers who were pregnant on 9/11 demonstrate that low cortisol in relation to parental PTSD appears to be present early in the course of development and may be influenced by in utero factors such as glucocorticoid programming.”

5. Malawi: Ending Starvation By Ignoring the Experts
Yet more proof of how damaging the World Bank’s ideology is, and a role model for other developing countries looking to get out of the aid trap.

I am shocked.

Lugging my way from the gate to baggage claim tonight, I glanced up at TV screen showing CNN. I expected to see, well, crap.

I still remember the first time I sat down and turned on the news after four years of an MSM-less collegiate bubble. The stories, the petty political issues, were the same as they were when I was in high school. A feature on gays in the military? What, did they just pop in a video from 1999? Oy.

But back to my shock.

CNN was doing a piece on political attack ads. And not just a two-minute fluff piece– they took a historical perspective, interviewing Dukakis about what he learned from the attack that tanked his campaign, they talked about the extreme things pamphleteers used to write in Jefferson’s time, and they showed Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “daisy ad”. They talked to people who orchestrated attack ads for each party, talked about video editing techniques (use slow-mo and a black and white zoom in on someone’s face to make them look sinister), talked about how the internet was changing the playing field (Republican spin expert laments “We used to have message control, total message control– now it’s the wild west”) and showed examples of ads from the current campaigns.

I mean, it’s still just covering tactics and strategies, not (heaven forbid) the merit of actual issues in the campaign, but mygod, it was like they’d had this crazy notion that journalism could involve in-depth coverage of something that actually _informs the public_.

I hope they slip in more substance before the person responsible is tracked down and fired.

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it’s not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock up in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safe-deposit box, because it
won’t be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.

At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It’s not safe here.
It’s not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of wingèd dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

Poem Before Pronouns

No water, lots of glaciers.
There was one bird

but she had no nest.
It got colder.

There were neither humans
nor gorillas: too cold

to go outside and work.
Finally, things began to change.

An onion grew somewhere.
Seeds got invented.

Somewhere else, one lizard
walked across a desert

and found the other lizard.
There was a blue warmth.

There was a blue warmth
and still some things began

to grow fur–as if they knew
it will be cold again.

-Thomas Lux

1. The Myth of Mars and Venus. Debunking myths about differences in language use by men and women.

2. The Secret of Intangible Wealth

A Mexican migrant to the U.S. is five times more productive than one who stays home. Why is that? The answer is not the obvious one: This country has more machinery or tools or natural resources. Instead, according to some remarkable but largely ignored research—by the World Bank, of all places—it is because the average American has access to over $418,000 in intangible wealth, while the stay-at-home Mexican’s intangible wealth is just $34,000.

3. TheOnion as Model Newspaper?

Are there any other newspapers that can boast a 60 percent increase in their print circulation during the last three years? … But type “best practices for newspapers” into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest themselves of their newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes much of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but nonetheless in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.

4. Menstral Blood as New Source of Stem Cells? A new wrinkle in the stem cell debate…

5. China Cop Uses Google Earth to Arrest a Human Trafficker. Cool story…

1. A Win in the Water War
“Stockton, Calif., residents have stopped one multinational company from taking over their water system, but other localities remain threatened.”

2. Using Flickr to Get Around Internet Censorship.
Flickr has “proved an effective tool for avoiding keyword filtering. Activists in China are using Flickr to disseminate images that contain words that get blocked by keyword filters - a simple tool allows a photo of Einstein at a blackboard to be annotated with arbitrary text that won’t be blocked by the Chinese firewall.”

3. Hot Squirrel Tails Deter Snakes.
“The ground squirrel heats up its tail then waves it in the snake’s face - a form of harassment that confuses the rattler, which has an infrared sensing organ for detecting small mammals…. This defensive tactic remained invisible to biologists until they looked at the animals through an infrared video camera. Now they believe that many other animals might be using infrared weaponry to ward off potential predators.” Awesome.

4. Visualizing Your Energy Use.
“How about making our energy use visible to everyone? Imagine if your daily consumption were part of your Facebook page — and broadcast to your friends by RSS feed. That would trigger what Ambient Devices CEO David Rose calls the sentinel effect: You’d work harder to conserve so you don’t look like a jackass in front of your peers. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. The design firm DIY Kyoto recently began selling a device called the Wattson, which not only shows your energy usage but can also transmit the data to a Web site, letting you compare yourself with other Wattson users worldwide.”

5. Microlending: Is it Really About Surviving Seasonal Income Variation.
This blogger points to a paper which argues that “the world’s poorest often are less badly hurting for food/medicine than they are for the most basic support networks and mechanisms we use to manage our lives. If your income is seasonal and you’ve got no bank, forget about starting a business - you can’t even plan for the next week. In this context, giving loans isn’t about creating and expanding ventures, it’s about meeting a basic need that might be as vital as the classic food, water, and shelter: the ability to manage risk and plan for changes.”

1. Programming Water to Display Digital Messages Whoa. “To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water.”

2. Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

3. Rise of Roboethics It is amazing how little it takes for humans to believe we are interacting with a creature that has agency.

Weizenbaum had developed a computer program that crudely mimicked a psychotherapist by rephrasing statements from human “patients” back to them as questions, thus supportively reflecting their thoughts. A user input of “I feel frustrated,” for instance, returned, “Why do you feel frustrated?”. . . Weizenbaum was deeply troubled by what he discovered during his experiments with ELIZA: Some of his students exhibited strong emotional connections to the program; some actually wished to be alone with it. Weizenbaum had unexpectedly discovered that, even if fully aware that they are talking to a simple computer program, people will nonetheless treat it as if it were a real, thinking being that cared about their problems—a phenomenon now known as the “Eliza Effect.”

4. Psychological Tricks to Make Sheep Better Weedkillers. Using aversion therapy to keep sheep from eating grapes and vines.

5.Lead Poisoning Linked to Crime Rates

The United States has had two spikes of lead poisoning: one at the turn of the 20th century, linked to lead in household paint, and one after World War II, when the use of leaded gasoline increased sharply. Both times, the violent crime rate went up and down in concert, with the violent crime peaks coming two decades after the lead poisoning peaks.

I figure while sitting in one airport (Oakland) it’s as good a time as any as to post these pics from another. The sculpture depicts a legend about Hindu gods and demons using a giant snake to churn the milky ocean to extract the nectar of immortality.

H’mong children selling bamboo walking sticks
(which were immediately helpful on the muddy trail down)

Inside:

(the clothes on the line were for sale to tourists)

Notice the pretty colored glass at the base of the wall

Outside, a barrel of dyes used to color the garments

(the fingers of many H’mong women are stained as a result)