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AREA 47
SECTION 97: RECYCLE BIN 2007
Other websites have ARCHIVES. But until I get my act together, All I've got is a Recycle Bin. This is not "Trash," But rather items pulled off the Home Page Which have not yet been Organized.
12/31/2007 2:50 AM
Year-End Review, With Yourself
Research shows that people who write out specific goals tend to be more successful in accomplishing things, whatever the nature of their objectives. But goals sometimes have a straight-from-central-casting quality: lose weight, exercise more, save more money, etc. They’re nice goals, but are they really the most important ones for you? Goals are more meaningful when they result from your taking stock of where you actually are, which requires you to think about how your life has developed over the past year. 12/20/2007 11:05 AM
U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 Senate Report Debunks "Consensus" Complete U.S. Senate Report Now Available: (LINK) Complete Report without Introduction: (LINK) INTRODUCTION: Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.
The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s office of the GOP Ranking Member details the views of the scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke out in 2007.
Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, the Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking." Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears “bite the dust.” (LINK) In addition, many scientists who are also progressive environmentalists believe climate fear promotion has "co-opted" the green movement. (LINK)
This blockbuster Senate report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007. This new “consensus busters” report is poised to redefine the debate.
Many of the scientists featured in this report consistently stated that numerous colleagues shared their views, but they will not speak out publicly for fear of retribution. Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, explains how many of his fellow scientists have been intimidated.
“Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,” Paldor wrote. [Note: See also July 2007 Senate report detailing how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation - LINK ]
Scientists from Around the World Dissent
This new report details how teams of international scientists are dissenting from the UN IPCC’s view of climate science. In such nations as Germany, Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia, New Zealand and France, nations, scientists banded together in 2007 to oppose climate alarmism. In addition, over 100 prominent international scientists sent an open letter in December 2007 to the UN stating attempts to control climate were “futile.” (LINK)
Paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, recently converted from a believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. Patterson noted that the notion of a “consensus” of scientists aligned with the UN IPCC or former Vice President Al Gore is false. “I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority.”
This new committee report, a first of its kind, comes after the UN IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri implied that there were only “about half a dozen” skeptical scientists left in the world. (LINK) Former Vice President Gore has claimed that scientists skeptical of climate change are akin to “flat Earth society members” and similar in number to those who “believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona.” (LINK) & (LINK)
The distinguished scientists featured in this new report are experts in diverse fields, including: climatology; oceanography; geology; biology; glaciology; biogeography; meteorology; oceanography; economics; chemistry; mathematics; environmental sciences; engineering; physics and paleoclimatology. Some of those profiled have won Nobel Prizes for their outstanding contribution to their field of expertise and many shared a portion of the UN IPCC Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Gore.
Additionally, these scientists hail from prestigious institutions worldwide, including: Harvard University; NASA; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the UN IPCC; the Danish National Space Center; U.S. Department of Energy; Princeton University; the Environmental Protection Agency; University of Pennsylvania; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the International Arctic Research Centre; the Pasteur Institute in Paris; the Belgian Weather Institute; Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; the University of Helsinki; the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S., France, and Russia; the University of Pretoria; University of Notre Dame; Stockholm University; University of Melbourne; University of Columbia; the World Federation of Scientists; and the University of London.
The voices of many of these hundreds of scientists serve as a direct challenge to the often media-hyped “consensus” that the debate is “settled.”
A May 2007 Senate report detailed scientists who had recently converted from believers in man-made global warming to skepticism. [See May 15, 2007 report: Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics: Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research – (LINK) ]
The report counters the claims made by the promoters of man-made global warming fears that the number of skeptical scientists is dwindling.
Examples of “consensus” claims made by promoters of man-made climate fears:
Former Vice President Al Gore (November 5, 2007): “There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat.” (LINK) Gore also compared global warming skeptics to people who 'believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona' (June 20, 2006 - LINK)
CNN’s Miles O’Brien (July 23, 2007): The scientific debate is over.” “We're done." O’Brien also declared on CNN on February 9, 2006 that scientific skeptics of man-made catastrophic global warming “are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually.” (LINK)
On July 27, 2006, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein described a scientist as “one of the few remaining scientists skeptical of the global warming harm caused by industries that burn fossil fuels.” (LINK) Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC view on the number of skeptical scientists as quoted on Feb. 20, 2003: “About 300 years ago, a Flat Earth Society was founded by those who did not believe the world was round. That society still exists; it probably has about a dozen members.” (LINK) Agence France-Press (AFP Press) article (December 4, 2007): The article noted that a prominent skeptic “finds himself increasingly alone in his claim that climate change poses no imminent threat to the planet.”
Andrew Dessler in the eco-publication Grist Magazine (November 21, 2007): “While some people claim there are lots of skeptical climate scientists out there, if you actually try to find one, you keep turning up the same two dozen or so (e.g., Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Christy, etc., etc.). These skeptics are endlessly recycled by the denial machine, so someone not paying close attention might think there are lots of them out there -- but that's not the case. (LINK)
The Washington Post asserted on May 23, 2006 that there were only “a handful of skeptics” of man-made climate fears. (LINK)
ABC News Global Warming Reporter Bill Blakemore reported on August 30, 2006: “After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate” on global warming. (LINK)
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Brief highlights of the report featuring over 400 international scientists:
Israel: Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has authored almost 70 peer-reviewed studies and won several awards. “First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial revolution (about 0.8C in 150 years or even 0.4C in the last 35 years) have occurred in Earth's climatic history. There's nothing special about the recent rise!”
Russia: Russian scientist Dr. Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences has authored more than 300 studies, nine books, and a 2006 paper titled “The Evolution and the Prediction of Global Climate Changes on Earth.” “Even if the concentration of ‘greenhouse gases’ double man would not perceive the temperature impact,” Sorochtin wrote.
Spain: Anton Uriarte, a professor of Physical Geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain and author of a book on the paleoclimate, rejected man-made climate fears in 2007. “There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried,” Uriate wrote.
Netherlands: Atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes, “I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting – a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number – entirely without merit,” Tennekes wrote. “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."
Brazil: Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo – Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil declared himself a skeptic. “The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming,” Hackbart wrote on May 30, 2007.
France: Climatologist Dr. Marcel Leroux, former professor at Université Jean Moulin and director of the Laboratory of Climatology, Risks, and Environment in Lyon, is a climate skeptic. Leroux wrote a 2005 book titled Global Warming – Myth or Reality? - The Erring Ways of Climatology. “Day after day, the same mantra - that ‘the Earth is warming up’ - is churned out in all its forms. As ‘the ice melts’ and ‘sea level rises,’ the Apocalypse looms ever nearer! Without realizing it, or perhaps without wishing to, the average citizen in bamboozled, lobotomized, lulled into mindless acceptance. ... Non-believers in the greenhouse scenario are in the position of those long ago who doubted the existence of God ... fortunately for them, the Inquisition is no longer with us!”
Norway: Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC: “It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.”
Finland: Dr. Boris Winterhalter, retired Senior Marine Researcher of the Geological Survey of Finland and former professor of marine geology at University of Helsinki, criticized the media for what he considered its alarming climate coverage. “The effect of solar winds on cosmic radiation has just recently been established and, furthermore, there seems to be a good correlation between cloudiness and variations in the intensity of cosmic radiation. Here we have a mechanism which is a far better explanation to variations in global climate than the attempts by IPCC to blame it all on anthropogenic input of greenhouse gases. “
Germany: Paleoclimate expert Augusto Mangini of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, criticized the UN IPCC summary. “I consider the part of the IPCC report, which I can really judge as an expert, i.e. the reconstruction of the paleoclimate, wrong,” Mangini noted in an April 5, 2007 article. He added: “The earth will not die.”
Canada: IPCC 2007 Expert Reviewer Madhav Khandekar, a Ph.D meteorologist, a scientist with the Natural Resources Stewardship Project who has over 45 years experience in climatology, meteorology and oceanography, and who has published nearly 100 papers, reports, book reviews and a book on Ocean Wave Analysis and Modeling: “To my dismay, IPCC authors ignored all my comments and suggestions for major changes in the FOD (First Order Draft) and sent me the SOD (Second Order Draft) with essentially the same text as the FOD. None of the authors of the chapter bothered to directly communicate with me (or with other expert reviewers with whom I communicate on a regular basis) on many issues that were raised in my review. This is not an acceptable scientific review process.”
Czech Republic: Czech-born U.S. climatologist Dr. George Kukla, a research scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at University of Columbia expressed climate skepticism in 2007. “The only thing to worry about is the damage that can be done by worrying. Why are some scientists worried? Perhaps because they feel that to stop worrying may mean to stop being paid,” Kukla told Gelf Magazine on April 24, 2007.
India: One of India's leading geologists, B.P. Radhakrishna, President of the Geological Society of India, expressed climate skepticism in 2007. “We appear to be overplaying this global warming issue as global warming is nothing new. It has happened in the past, not once but several times, giving rise to glacial-interglacial cycles.”
USA: Climatologist Robert Durrenberger, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and one of the climatologists who gathered at Woods Hole to review the National Climate Program Plan in July, 1979: “Al Gore brought me back to the battle and prompted me to do renewed research in the field of climatology. And because of all the misinformation that Gore and his army have been spreading about climate change I have decided that ‘real’ climatologists should try to help the public understand the nature of the problem.”
Italy: Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists and a retired Professor of Advanced Physics at the University of Bologna in Italy, who has published over 800 scientific papers: “Significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming."
New Zealand: IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990 and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001: “The [IPCC] ‘Summary for Policymakers’ might get a few readers, but the main purpose of the report is to provide a spurious scientific backup for the absurd claims of the worldwide environmentalist lobby that it has been established scientifically that increases in carbon dioxide are harmful to the climate. It just does not matter that this ain't so.”
South Africa: Dr. Kelvin Kemm, formerly a scientist at South Africa’s Atomic Energy Corporation who holds degrees in nuclear physics and mathematics: “The global-warming mania continues with more and more hype and less and less thinking. With religious zeal, people look for issues or events to blame on global warming.”
Poland: Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw: ““We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming—with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy—is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels.”
