tisiwoota

This is a blog entry I wrote (elsewhere) the day after the 2004 election.
It is, I think, worth revisiting today:

Even if “we” had won the election, our battles would not be over.
They would be easier yes, but not over. Either way, there is always
more to do. So let’s get back to doing it.

We have been reminded of the importance of working together,
and of not being complacent.
As many of us have read, those lessons are what sewed the basis of
the success of the current regime. It will work for us, too.

We have a start, and we can run with it, if we try.

Little did we know then how far we could get today.
So perhaps too, little do we know today, how much further
we shall get tomorrow.

I’ve been car-less since my car got stolen in September, but those of you still car-bound may want to check this roadside assistance alternative: A Better World Club.

Why the need for an alternative? Well, AAA isn’t just a benign organization that picks you up in emergencies and gets you hotel discounts. They do a lot of lobbying– and it’s all pro gas-guzzling, against fuel efficiency, against public transit (they’d rather see more highways paved), against the Clean Air Act, etc.

There’s a great Sierra Club article on A Better World Club (and AAA’s activities):
here

Excerpt:
Well, I think the bottom line question for everyone is, when the car breaks down at some inopportune time and place, will you be there?

The way that works is this: There are six national towing networks in the country, AAA being the most prominent of them. The important point is that these networks are non-exclusive for the most part. The service providers can sign up for any of them, so you’re really dealing with the same service providers no matter which network you’re with.

*BWC provides nationwide 24-hour emergency roadside assistance including towing, lockout and flat tire assistance, jumpstarts, gas and fuel delivery.
*BWC supports sound environmental policies like mass transit funding and the Clean Air Act.
* 1% of all BWC revenues go towards environmental cleanup and advocacy.
* BWC donates $1.00 for every online booking made through their web site and offer members free carbon offsets (to help fight global warming) when you make your airline reservations through Better World Club.

BWC is generally less expensive than AAA, and guarantees to match their prices.

Check it out, eh?

Better World Club

PS Also awesome? They have roadside assistance and towing for _bicycles_. Whoa nelly.

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.

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.

1. Magnetic Contact Lenses for Better Eyetracking “The system should work regardless of head orientation and movement, lighting conditions or “face furniture” such as goggles or glasses.” It’s being developed for military purposes, but should have some other cool applications– giving disabled people improved wheelchair control, surgical devices, video games (how popular would wii plus this be?), etc.

2. The Proteus Effect: Psychology of Avatars. Now this is a cool study, with interesting implications for real life. (For the unfamiliar, avatars are digital representations of people; golems that represent you in virtual worlds such as Second Life).

“In the first study, I found that participants in attractive avatars walked closer to and disclosed more information to a stranger than participants in unattractive avatars. In the second study, I found that participants in taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in a bargaining task than participants in shorter avatars. In the third study, I demonstrated that the Proteus Effect occurs in an actual online community. And in the final study, I showed that the Proteus Effect persists outside of the virtual environment. Placing someone in a taller avatar changes how they consequently negotiate in a face-to-face setting.”

3. Side by Side Comparison of Presidential Candidates’ Health Care Plans. Quite detailed! Covers both parties.

4. Technology Crutches Let Memory Deteriorate? Does relying on cellphones, Blackberrys, PDAs and other gadgets to recall information lower our memory skills? “Survey findings… show that the over-50s who grew up committing more to memory report better performance in many areas than those under 30 who are heavily reliant on technology to act as their day-to-day aide memoir.”

5. The Intuitive Advantage from Collectivist Culture “In a new psychological experiment, Chinese students outperformed their US counterparts when ask to infer another person’s perspective.”

1. The Gregarious Brain. Fascinating article about Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes people to have no fear of social interaction– making them friendly, and gullible, to an extreme. Especially great for its discussion of the implications for understanding our evolutionary past.

2. Cut the Farm Bill Fat A short op-ed in the NY Times about the need to phase out farm subsidies, pointed out by a friend who works for Bread for the World.

3. Transplastics Exhibition: Natural Fibers as Immune Response. I like the premise of this installation: “…the collection tells the (fictional) story of a world made of synthetics that’s overgrown by natural fibers as an immunological response”.

4. Legally Sweet. An interesting article about interpreting Splenda’s claims that its product is “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar” from the perspectives of chemistry and patent law.

5. Our Biotech Future. One of my favorite reads in a while. Freeman Dyson argues, among other things, that a future full of genetic engineering would not be a total departure from evolutionary history, but rather a renaissance of the horizontal gene transfer that typified early life. Talk about putting things in perspective! (Oh yes and as if that weren’t enough THEN he segues into a discussion of rural poverty and green technology).

Always makes a shot a little more interesting, I think.

1. Is Torture a ‘Fair Use’ of Copyrighted Music? Sounds like as good a way as any to keep a spotlight on the government’s actions. And look, yet another angle for criticizing the RIAA!

2. Get Virtual Lab Mice Drunk, Stoned, or High. Cute graphics.

3. Report says Voter Fraud is “Extremely Rare”. Why requiring photo IDs at polls only hurts democracy.

4. Study: Moral Outrage and Perceptions of Inequality.. Shows that stories of morally outrageous social injustices induced reader support of measures for greater equality, while rags-to-riches stories of heroic boot-strappers lowered support for such initiatives. Suggests people manipulate their perceptions of inequality to avoid emotional distress.

5. Amusing tale of the author’s stubborn search for the real-life location of an anonymous Windows wallpaper picture.