Australia: Prize-wining Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer, a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia: "There is new work emerging even in the last few weeks that shows we can have a very close correlation between the temperatures of the Earth and supernova and solar radiation.”
Britain: Dr. Richard Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant: “To date, no convincing evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with AGW model predictions.”
China: Chinese Scientists Say C02 Impact on Warming May Be ‘Excessively Exaggerated’ – Scientists Lin Zhen-Shan’s and Sun Xian’s 2007 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics: "Although the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated." Their study asserted that "it is high time to reconsider the trend of global climate change.”
Denmark: Space physicist Dr. Eigil Friis-Christensen is the director of the Danish National Space Centre, a member of the space research advisory committee of the Swedish National Space Board, a member of a NASA working group, and a member of the European Space Agency who has authored or co-authored around 100 peer-reviewed papers and chairs the Institute of Space Physics: “The sun is the source of the energy that causes the motion of the atmosphere and thereby controls weather and climate. Any change in the energy from the sun received at the Earth’s surface will therefore affect climate.”
Belgium: Climate scientist Luc Debontridder of the Belgium Weather Institute’s Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) co-authored a study in August 2007 which dismissed a decisive role of CO2 in global warming: "CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. “Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it.”
Sweden: Geologist Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, professor emeritus of the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology at Stockholm University, critiqued the Associated Press for hyping promoting climate fears in 2007. “Another of these hysterical views of our climate. Newspapers should think about the damage they are doing to many persons, particularly young kids, by spreading the exaggerated views of a human impact on climate.”
USA: Dr. David Wojick is a UN IPCC expert reviewer, who earned his PhD in Philosophy of Science and co-founded the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University: “In point of fact, the hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The GHG (greenhouse gas) hypothesis does not do this.” Wojick added: “The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”
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Background: Only 52 Scientists Participated in UN IPCC Summary The over 400 skeptical scientists featured in this new report outnumber by nearly eight times the number of scientists who participated in the 2007 UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers. The notion of “hundreds” or “thousands” of UN scientists agreeing to a scientific statement does not hold up to scrutiny. (See report debunking “consensus” LINK) Recent research by Australian climate data analyst Dr. John McLean revealed that the IPCC’s peer-review process for the Summary for Policymakers leaves much to be desired. (LINK) Proponents of man-made global warming like to note how the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have issued statements endorsing the so-called "consensus" view that man is driving global warming. But both the NAS and AMS never allowed member scientists to directly vote on these climate statements. Essentially, only two dozen or so members on the governing boards of these institutions produced the "consensus" statements. This report gives a voice to the rank-and-file scientists who were shut out of the process. (LINK) The most recent attempt to imply there was an overwhelming scientific “consensus” in favor of man-made global warming fears came in December 2007 during the UN climate conference in Bali. A letter signed by only 215 scientists urged the UN to mandate deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. But absent from the letter were the signatures of these alleged “thousands” of scientists. (See AP article: - LINK )
UN IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri urged the world at the December 2007 UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia to "Please listen to the voice of science.”
The science has continued to grow loud and clear in 2007. In addition to the growing number of scientists expressing skepticism, an abundance of recent peer-reviewed studies have cast considerable doubt about man-made global warming fears. A November 3, 2007 peer-reviewed study found that “solar changes significantly alter climate.” (LINK) A December 2007 peer-reviewed study recalculated and halved the global average surface temperature trend between 1980 – 2002. (LINK) Another new study found the Medieval Warm Period “0.3C warmer than 20th century” (LINK)
A peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists found that "warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence." (LINK) – Another November 2007 peer-reviewed study in the journal Physical Geography found “Long-term climate change is driven by solar insolation changes.” (LINK ) These recent studies were in addition to the abundance of peer-reviewed studies earlier in 2007. - See "New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears" (LINK )
With this new report of profiling 400 skeptical scientists, the world can finally hear the voices of the “silent majority” of scientists.
LINKS TO COMPLETE U.S. SENATE REPORT: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 Complete Report: (LINK) Complete Report without Introduction: (LINK) --
12/3/2007 11:34 AM National debt grows $1 million a minuteWASHINGTON - Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day — or nearly $1 million a minute.
What's that mean to you? It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States. Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion. And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt — now at relatively low interest rates — rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain. So long as somebody is willing to keep loaning the U.S. government money, the debt is largely out of sight, out of mind. But the interest payments keep compounding, and could in time squeeze out most other government spending — leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above. A major economic slowdown, as some economists suggest may be looming, could hasten the day of reckoning. The national debt — the total accumulation of annual budget deficits — is up from $5.7 trillion when President Bush took office in January 2001 and it will top $10 trillion sometime right before or right after he leaves in January 2009. That's $10,000,000,000,000.00, or one digit more than an odometer-style "national debt clock" near New York's Times Square can handle. When the privately owned automated clock was activated in 1989, the national debt was $2.7 trillion. It only gets worse. Over the next 25 years, the number of Americans aged 65 and up is expected to almost double. The work population will shrink and more and more baby boomers will be drawing Social Security and Medicare benefits, putting new demands on the government's resources. These guaranteed retirement and health benefit programs now make up the largest component of federal spending. Defense is next. And moving up fast in third place is interest on the national debt, which totaled $430 billion last year. Aggravating the debt picture: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost $2.4 trillion over the next decade Despite vows in both parties to restrain federal spending, the national debt as a percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product has grown from about 35 percent in 1975 to around 65 percent today. By historical standards, it's not proportionately as high as during World War II — when it briefly rose to 120 percent of GDP, but it's a big chunk of liability. "The problem is going forward," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poors, a major credit-rating agency. "Our estimate is that the national debt will hit 350 percent of the GDP by 2050 under unchanged policy. Something has to change, because if you look at what's going to happen to expenditures for entitlement programs after us baby boomers start to retire, at the current tax rates, it doesn't work," Wyss said. With national elections approaching, candidates of both parties are talking about fiscal discipline and reducing the deficit and accusing the other of irresponsible spending. But the national debt itself — a legacy of overspending dating back to the American Revolution — receives only occasional mention. Who is loaning Washington all this money? Ordinary investors who buy Treasury bills, notes and U.S. savings bonds, for one. Also it is banks, pension funds, mutual fund companies and state, local and increasingly foreign governments. This accounts for about $5.1 trillion of the total and is called the "publicly held" debt. The remaining $4 trillion is owed to Social Security and other government accounts, according to the Treasury Department, which keeps figures on the national debt down to the penny on its Web site. Some economists liken the government's plight to consumers who spent like there was no tomorrow — only to find themselves maxed out on credit cards and having a hard time keeping up with rising interest payments. "The government is in the same predicament as the average homeowner who took out an adjustable mortgage," said Stanley Collender, a former congressional budget analyst and now managing director at Qorvis Communications, a business consulting firm. Much of the recent borrowing has been accomplished through the selling of shorter-term Treasury bills. If these loans roll over to higher rates, interest payments on the national debt could soar. Furthermore, the decline of the dollar against other major currencies is making Treasury securities less attractive to foreigners — even if they remain one of the world's safest investments. For now, large U.S. trade deficits with much of the rest of the world work in favor of continued foreign investment in Treasuries and dollar-denominated securities. After all, the vast sums Americans pay — in dollars — for imported goods has to go somewhere. But that dynamic could change. "The first day the Chinese or the Japanese or the Saudis say, `we've bought enough of your paper,' then the debt — whatever level it is at that point — becomes unmanageable," said Collender. A recent comment by a Chinese lawmaker suggesting the country should buy more euros instead of dollars helped send the Dow Jones plunging more than 300 points. The dollar is down about 35 percent since the end of 2001 against a basket of major currencies. Foreign governments and investors now hold some $2.23 trillion — or about 44 percent — of all publicly held U.S. debt. That's up 9.5 percent from a year earlier. Japan is first with $586 billion, followed by China ($400 billion) and Britain ($244 billion). Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries account for $123 billion, according to the Treasury. "Borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from China and OPEC puts not only our future economy, but also our national security, at risk. It is critical that we ensure that countries that control our debt do not control our future," said Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, a Republican budget hawk. Of all federal budget categories, interest on the national debt is the one the president and Congress have the least control over. Cutting payments would amount to default, something Washington has never done. Congress must from time to time raise the debt limit — sort of like a credit card maximum — or the government would be unable to borrow any further to keep it operating and to pay additional debt obligations. The Democratic-led Congress recently did just that, raising the ceiling to $9.82 trillion as the former $8.97 trillion maximum was about to be exceeded. It was the fifth debt-ceiling increase since Bush became president in 2001. Democrats are blaming the runup in deficit spending on Bush and his Republican allies who controlled Congress for the first six years of his presidency. They criticize him for resisting improvements in health care, education and other vital areas while seeking nearly $200 billion in new Iraq and Afghanistan war spending. "We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "That's fiscal irresponsibility." Republicans insist congressional Democrats are the irresponsible ones. Bush has reinforced his call for deficit reduction with vetoes and veto threats and cites a looming "train wreck" if entitlement programs are not reined in. Yet his efforts two years ago to overhaul Social Security had little support, even among fellow Republicans. The deficit only reflects the gap between government spending and tax revenues for one year. Not exactly how a family or a business keeps its books. Even during the four most recent years when there was a budget surplus, 1998-2001, the national debt ranged between $5.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion. As in trying to pay off a large credit-card balance by only making minimum payments, the overall debt might be next to impossible to chisel down appreciably, regardless of who is in the White House or which party controls Congress, without major spending cuts, tax increases or both. "The basic facts are a matter of arithmetic, not ideology," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates eliminating federal deficits. There's little dispute that current fiscal policies are unsustainable, he said. "Yet too few of our elected leaders in Washington are willing to acknowledge the seriousness of the long-term fiscal problem and even fewer are willing to put it on the political agenda." Polls show people don't like the idea of saddling future generations with debt, but proposing to pay down the national debt itself doesn't move the needle much. "People have a tendency to put some of these longer term problems out of their minds because they're so pressed with more imminent worries, such as wages and jobs and income inequality," said pollster Andrew Kohut of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Texas billionaire Ross Perot made paying down the national debt a central element of his quixotic third-party presidential bid in 1992. The national debt then stood at $4 trillion and Perot displayed charts showing it would soar to $8 trillion by 2007 if left unchecked. He was about a trillion low. Not long ago, it actually looked like the national debt could be paid off — in full. In the late 1990s, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office projected a surplus of a $5.6 trillion over ten years — and calculated the debt would be paid off as early as 2006. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan recently wrote that he was "stunned" and even troubled by such a prospect. Among other things, he worried about where the government would park its surplus if Treasury bonds went out of existence because they were no longer needed. Not to worry. That surplus quickly evaporated. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, said he's more concerned that interest on the national debt will become unsustainable than he is that foreign countries will dump their dollar holdings — something that would undermine the value of their own vast holdings. "We're going to have to shell out a lot of resources to make those interest payments. There's a very strong argument as to why it's vital that we address our budget issues before they get measurably worse," Zandi said. "Of course, that's not going to happen until after the next president is in the White House," he added. --
Cool and the GangStephen King sizes up who's cool...and who's notAfter exhaustive research — 20 minutes, at least — I can only find two adjectives in the English language that cannot be modified. One is unique. You can't say something is totally unique or even very unique; either a thing is unique or it isn't. Like the Farmer in the Dell's cheese, unique stands alone. This is also true of cool. It's one of our longest-running slang terms. Wikipedia says the concept may date back to Aristotle. Could be, but today's usage seems to have originated with the rhythm & blues hipsters who learned their chops in the 1930s and '40s. You can find definitions in various slang dictionaries, but the meaning of cool is beyond definition. And, as I said, beyond modification. It just is, man. Lots of people don't understand that, because they're not cool. Your Uncle Stevie is cool, however (he says it with all appropriate modesty), and has been since he ditched his first pair of school corduroys (Husky Boys size, from the Sears catalog...and, oh God, how square, with cuffs) for pegged jeans, a leather jacket, and a scuffed pair of boots with elastic sides and pointed toes. (Note: Many kinds of boots come with square toes, but they are not cool; boots with square toes are and always will be ''country s---kickers.'') Now, look. We all read EW religiously, and we know about hot — male hotties, female hotties, who's hot and who's not — but I'm here to tell you that hot doesn't matter. Hot is for square bears weighted down with earthly cares. What matters is cool. You know, like Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven. Or Natalie Wood starting the hot-rod race in Rebel Without a Cause. Take, for instance, Bruce Springsteen's new album, Magic. It's good, but not cool. Then there's John Fogerty's latest. It's not as good as Springsteen's disc, but it is cool, especially ''Creedence Song.'' It might have something to do with the way Fogerty says ''Creedence'' — it's some strange and exotic pronunciation, as if he learned the word in Lithuanian. Here's another example: Michael Clayton. Great film, but not cool...although Tom Wilkinson, who plays the so-crazy-he's-sane lawyer, is cool in it. George Clooney gives a heckuva performance in the movie, but he's not a bit cool. Not square, I won't go that far, but cool? No. Sorry. On the other hand, Jodie Foster is cool in The Brave One; her defining moment of cool comes late in the film, when she snarls, ''I want my dog back!'' In this year's other vigilante movie, the wonderfully bloodthirsty Death Sentence, Kevin Bacon isn't cool, but John Goodman — as a sleazy gun dealer — is. In this case I know exactly why. It's his glasses. In 3:10 to Yuma, it's the hat. Russell Crowe is cool because of the hat. But here's the thing — you or I could wear that hat and not be cool. It's Russell Crowe under the hat that makes it cool, just as it's John Goodman's face behind the glasses. Are any actors always cool? Even in bad movies? I'd say there are at least four: Jack Nicholson, Holly Hunter, Morgan Freeman, and the late John Cassavetes. It's worth noting that Cassavetes directed many films and none were cool. Best consistently noncool male actor? Tom Hanks. Best consistently noncool female actor? Charlize Theron. On TV, Prison Break isn't very good, but it has stayed cool. And the just-concluded season of Damages was one bad refrigerator. Friday Night Lights? Good, but not cool. Because it tries too hard to be cool. Battlestar Galactica? Was cool; last season started out cool, then warmed up. It may regain its coolness factor, but probably not; that rarely happens. Lost has stayed cool because it's so weird. American Idol was never cool. It says sad things about the coolness quotient of our young people that any of them like this warmed-over Las Vegas meatloaf. Mystery-suspense writer Michael Connelly is cool. So is George Pelecanos. Elmore Leonard, the true Daddy Cool of American letters, is chillier than your freezer's ice-cube dispenser. Robert Parker used to be cool but isn't anymore. Ditto Patricia Cornwell. James Patterson never was, never will be. Gotta say it: Nora Roberts is cool. I don't make the news, honey, I just report it. There's no rhyme or reason to the coolness thing. Look at politicians, the ultimate entertainers. Barack Obama is cool. Hillary Clinton, who will probably win the Democratic Party's nomination to run for president, is not. On the other side — well, it's hard to be a Republican and be cool, it's almost an oxymoron, but John McCain is cool. And, of course, Bob Dole. Very cool. Hence the Viagra ads. Remember, cool is not a way of life; it's a state of being. Like your height. I can't help being 6'3", and I can't help being cool. Same way Michael Crichton can't help being 6'9''...and not cool. It doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you're a good person, either. Some of us just have to be Fred Rogers. Oops, my bad. I just remembered: Fred Rogers was cool. I think it was the sweater. --
Report: China targeting all 'enemy space vehicles' including GPS satellites China’s anti-satellite and space warfare program includes plans to destroy or incapacitate 'every enemy space vehicle' that passes over China.
The annual report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, released last week, listed among Beijing's goals that of ensuring that Chinese space weapons are “conducted covertly so China can maintain a positive international image.” China has called for a ban on space weapons at the United Nations. The report said that China also is developing civilian technology that can be applied to military space programs and is acquiring the “ability to destroy or temporarily incapacitate every enemy space vehicle when it is located above China,” the report said. The Chinese also plan to attack U.S. global positioning system (GPS) satellites through various means, including anti-satellite weapons, high-energy weapons, high-energy weather monitoring rockets and ground attacks on earth-based stations. One section of the report, based on public and classified briefings, concluded there was a need for more information about Chinese activities and intentions. Research from nearly 100 Chinese sources identified 30 proposals and recommendations by Chinese military leaders “regarding the development of space and counter-space weapons and programs.” The military is also developing stealth satellites and a space program that will “provide key support for Chinese combat forces.” “Some of these proposals appear to have been implemented already, as evidenced by January’s kinetic anti-satellite test and earlier laser incidents involving American satellites,” the report said. --
11/29/2007 1:48 PM Half of immigrants in Texas are there illegally, study saysState has one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations.Thursday, November 29, 2007 WASHINGTON — Half of the nearly 3.5 million immigrants living in Texas are in the country illegally, the Center for Immigration Studies says in a report being released today. Based on the latest Census Bureau data, the report said Texas has one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations of any state. It said that 50 percent of the state's foreign-born population — slightly more than 1.7 million people — are illegal immigrants. Only Arizona at 65 percent, North Carolina at 58 percent and Georgia at 53 percent had a higher proportion of illegal immigrants in their immigrant populations. Many people within the undocumented population are unskilled workers and tend to go to states where they can find those types of jobs, explained Flavia Jimenez, a senior policy analyst with the National Council of La Raza, a nonpartisan advocacy group for Hispanic Americans. And many go where there are already family members. The influx of immigrants into Texas reflects the national trend, the report showed. The nation's immigrant population — legal and illegal — reached a record of 37.9 million in 2007. Nearly one in three of these newcomers is here illegally. Half of the immigrants from Mexico and Central America are in the country illegally, and one-third of those from South America are illegal immigrants. The report documents this surge of new arrivals and describes its impact. "The last seven years have been the highest period of immigration in American history," the report said. "Immigrants and their young children (under 18) now account for one-fifth of the school-age population, one-fourth of those in poverty and nearly one-third of those without health insurance." Immigration accounts for nearly all of the national increase in public school enrollment over the past two decades, the report said. In 2007, there were 10.8 million school-age children from immigrant families in the United States — about one in five of the nation's school-age kids. In Texas, 26.7 percent of the school-age (5-17) population had immigrant fathers. About half of these immigrant children — 13 percent of the state's total school age population — were illegal immigrants or the offspring of illegal immigrants. About one-third of all families nationally headed by an immigrant use at least one welfare program — compared to less than one-fifth for native households, the report said. The percentage in Texas exceeds the national average, with 39.2 percent of immigrant households using at least one welfare program, compared with 21.1 percent of native households. The report is called "Immigrants in the United States, 2007: A Profile of America's Foreign-Born Population." It was written by Seven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank that advocates reductions in immigration. The data came from the March 2007 Current Population Survey collected by the Census Bureau. "There is nothing surprising in the report. These are the same kind of findings we have seen with other research," Jimenez said. "This is further proof that, in our opinion, this country needs to fix its immigration system." The report said immigrants and their U.S.-born children under the age of 18 now make up 21 percent of Texas' population. Children born in the U.S. are citizens even if their parents are illegal immigrants. The number of immigrants in Texas has risen rapidly in a little more than a decade — growing from 2.2 million in 1995 to 2.6 million in 2000 to nearly 3.5 million in 2007. Since 2000, the state's immigrant population has increased 32.7 percent. --
10 most foolish mistakes of IT pros-- The top 10 IT disasters of all time--
11/28/2007 2:26 PM
A New Way to Control Weight?Scientists Say Just Standing Up May Be as Important as Exercise
Is Atomic Radiation as Dangerous as We Thought?
A mounting number of studies are coming to some surprising conclusions about the dangers of nuclear radiation. It might not be as deadly as is widely believed.
-- http://www.darkroastedblend.com/ Rare & Beautiful
Vintage Visions of the Future -- 11/27/2007 1:59 PM Ten things holding back techThe pace of change in IT has never been faster — or has it? After 25 years of desktop computing and 15 years of the commercial internet, there are still plenty of frustrations, pains and throwbacks in our everyday technology experience. It's great having a terabyte hard disk, but not so great trying to manage it using interfaces and tools that have barely changed from the days when 40MB was respectable. Many factors are holding back technology. Here is a list of 10 such barriers, in no particular order. We have almost certainly missed a few, so feel free to leave your comments using the Talkback facility at the bottom of the page. 1. Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop For most people, computing means Windows, not because they choose it but because the company's immense power in retail and business channels, together with the inertia that comes through decades of market dominance, make it a default that's hard to change. So why does this hold back innovation? The European Commission ruled that computer users are unnecessarily used to products like Windows Media Player — applications that are mediocre just because Microsoft has no real incentive to make them better. Monopolies are anti-competitive and therefore anti-innovation. Just look at Internet Explorer's long stagnation. Microsoft's stifling influence on new ways of thinking goes beyond applications, however. As Vista so readily proves, rehashing the same idea again and again does not make for progress. For everyone's sake, especially Microsoft itself, the company needs to learn to compete fairly again. 2. Operator lock-in However, both situations show, or have shown, the harm that can be done to innovation when those operating the pipes of the internet decide they want control over content. Operators providing content is nothing new, nor is it a bad or surprising thing for them to do, but that provision needs to be in line with the founding principles of the internet if innovation is to flourish. Any threat to the equality of access and provision on the internet is a bad thing for innovation, and a combination of the market and regulation is needed to hold such threats at bay. 3. Input methods There are lots of new ideas — voice, gesture and handwriting recognition; video and infrared inputs that watch what we do with our hands and decide what it is that we want — but the mobile experience remains one of thumb-mangling, eye-straining frustration. A BlackBerry keyboard is a wonder of miniaturisation; shame the same's not true of most BlackBerry users. Until we manage to break down the barriers erected between us and the machines back in the days before eight-bit processors, we'll be stuck back there too. 4. Battery life Particularly on the handset side, the increase in processing power needed to support the internet and the mobile office puts huge demands on a device's battery, as do high-speed wireless data technologies like 3G — there is a good reason why the iPhone, which has to provide a reasonable simulation of the iPod's battery life, does not currently use 3G. Also, even when they refrain from exploding, the lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries used in a wide variety of electronic devices become less efficient over time. That means mobile technology will forever lag behind fixed technology. But perhaps the greatest application for improved battery technology would be in electric cars. The concept is proven and on the street but, until it becomes possible to go as far on a charge as you would on a tank of fuel, only first adopters and urban eco-warriors will bother. 5. The mania for speed Too much R&D time and money goes into processor speed when other issues remain under-addressed. For example, could data not be handled a bit better? What about smarter ways of tagging data? The semantic web initiative runs along these sorts of lines, so where is the hardware-based equivalent? It is all very well to be able to run the latest DX10 games on your PC, but untold mould-shattering developments lie on the other side of a concerted effort to rethink the nature of the computer. Whichever chipmaker becomes the first to... ...think beyond speed alone will gain a whole new advantage over its competitors: smarter, not faster, will lead to both smarter and faster. 6. Intellectual property law Intellectual property law is broken. Creativity needs protection, but the current system isn't working. Designed to encourage inventiveness and the building of ideas on ideas, it instead rewards power and influence with more power and influence. The ideal world of the intellectual property lawyer is one where nothing can move without permission; no idea can happen unless it is approved. This is no model for a world where ideas can spread like never before and information is freer than even the most utopian could have imagined 50 years ago. A new way of thinking about information ownership is needed, and quickly. 7. Skills inequalities Technology has traditionally been terrible at attracting anyone but the technically minded. Seen by many as incredibly dull and exclusive, the industry most needs the influence of those who give it the least thought. Even the best technical process could benefit from a little humanity. Industry is also waking up to the developing world and beginning to hear its voice. Technology has the capability of leapfrogging the biggest problems, but only if it's built to match the needs of the people it serves. The more IT listens to and gives power to those it has traditionally excluded, the better it will be suited to solve real problems for us all. 8. Web 2.0 Do we really need applications like Twitter? What price a poke on Facebook? Microsoft's recent purchase of a chunk of Facebook valued the social-networking company at $15bn (£7.2bn). This is a company that does not yet have a proven business plan, despite having big aspirations as a marketing hub. Two years ago, eBay bought Skype for $2.6bn and Skype — a mostly free service — is currently struggling to justify that price. It's nice to see the vanguard cashing in. But they're not really worth their valuations or the mountains of cash they have received from venture capitalists, whose money could probably find better use in other areas of technological innovation. With the global economy in its current, credit-crunched state, Web 2.0 runs the risk of not only taking funding away from worthier areas of research but also contributing to a downturn that may hit the tech industry particularly hard. It remains a crucial element of the way we interact through technology, but its business models need a lot of work. 9. National interests If we view technology as a globally collaborative effort, one of the clearest barriers to its development is that of national interests. Look at the interminable arguments in organisations like the International Telecommunication Union. Countries defend the interests of their indigenous corporations and lobby groups; the idea that these interests may be better served in the long term by ceding ground in the short is as popular as skinny-dipping in the Antarctic. Sometimes it is hard to escape the notion that certain countries are deviating from the pack just for the sake of it, much as Napoleon and the US had horses and carriages use the right-hand side of the road for no other reason than the British used the left. Despite the upcoming Olympics, China is still dragging its heels over the deployment of 3G because it wants to use its own home-grown standard, TD-SCDMA. Its motivations for this include avoiding payments to western patent holders, but the main driver is the fact that China has a large enough internal market to not have to worry about inconsistencies with international norms. Overall, progress is yet again slowed down. Some national interests have an almost absurdly negative effect on international technological development. For years, the US government classified encryption technology as a munition, and had export laws that forbade the distribution to the world of chips using the RSA algorithm. The ban proved unworkable in the long term but, for a long while, it seriously held back the development of security technology around the world. 10. The current lack of global
wars and/or disasters These days, warfare still results in misery and death, but the technological benefits are harder to appreciate. There's not much in a stealth fighter or bomb-disposal robot that helps away from the battlefield. Let's stick to metaphorical warfare. That's something politicans are good at promoting, but bad at executing — the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" both sound good but have generated little of note, beyond copious government expenditure on ever more inventive ways to annoy their own citizens. If we must have war, we might as well use it wisely. The biggest threats to mankind are environmental change, disease and international political and economic upheaval. Putting the nations of the world on a war footing against this terrible triad would produce a flowering of new, focused thinking and technologies — and nobody would get hurt. --
"Techdirt reports that Amazon has been awarded a patent for Generating Current Order Fulfillment Plans Based on Expected Future Orders. Essentially, if Amazon deems that you won't be a long time customer or ordering again soon, your order will take longer to be expedited."
--
11/24/2007 11:51 PM
"I was recently laid off, and during several of the interviews looking for a new job as a mid level IT manager, I was asked "So, I can just Google your name and find some of your work?" The answer is "yes", but searching for my name doesn't really bring up many results compared to searching for my online nickname which I have been using for about a decade. I am very tempted just to put that nickname on my resume. Is the professional, albeit technical, world ready for this step? Where should I put it? At the top or somewhere in the body?" And the other problem- how hard will it be to get a job when your nickname is something ridiculous. Boy I wish I would have thought of that in 95 ;)
My current employer
googled my email address, found my LiveJournal and read the previous
two years or so of what I'd been writing.
-- I am very tempted
just to put that nickname on my resume. Is the professional, albeit
technical, world ready for this step? --
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7104558.stm Earth's Moon is 'cosmic rarity' -- 
-- Mankind 'shortening the universe's life'
Over the past few years,
cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what
happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to
extend it to understand the universe, since it began in
the subatomic realm during the Big Bang. -- Cyberbullying Suicide Stokes the Internet Fury MachineTwo years ago a college girl in South Korea was harassed after her tiny dog defecated on the floor of a subway car, and she ignored passengers' requests to clean it up. Someone on the train snapped her photo and posted it online. She was quickly dubbed Dog Poop Girl, and within days a cyberposse had discovered her name and was digging up information about her and her family. The public humiliation reportedly led her to withdraw from her university, and the pictures of her and the feces are still online today. --
Cat's daily routine baffles owner
A cat is baffling his owner by wandering off at night before expecting to be collected by car every morning at exactly the same time and place. Sgt Podge, a Norwegian Forest Cat, disappears from his owner's home in Talbot Woods, Bournemouth, every night. The next morning, the 12-year-old cat can always be found in exactly the same place, on a pavement about one and a half miles (2.4km) away. His owner, Liz Bullard, takes her son to school before collecting Sgt Podge. She said the routine began earlier this year, when Sgt Podge disappeared one day. Ms Bullard rang the RSPCA and began telephoning her neighbours to see if anyone had seen him. An elderly woman who lived about one and a half miles away called back to say she had found a cat matching Sgt Podge's description. Ms Bullard collected him but within days he vanished again. She rang the elderly woman to find Sgt Podge was back outside her home.
She said a routine has now become established, where each morning she takes her son to school before driving to collect Sgt Podge from the pavement between 0800 and 0815 GMT. It is thought Sgt Podge walks across Meyrick Park Golf Course every night to reach his destination. Ms Bullard said: "If it's raining he may be in the bush but he comes running if I clap my hands." All she has to do is open the car passenger door from the inside for Sgt Podge to jump in. Wandering the streets Ms Bullard also makes the trip at weekends and during school holidays - when her son is having a lie in. She does not know why, after 12 years, Sgt Podge has begun the routine but explained that another woman who lived nearby used to feed him sardines, and that he may be on the look-out for more treats. "As long as you know where they are you don't mind as a cat owner," Ms Bullard said. "I know where to collect him - as long as he's not wandering the streets." Back at home, Sgt Podge has breakfast before going to sleep by a warm radiator.
11/13/2007 12:18 PM
'Hidden costs raise' US war price
The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing nearly double the amount previously thought, according to a report by Democrats in the US Congress. They say "hidden costs" have pushed the total to about $1.5 trillion - nearly twice the requested $804bn (£402bn). Higher oil prices, treating wounded veterans, and the cost to the economy of pulling reservists away from their jobs have been taken into account. The White House has called the report politically motivated.
"This report was put out by Democrats on Capitol Hill," White House press secretary Dana Perino was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. "This committee is known for being partisan and political." "They did not consult or co-operate with the Republicans on the committee, and so I think it is an attempt to muddy the waters on what has been some positive developments being reported out of Iraq." And some of the figures the report contains were labelled speculative by funding experts, the Washington Post newspaper reported. 'Lost earnings' The report was written by Democratic members of Congress's Joint Economic Committee (JEC).
The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says it was designed to shock Americans into stronger opposition to the war in Iraq. The Democrats calculate that between 2002 and 2008 the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan will have cost the average US family of four about $20,900. The report adds that the amount could rise to $46,400 over the next decade. It cites costs such as interest payments on money borrowed from abroad to pay for the wars, lost investment in US businesses, and the cost of oil market disruptions. Oil prices have surged since the start of the war in Iraq, from about $37 a barrel to more than $90 a barrel in recent weeks. The report says the rise has hit US consumers. 'Unacceptable price' The chairman of the JEC, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, said the "backbreaking cost" of the war was becoming an unbearable burden for American families. "What this report makes crystal clear is that the cost to our country in lives lost and dollars spent is tragically unacceptable." He said: "The cost of the war... is becoming the first thing the people mention after the loss of life when they are opposed to this war and the people who mention it, many of them are not people who were against the war in the past." The report estimates that both wars could cost a total of $3.5 trillion over the next decade.
The Democratic authors estimated that treating veterans could add more than $30bn to costs, including disability payments and lost earnings for veterans affected by post-traumatic stress disorder.
11/11/2007 6:12 AM
Don’t Throw Out Your Broken iPod; Fix It via the Web
A FEW months ago, Stephen Ironside, a student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, confronted a minor but modern tragedy: the iPod that filled his life with song stopped working. The device was out of warranty, and Apple would not fix it free. So he left it in a drawer until he happened to read a blog posting on CrunchGear.com that described how he might fix it — with a small, folded piece of paper. Mr. Ironside celebrated by posting thanks on the blog: “I’ve been on CDs for months. You saved my life (and my iPod).” The author of the blog post, Matt Hickey of Seattle, says that using paper as a shim to put pressure on the hard drive has worked on about 70 percent of the failed iPods he has encountered — even though he is not sure why it works. Gadget-fixing is adapting to the modern era. Neighborhood repair shops are all but gone, and along with them the repairmen who could offer casual advice, even when that advice was whether it was worth repairing the device. But Web sites can help users find and share solutions that can save a device from the landfill. If the job is too tricky, a number of Internet-based firms offer highly specialized repairs via overnight mail. Some sites like macfixit.com, fixmyxp.com and macosxhints.com are devoted to a single product, while others like avsforum.com sponsor debates on a big product area, in this case home theaters, televisions and stereos. People with laptops that have suddenly gone blank can turn to www.notebookforums.com or notebookreview.com, and there are even a few sites like www.highdefforum.com for fixing TVs. Yaniv Bensadon, the chief executive of fixya.com, started his site after he moved back to Israel from the United States and found that his electronics would often malfunction in the new environment. The manuals and the support offered by the manufacturers rarely helped. His site groups questions and answers to problems and organizes them according to product type, brand name and model number. The page for the Microsoft Xbox 360, for instance, lists more than 100 questions with answers. Most provide a single solution, but one common problem, overheating, has 81 posts debating the best fix. All but about a dozen of the questions had answers, although some were a bit brief. (Microsoft has offered to fix those overheating Xbox 360s.) “Like any other consumer out there, I had problems with my Xerox printer, Palm Treo 700, Belkin wireless router and even Sony portable DVD,” Mr. Bensadon said. “On each of the problems I posted, I received a great solution within 5 to 10 hours.” Fixya rates the people who offer advice. Anyone can claim to be an expert on a topic, but their rating will rise or fall with the quality of their answers. The site also offers paid services from users who charge about $10 to $20 a problem. Knowledge is only half of the battle. A number of sites specialize in providing spare parts but also provide the information on how to install them as the incentive to use the site. PDAparts.com, for instance, sells replacement screens, batteries, cases and other parts for Palm Treos, iPaqs and other P.D.A.’s. Videos describing the process of opening the cases — probably the trickiest part of repairing today’s electronics — can be downloaded from the site. Most other gadgets come with batteries that are easy to replace without custom tools. Replacement batteries for cellphones are often marked up by the devices’ manufacturers, while third-party replacements are often available for 60 percent to 80 percent less. Companies offering replacement batteries for iPods often offer better batteries with higher capacities and longer lifetimes. Ipodjuice.com, for instance, sells a 1,200-milliamp-hour battery that will replace the 600-milliamp-hour battery that shipped with a fourth-generation iPod — an improvement that lets the Web site claim that the repaired iPod will “last 100 percent longer.” Most replacement kits include small tools for popping open iPods and video instructions for swapping batteries. For those who do not want to get their hands dirty or wait for an answer, dozens of businesses specialize in fixing some of the most common problems. Ryan Arter, the president of IResQ.com, said his company has been fixing Apple products since 1994. Today, hundreds of iPod, iPhone and iBook owners send their broken machines by overnight mail to his shop in Olathe, Kan., where technicians repair them. Prices depend on the item and the damage. Replacing a screen on a fourth-generation iPod, for instance, costs $94 for parts, labor and overnight shipping in both directions. Replacing the battery on an iPhone costs $79. You can take the device to an Apple store for a new battery, and it will cost only $65. But you may not get the same device back, a concern if the gadget is personalized. “They’re definitely worth repairing,” Mr. Arter said. “Sometimes they’re engraved and they have some special meaning. “Are they disposable?” he said. “No. They’re little computers. They’re a big investment.” But he says that it makes little sense to fix a device if there are two or three problems with it. Shannon Jean, the founder of TechRestore.com, a competitor in Concord, Calif., says that the data on a device can be more valuable than the gadget itself. An iPod or a laptop may carry thousands of dollars worth of music and a immeasurable amount of documents, spreadsheets or other information. “When there’s data involved, that defines what people will pay, especially when there’s downtime involved,” he said. Among the sites offering help with repairs, it is hard to find one that tells you whether it makes economic sense to pay for the repairs. But some decisions are easy. Basic DVD players are usually cheaper to replace. So are PCs with outdated operating systems like Windows 95. For everything else, especially when a new device costs less the one you bought, the choice is harder. Is it wise to pay $80 to repair a $300 digital camera that now costs $100? Unlikely. Deciding between repairing a gadget or replacing it with a newer, often better model is a bit of a gamble. Most sites caution that they cannot fix every problem. Some problems like a cracked screen can be easy to estimate and straightforward to repair. Random glitches and odd behavior, however, may be impossible to pinpoint, leaving the user with a bill for ineffective repairs. Chris Adamson, an editor at O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol, Calif., offers a cautionary tale. He shipped a faulty iPod that was failing on planes to an online company, which he does not want to mention by name. It took a week for the service to diagnose the problem before suggesting replacing the hard disk for $120. The solution, however, did not address the basic problem, and he now finds himself asking for a refund, which the company does not want to give. He recommends thinking of the devices as having a short life span, perhaps three or four years. “If it fails after that period, accept that you’ve gotten your value out of it and get something new,” he said. -- Getting the measure of a kilogram
In a heavily-guarded, subterranean vault on the outskirts of Paris is a lump of metal about the size of a plum. To the eye it's an unremarkable object but "Le Grand K" or the international prototype, as it is known, has global significance. The cylinder of platinum and iridium is the only object known to scientists that weighs exactly 1kg.
It is the reference object from which the unit of mass is derived. Hence, all objects measured in kilograms, whether a bag of sugar or an aircraft carrier, are defined by Le Grand K's mass. The object, along with a clutch of copycat cylinders, was forged in London in the 1880s. Le Grand K was kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sevres in France and the others were distributed around the metric world - Britain holds Kilogram 18 for example - to act as the arbiters of mass. Every few years the siblings were taken to Paris to be measured against Le Grand K to make sure that everyone was singing from the same song sheet. Tiny drift But around 30 years ago scientists discovered a problem. The international prototype was no longer the same mass as the other cylinders. And, since then, the drift has continued."Relative to the average of all the sister copies made over the last 100 years you could say it is losing weight, but by definition it can't," explained Dr Richard Steiner of the National Institute of Standards and technology (NIST) in the US. "So the others are really gaining mass." The fluctuation is about 50 parts in a billion, less than a single grain in a bag of sugar. But whilst it is tiny, the change can have important consequences, particularly for scientists who require precise definitions of the kilogram for other measurements such as voltage. However, as they are all measured against each other, knowing which are losing mass or gaining it is an open question. "We just don't know," admitted Dr Steiner. If they have shed weight, one suggestion is that it is because atmospheric pollutants, incorporated into the cylinders when they were forged, have escaped. If they have gained mass it could be because the platinum based ingots have absorbed mercury from the atmosphere or hydrogen from the solvents used to clean the ingots.
The drift of Le Grand K relative to the others could be explained by the fact that it is taken out of its vault and handled less often than the other objects. The bottom line is that the cylinders have now passed their useful shelf life as the ultimate reference for the kilogram and as a result, scientists around the world have been working on new ways to define the kilogram. Balancing force Next week the custodians of measurement, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), will meet in Paris and one of the things on their agenda will be to assess progress in the field.
Two methods are currently being considered to do away with Le Grand K. Both try to characterise mass in terms of a constant of nature, the way all other basic scientific units are now defined. For example, the metre was originally measured against a brass bar but is now defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in a precise fraction of a second. One approach is to try to define the kilogram using a piece of apparatus known as the watt balance, which amongst other things can be used to determine the quantum mechanical constant known as the Planck constant. "The Planck constant is the constant that relates energy to frequency in a photon," said Dr Seton Bennett, Deputy Director at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK. "It is related to a lot of other constants so it crops up all over the place in physics and in particular in the equations that describe the operations of the watt balance." This complex piece of machinery, invented at NPL, consists of a vacuum-enclosed balance arm, an ultra powerful magnet and a replica kilogram. "What you are doing in the watt balance is balancing a current passing through a [wire] coil in a magnetic field against the force of gravity on the kilogram." Precise measure This is achieved by lowering the coil into the magnetic field, creating a downward electromagnetic force.
By adjusting the current running through the coil the force can be made to exactly balance gravity's pull on the kilogram. A second experiment is then conducted to measure the strength of the magnetic field. "When you combine those experiments, the equations give you a result that includes the Planck constant," said Dr Bennett. The constant is therefore intimately linked to the mass of a kilogram. By rearranging equations the constant can be used to determine the mass of the kilogram. "We are looking for experimental results that are 50 parts per billion or better," said Dr Bennett. This accuracy is equivalent to the drift measured between the standard kilograms used today. "If we can do better than that we can come up with a value that we know is right and will stand for all time." Dr Steiner at NIST has so far managed to measure the Planck constant with uncertainties of 36 parts in a billion. But their value is different from that measured at NPL, leaving scientists on both sides of the Atlantic scratching their heads. Golden globe However, there is another, perhaps more intuitive, approach.
"We want to redefine the kilogram on the basis of the mass of an atom," said Professor Peter Becker of the national metrology institute (PTB) in Germany. "We want to try to count the atoms in one kilogram of a crystal." The project is named after the Avogadro Constant - the total number of carbon-12 atoms in 12 grams (0.012 kg). But instead of carbon-12, Professor Becker's crystal of choice is a sphere of silicon, about the size of a grapefruit. "We measure the volume of the sphere and we measure the volume of an atom of the silicon. "So when you divide the silicon sphere by the volume of the atoms you get the number of the atoms - this is very simple." Except that it is not simple. There may be 50 septillion (trillion trillion) atoms in the sphere and early work showed that they could only be measured with accuracies of a few parts in 10 million - not down to the crucial parts per billion. The problem is that silicon occurs as isotopes - different forms of the same element with different masses. To get round this, Professor Becker has commissioned Russian scientists to grow ultrapure 1kg spheres of silicon made up of 99.99% of one particular type of atom, known as silicon 28. The material for these spheres costs 1 million Euros (£0.7m). "This gives us the chance to derive a result with an acceptable level of uncertainty," he said. History repeats At the moment it looks like the watt balance method has the edge over atom counting and may therefore become the method used to redefine the kilogram, Professor Becker admitted. But he does not think his work is in vain. "If the decision is in favour of the watt balance we can check the work independently," said Professor Becker. Dr Bennett is of the same opinion. "The two experiments are related so we have to get them to agree," said Dr Bennett. But that will be just the start of the redefinition. In the world of measurement and standards everything must be precise and replicable. "There will also have to be some standard instrument, whether a watt balance or something else, which will be used to monitor the kilogram or we're just back in the same situation," said Dr Bennett. "I think the reality will be that there will still be the kilogram in Paris for years to come." -- Toads are 'open-minded' about sex
Some female toads are rather open-minded when it comes to choosing a mate, a study reveals. US researcher Karen Pfenning found female spadefoot toads will flout the general evolutionary rule of not breeding with other species. She discovered that the amphibians, under some conditions, will mate with other species to help boost the survival rates of their offspring. The research is published in the journal Science. Spadefoots breed in small ponds, which can often dry out, killing any developing tadpoles. Dr Pfenning, from the University of North Carolina, has discovered that when a pond is very shallow, one species of female spadefoot, S. bombifrons, will often mate with another closely relates species, D. multiplicata, rather than males of their own kind. She believes the reason is down to tadpole development. S. bombifrons tadpoles develop much more slowly than D. multiplicata, meaning they have to spend longer in the ponds. But the hybrid offspring between the two species develop rapidly, meaning that they are more likely to survive if the pond dries out quickly.
The Mafia's "Ten Commandments" The original Ten Commandments 1. No-one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it. 1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me 2. Never look at the wives of friends. 2. Thou shalt not make for thyself an idol 3. Never be seen with cops. 3. Thou shalt not make wrongful use of the name of thy God 4. Don't go to pubs and clubs. 4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy 5. Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty - even if your wife's about to give birth. 5. Honor thy Father and Mother 6. Appointments must absolutely be respected. 6. Thou shalt not murder 7. Wives must be treated with respect. 7. Thou shalt not commit adultery 8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth. 8. Thou shalt not steal 9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families. 9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor 10. People who can't be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn't hold to moral values. 10. Thou shalt not covet --
The shooting shocked Finland, which has low levels of violent crime despite the high rate of gun ownership. According to the Small Arms Survey, based in Geneva, Switzerland, only the US and Yemen have more firearms per capita. Hunting and shooting are popular in Finland and the country has until now resisted pressure to bring its gun laws into line with the rest of Europe.
FINLAND GUN FACTS 5.2 million population World's 3rd highest gun ownership 56 guns per 100 people Low rate of gun violence Guns used in 14% of homicides --
Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, has discovered the proper use for Second Life. During a "virtual booksigning," which seems to defeat the purpose, Adams invited fans to kick him in his virtual crotch, which is what passive-aggressive Second Lifers want to do to famous people anyway. I'm so glad Al Gore invented the Internet. This is going to change everything. Catch the video after the jump. -- http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/ The biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months. --
11/7/2007 12:44 PM http://www.informationweek.com/ 'Dilbert' Creator Scott Adams Comes To Second Life To Get Kicked In The 'Nads
Adams explained: "This idea was born of the old marketing truism, 'Your customers tell you what business you are in.' In my case, this blog has evolved to a forum where I say unpopular things and my readers abuse me in the comments. I’m just extending that to the virtual world where you can take out your frustration at my stubborn refusal to recognize the truth and beauty of your opinions, by kicking me in the 'nads." Afterward, Adams described the event and linked to a video,where you can watch Adams's avatar get repeatedly assaulted in the produce section by fans. The soundtrack on the clip: Dean Martin singing "That's Amore." Adams' example provides several serious lessons about marketing in virtual worlds, which I'll be happy to pass on to you just as soon as you stop giggling. You can still get real-world publicity for virtual worlds marketing -- if you're clever enough. A year or two ago, a company could get attention simply for going into Second Life. "Company XXX Launches In Second Life" was sufficient to generate buzz. Now, a sufficient number of companies are in Second Life that just opening shop doesn't get attention anymore. But if you do something clever and original, people will pay attention. The Dilbert event got a write-up in Valleywag,, the 36th most popular blog on the Internet. Provide a way for people not in the virtual world to participate. That YouTube video got 18,668 views as I write this -- about 2,500 in the past day or so alone. Let your community of interest spread the word. The video wasn't created by Adams or his team -- it was created by a fan. A more control-minded business might have ordered the video taken down; Adams made it the subject of a follow-up blog post. Multiply the impact of your event in a virtual world by publicizing it elsewhere. Very few people can attend events in Second Life -- about 150 people if you use a lot of tricks to maximize capacity of Second Life venues. But Adams was smart. He wrote about the event on his blog, the 96th most popular blog on the Internet. -- http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/ Kick Me in the Virtual NutsTomorrow night, October 30th, at 9 pm EST, you can log on to the virtual world called Second Life (for free), and have your avatar kick my avatar in the nuts. Or punch me, or slap me. Seriously. I took digital photos of my head from all angles and had it turned into a 3-D character, called an avatar. I’ll be on stage answering questions in a public forum in Second Life tomorrow night. Each person will have a chance to come on stage and literally kick my avatar in the nuts. Or punch me, or slap me, or any combination. Just push a button to select your method of assault. My avatar is programmed to react to the blows but won’t fight back. Your own avatar can be selected from a bunch of options. So you could be, for example, a giant squirrel. And if your spouse asks you why you are late for dinner, just say, “I’m a giant squirrel, and I’m kicking that cartoonist guy in the nuts.” For once, it will be true. My avatar is a bit creepy looking because it has my head but the body of a 19-year old marathon runner. You’ll want to beat me up as soon as you see me, just for being so creepy. And if you disagreed with anything I’ve ever said in this blog, you’ll have more than enough motivation to pound my nuggets into my thorax. You can also get a free digital poster of Dilbert and Dogbert, suitable for displaying on your digital wall in Second Life. This idea was born of the old marketing truism, “Your customers tell you what business you are in.” In my case, this blog has evolved to a forum where I say unpopular things and my readers abuse me in the comments. I’m just extending that to the virtual world where you can take out your frustration at my stubborn refusal to recognize the truth and beauty of your opinions, by kicking me in the ‘nads. This is what you call being customer focused. I think Nordstrom could learn a thing or two from my example. You’ll have to download the free client software from Second Life before using the system. That’s here: After you have signed up and chosen an avatar, this link will take you to my event: And if you can't think of a reason to kick me in the nuts, allow me to mention far too often that my new book is out, called Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain! Available at local bookstores or on Amazon.com at --
Meet Prime Singles In Your AreaPersonals for singles over 50 are growing rapidly at Prime Singles. Meet friendly men and women like you today! It is so easy to use, get started meeting new people now. Enjoy this comfortable and friendly community by clicking the link above. --
Didn't get enough sleep last night? Grab a quick midday nap just after a cup of coffee. From Wired's How To wiki: Scientists say that a successful midday nap depends on two things: timing and (no kidding) caffeine consumption. Experiments performed at Loughborough University in the UK showed that the sleep-deprived need only a cup of coffee and 15 minutes of shut-eye to feel amazingly refreshed. 1. Right before you crash, down a cup of java. The caffeine has to travel through your gastro-intestinal tract, giving you time to nap before it kicks in. 2. Close your eyes and relax. Even if you only doze, you'll get what's known as effective microsleep, or momentary lapses of wakefulness. 3. Limit your nap to 15 minutes. A half hour can lead to sleep inertia, or the spinning down of the brain's prefrontal cortex, which handles functions like judgment. This gray matter can take 30 minutes to reboot. --
Bye Bye PCs? PCs Being Pushed Aside in Japan by Array of Gadgets With Similar Power, Speed TOKYO (AP) -- Masaya Igarashi wants $200 headphones for his new iPod Touch, and he's torn between Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 game consoles. When he has saved up again, he plans to splurge on a digital camera or flat-screen TV.
There's one conspicuous omission from the college student's shopping list: a new computer. The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory. "A new PC just isn't high on my priority list right now," said Igarashi, who was shopping at a Bic Camera electronics shop in central Tokyo and said his three-year-old desktop was "good for now." "For the cost, I'd rather buy something else," he said. Japan's PC market is already shrinking, leading analysts to wonder whether Japan will become the first major market to see a decline in personal computer use some 25 years after it revolutionized household electronics -- and whether this could be the picture of things to come in other countries. "The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones," said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC. Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent. NEC's and Sony's sales have been falling since 2006 in Japan. Hitachi Ltd. said Oct. 22 it will pull out of the household computer business entirely in an effort to refocus its sprawling operations. "Consumers aren't impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That's not as exciting as a bigger TV," Katayama said. "And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn't bright." PC makers beg to differ, and they're aggressively marketing their products in the countries where they're seeing the most sales growth -- places where residents have never had a PC. The industry is responding in two other ways: reminding detractors that computers are still essential in linking the digital universe and releasing several laptops priced below $300 this holiday shopping season. And, though Sales in the U.S. are slowing too, booming demand in the industrializing world is expected to buoy worldwide PC shipments 11 percent to an all-time high of 286 million in 2007. And, outside Japan, Asia is a key growth area, with second-quarter sales jumping 21.9 percent this year. Hitachi had already stopped making PCs for individual consumers since releasing this year's summer models, although the Tokyo-based manufacturer will keep making some computers for corporate clients. Personal computers already accounted for less than 1 percent of Hitachi's annual sales. It's clear why consumers are shunning PCs. Millions download music directly to their mobiles, and many more use their handsets for online shopping and to play games. Digital cameras connect directly to printers and high-definition TVs for viewing photos, bypassing PCs altogether. Movies now download straight to TVs. More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely. The fastest growing social networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites like mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube. And while a lot of the decline is in household PCs, businesses are also waiting longer to replace their computers partly because recent advances in PC technology are only incremental, analysts say. At a consumer electronics event in Tokyo in October, the mostly unpopular stalls showcasing new PCs contrasted sharply with the crowded displays of flat-panel TVs. "There's no denying PCs are losing their spunk in Japanese consumers' eyes," said Hiroyuki Ishii, a sales official at Japan's top PC maker, NEC Corp. "There seems to be less and less things only a PC can do," Ishii said. "The PC's value will fade unless the PC can offer some breakthrough functions." The slide has made PC manufacturers desperate to maintain their presence in Japanese homes. Recent desktop PCs look more like audiovisual equipment -- or even colorful art objects -- than computers. Sony Corp.'s desktop computers have folded up to become clocks, and its latest version even hangs on the wall. Laptops in a new Sony line are adorned with illustrations from hip designers like ZAnPon. NEC is trying to make its PCs' cooling fans quieter -- to address a common complaint from customers, it says. Still, sluggish sales weigh on manufacturers. NEC's annual PC shipments in Japan shrank 6.2 percent to 2.72 million units in 2006, though overall earnings have been buoyed by mobile phone and networking solutions operations. The trend continued in the first quarter of fiscal 2007 then there was a 14 percent decline from a year earlier. Sony's PC shipments for Japan shrank 10 percent in 2006 from a year earlier. But it isn't about to throw in the towel -- yet. "We feel we've reached a new stage in PC development, where consumers are looking for user-friendly machines to complement other electronics," said Hiroko Nakamura, a Sony official in Tokyo. Sony's latest PCs, for example, come with a powerful program that can take photos and video clips and automatically edit them into a slideshow set to music. Even Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Inc., whose computer sales and market share are surging in the U.S., has seen Macintosh unit sales in Japan slip 5 percent year-on-year in the first nine months of 2007. There are other reasons Japan is the first market to see PCs shrink, some analysts say. "We think of Japanese as workaholics, but many don't take work home," said Damian Thong, a technology analyst at Macquarie Bank in Japan. "Once they leave the office, they're often content with tapping e-mails or downloading music on their phones," he said. As Hitachi's shuttering of its household PC business demonstrates, making PCs has become less attractive. IBM Corp. also left the PC business in 2005, selling its computer unit to China's Lenovo Group Ltd. But NEC's Ishii is persisting. "We have to get the message out there that PCs are on top in terms of computing power," he said. "They always will be."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/
FAS-FAX: Top 25 Daily and Sunday U.S.
Newspapers NEW YORK Here is a chart for the Top 25 newspapers by
circulation, both daily and Sunday, based on the new FAS-FAX numbers
released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations this morning, for
six-month period ending Sept. 30. --
11/5/2007 6:11 AM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7078245.stm
Robot cars race around California
A driverless car called Boss has scooped a $2m prize in a Californian race for robotic vehicles.
Boss successfully drove around an urban environment, avoiding other cars, and covering 60 miles (85km) in less than six hours, all without any human control. The modified Chevrolet Tahoe was one of six cars that crossed the finish line, from a pack of 11 robotic vehicles which set off at dawn. The others had to pull out after crashes or other problems.
Larry Burns, GM's vice-president for research and development and strategic planning, said developing cars that drive themselves is a key objective. "Imagine being able to talk on the phone, eat your breakfast, handle your emails, and leave the driving to the vehicle," he added. "That would be pretty phenomenal. It's going to a big breakthrough. It's technology that's on the way to 'having cars that don't crash'." He believes cars with that level of intelligence could be on the road by 2015. --
US scientists engineer 'mighty mice'
US researchers have engineered a line of "mighty mice" whose human equivalent would have similar abilities to the bicycling champion Lance Armstrong, according to research published Thursday. The breed of mice can run six kilometers (four miles) at a speed of 20 meters (yards) per minute for up to six hours without stopping, according to Richard Hanson, a biochemistry professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees; they utilize mainly fatty acids for energy and produce very little lactic acid," said Hanson, the senior author of the article which was published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The genetically engineered mice can eat 60 percent more than wild mice in a control group but remain slim and fit. The "mighty mice" live longer, and some females were able to reproduce much later in life than other mice.
11/2/2007 11:53 AM
Gene Tweak Makes for Mighty MiceScientists Genetically Engineer Mice That Outrun and Outlive Ordinary Mice
Nov.1, 2007 -- Scientists at Case Western Reserve University have genetically engineered mice that outrun, outlive, and out-eat ordinary mice while staying lean, light, and fertile well into old age. Chalk it up to a change in a single gene. That genetic tweak boosted levels of an enzyme called PEPCK-C in the mice's skeletal muscles, knocking mice's muscle metabolism into orbit. "They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees," researcher Richard Hanson, PhD, says in a news release. The mighty mice were seven times more active than normal mice. They showed unusually high levels of activity in their cages from the time they were 2 weeks old. Running on special treadmills designed for mice, the genetically engineered mice left ordinary mice in the dust. One treadmill test began at a leisurely pace. The researchers raised the treadmill's incline and speed every two minutes until the mice were exhausted and couldn't run for 10 seconds. The genetically engineered mice ran for 32 minutes, while the ordinary mice pooped out at 19 minutes. The genetically engineered mice ate 60% more than the ordinary mice, but they were lean and light, weighing half of what normal mice weigh with 90% less body fat. The researchers also report that the genetically engineered mice lived longer than other mice and maintained their superior running ability. For instance, mice that were up to 2.5 years old outran mice that were less than half their age, the study shows. In addition, a 30-month-old genetically engineered female mouse had baby mice during the study, well past the typical mouse-bearing ages. A major unanswered question, Hanson's team notes, is what brain changes accompany the genetically engineered mice's hyped-up activity. Their findings appear in tomorrow's early online edition of The Journal of Biological Chemistry. --
10/31/2007 8:56 AM
39 Ways to Put Yourself on the WebWhether you're interested in blogging, making music, shooting videos, publishing your novel, or starting your own social network, these great services can help--in many cases, for free.--
State of the planet, in graphics Globally human populations are growing, trade is increasing, and living standards are rising for many. But, according to the UN's latest Global Environment Outlook report, long-term problems including climate change, pollution, access to clean water, and the threat of mass extinctions are being met with "a remarkable lack of urgency".
http://www.smartwomanguides.com/
Ten Small Things That Can Add Big Years to Your Life
A
recent study at the Erasmus M.C. University Medical
Center surveyed and tested over 5,000 men and women,
finding that those who engaged in exercise - running,
aerobics, yoga - almost daily added up to 3.7 years to
their life. This was largely due to the fact that
exercising decreased stress and interrupted the
development of heart disease, the leading killer of
Americans. US and Canadian Researchers recently found that even after the onset of tobacco induced lung diseases, quitting smoking can still increase lifespan, adding up to five years. This was based on the findings that the mortality rate of middle-aged heavy smokers was cut in half once they decided to extinguish their cigarettes, and their habit. Several studies have shown that owning a pet lowers a person's blood pressure, increases self-esteem in children, decreases the mortality rates of heart attack victims, decreases cholesterol, decreases depression, relieves stress, and increases family happiness. Pets also make people, particularly younger people, more likely to participate in extracurricular activities. On a whole, research predicts that those who own pets will outlive those who don't by an average of seven years.
Eating
wisely may seem like an improbable goal, with eating
poorly often cheaper and more convenient. But, eating
wisely doesn't have to be that hard. All it takes is a
little planning, a little discipline, and little
portions when the food is unhealthy.
Human beings
have an innate desire to be needed and be wanted.
Because of this, having friends and close confidants can
increase a person's well being, and their life. The
reasons for this lie in the fact that friends and
partners are people we can use to reduce stress,
boredom, and sadness. Studies indicate that laughter is a natural medicine, with the ability to decrease stress-related hormones. Laughing also possesses many of the physical and mental benefits of yoga, making it seem like yogic training for your funny bone. The benefits laughter offers include boosting the immune system, regulating blood pressure, increasing the flow of blood and oxygen to muscles and organs, and internal massaging. Recently, two studies were conducted that found older men with angry and hostile personalities more likely to die before those who engaged in an unhealthy lifestyle of smoking and drinking. Along these lines, the second study revealed that those who were giving, helpful, and cooperative with others had a 60 percent chance of outliving those who were selfish and antisocial. --
10/15/2007 9:07 AM
Inquiry into N-test veterans case
Christmas Island - the area was used for nuclear testing
A parliamentary inquiry has begun into British nuclear tests in the South Pacific in the 1950s, which veterans say led to genetic defects.
Scientific evidence He told BBC Radio Five Live: "When the actual bomb went off, you didn't hear any noise. It was just a great white flash. "You got your eyes covered with your hands, and the whole of the inside of your body lit up to the point where even through your hands and your eyelids, you could see the structure of your bones inside your hands.
"At the same time, a tremendous heat built up, to the point where you thought, I can't take this, and just about that point it eased and then cooled down again."
10/12/2007 9:18 AM
The general message is we still have the situation we had 20 years ago - that half a million women die every year from the complications of childbirth and 10-20 million women suffer disability
The number of women dying in childbirth varies dramatically worldwide from one in eight in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone to one in 47,000 in Ireland Maternal health is strongly linked to access to safe abortion, contraception and emergency obstetric care If a mother is ill or dies, the baby is less likely to survive and her other children less likely to be healthy and educated
Rigid Scholarship on Male SexualityThree provocative books on male sexuality recently published by university presses provide a good barometer of the current state of campus gender studies. A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women's-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on. These books reflect that broader perspective and also display a more liberal attitude toward pornography, which was assailed in the 1980s by religious and cultural conservatives oddly allied with crusading feminists. By the 90s, pornography was legitimized as a field of study by gay male academics as well as an insurgent wing of sex-positive feminism. However, despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men — or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness. In Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man's Most Precious Fluid, Lisa Jean Moore, an associate professor of sociology and women's studies at the State University of New York College at Purchase, examines how the definition and meaning of sperm has changed depending on period and point of view. This book has, hands down, one of the most arresting first sentences I've ever seen: "It has been called sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman's relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard, squirt, goo, spunk, splooge, love juice, man cream, and la leche." What mesmerizing vernacular poetry! At her best, Moore has a frank, breezy manner that may be partly due to her practical experience outside academe: She was president of the board of the nonprofit Sperm Bank of California and also worked at a national sex-information switchboard. One chapter is based on her interviews over a five-year period with prostitutes in San Francisco. She also cites her personal history as a lesbian who has borne two daughters conceived by artificial insemination with donor sperm. Sperm Counts comes with its own marginalia: When the pages are flipped, a cartoon spermatozoon seems to race up and around the text. Semen, Moore states, is "a mixture of prostaglandin, fructose, and fatty acids." Sperm constitutes only 2 to 5 percent of the average ejaculate, which contains between 200 million and 500 million sperm cells and is propelled by the penis at 10 miles per hour. The unofficial distance record for ejaculate is 18 feet, 9 inches, achieved by one Horst Schultz, who also holds the record for greatest height (12 feet, 4 inches). Moore remarks that semen's scent is sometimes compared to "bleach, household cleanser, or swimming pool water." Hence the marketing of Semenex ($54.95 for 30 servings), a drink that promises to sweeten the taste of semen for practitioners of oral sex. In the 17th century, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope, was the first to identify spermatozoa, whose lashing tails he compared to the swimming of a snake or eel. (Moore disapprovingly identifies this as "classic phallic imagery," which isn't entirely fair, given the ancient association of snakes with mother goddesses.) An 18th-century physiologist, Lazzaro Spallanzani, discovered cryopreservation by recovering motile sperm from semen frozen in snow. The sperm count as a diagnostic tool was first proposed in 1929. However, the morphology or shape of the spermatozoon proved to be equally crucial: A scientist of the 1930s cataloged "50 variations in sperm morphology with names such as micro-sperm, megalo-sperm, puff-ball, and double neck." In a fascinating chapter, Moore distills her study of sex manuals written for children — 27 books published over a 50-year period. There are hilarious illustrations of a "romantic and irresistible sperm" sporting a top hat and gift rose, while the fat prize ovum complacently waits on a plush pillow or douses herself with "Eau de Magnet" perfume. Moore laments that sperm are portrayed as active, heroic protagonists with endearingly comic personalities, while the egg is lumpishly passive and boring. This "recurring narrative," she argues, fosters "male entitlement" and a sexist "superiority complex." Christian children's books, on the other hand, are amazingly "much more scientific than secular books": They do not anthropomorphize sperm or use war or football metaphors for the sperm's quest for the egg. "God," Moore says, "is the only actor in the story." Moore elsewhere discusses the "money shot" in pornography (where the male lead visibly ejaculates on the body or face of his partner) and ponders the ironies of this theme's having exploded in popularity during the era of HIV/AIDS, when sexual hygiene has been so promoted and mandated. The prostitutes she interviews recount their stringently clinical techniques of dealing with the "hazardous waste material" of semen, which carries an array of diseases. Elsewhere, Moore explores the ethical and cultural issues raised by the new fertility industry, whose advanced technology has empowered women by freeing conception from involvement with or obligation to men. Finally, Moore shows how sperm has become, through DNA testing, "the gold standard of incriminating evidence," from sexual assault cases to the Starr report, whose tawdry trophy was Monica Lewinsky's stained dress. When Moore is speaking in her own voice, Sperm Counts is a lively, funny read. But too often, she goes prim and flat before gender-studies shibboleths. She's overly impressed, for example, with leaden terms like "hegemonic masculinity" and "heteronormativity," and she uncritically adheres to the standard feminist line about patriarchy ("We live in a male-dominated world"), by which any whiff of dissent is labeled "antifeminist backlash." Were it not for its dogged deference to exhausted academic formulas, this book could be targeted to a wide general audience. In contrast, Murat Aydemir's Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning seems sealed in an academic dungeon with little hope of rescue. Aydemir is an assistant professor of comparative literature and cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam. This book, an expansion of his doctoral dissertation, has obviously been constructed with great care, devotion, and seriousness of purpose. But for whom could it possibly be intended? Its sensational-sounding juxtaposition of hard-core gay porn films and semen art with Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, and Marcel Proust is buried in a labyrinthine poststructuralist prose that makes the reader long for a machete to hack through the undergrowth. The "bliss" of the title seems like a cruel joke: As we endure tortured verbiage, sex has seldom seemed less appealing or pleasurable. Aydemir belongs to the school of criticism that views everything in art, history, or culture as a "text," a slippery narrative that can be read like a book. The problems with this language-based style of analysis are, first, that its conclusions are already tediously contained in its premises and, second, that it makes a poor fit with subjects, such as sex, that overlap the physical world of concrete action. Predictably, ejaculation as Aydemir treats it accomplishes or supplies nothing but a descent into the murky waters of infinite subjectivity. The first chapter of Images of Bliss is undone by its own ambitions. A potentially interesting study of the New York artist Andres Serrano's photographs of his own semen and blood (later used on the cover of a Metallica album) is distractingly interwoven with a dissection of Aristotle's androcentric theory of procreation in Generation of Animals. Everything seems floatingly ahistorical, divorced from cultural context: The relation of Aristotle to his precursors is missing, as is any consideration of Greek terminology or assumptions. Similarly, Serrano's use of semen and blood as artistic materials is treated in total isolation from the wider genre of body-based conceptual art. Even Serrano's experimentation with urine (as in his notorious "Piss Christ," which rocked the National Endowment for the Arts) is inexplicably absent. Instead, Aydemir fills up space with turgid quotations from once-fashionable theorists Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray and their sycophantish academic acolytes. A chapter dithering over Lacan's excursus on a Hans Holbein painting becomes an exercise in recycling and rehash where tiny disputes among poststructuralists are tracked with cowed reverence. An opulent Titian portrait, "Charles V With Hound," is tittered over for its prominent codpiece and dangling finger; everything else is ignored, including the massive dog symbolically restrained by its collar. The finale is an intriguingly stark gay image, John O'Reilly's photograph "A Vanitas," but Aydemir's comments are rushed and cursory. Leonardo is reductively discussed in terms of penises: The artist's canonical "Vitruvian Man" doesn't acknowledge his own nudity (why should he?), while a minor drawing, the so-called "Angel in the Flesh," flaunts a robust erection. There is little evidence of wider research into Leonardo and no reference to the shadowy history of the latter, highly questionable, and technically weak work (supposedly stolen from the Queen's Leonardo collection at Windsor in the 19th century and recovered in 1991). Aydemir is too eager to get back to Lacan and Judith Butler, a postmodernist rhetorician whose exaggerated reputation as an original thinker about sex has receded over the past decade. Material on pornography should wake any reader up, but Aydemir's overclever chapter title is inauspicious: "Significant Discharge: The Cum Shot and Narrativity." Simple points about the analogy between sexual and literary climax, as well as the vagaries of plot structure, are dizzyingly inflated. Bruce LaBruce's name starting a new chapter galvanized me with hope: Surely the dynamic co-director of the gay porn classic Hustler White will zap this book to life. But aside from his description of that film's parodic "money shots" (showers of dollar bills falling in slow-motion onto a bed), Aydemir scarcely profits from LaBruce's creative energy. Again, there's no context, not even the most basic information about LaBruce — such as his nationality (Canadian) or his eclectic career as a punk writer, performer, and photographer. After Aydemir's jargon-ridden forced march through every dated authority figure of the past 30 years (including Derrida), it was a positive relief to immerse oneself in the lucid, urbane, fast-moving, and often amusing prose of Angus McLaren's Impotence: A Cultural History. McLaren, author of several studies on sexual themes, is a professor of history at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia. Viagra, which made erectile dysfunction a household word, begins and ends the book with topical freshness. The first chapter, however, on "manhood in Greece and Rome," is strangely jumbled. It begins with quotations from literature (Ovid, Petronius), which are unwisely treated as if they were sociological samples from actual popular views of impotence. Poets and novelists of any period are unique and often unrepresentative voices with their own personal agendas. The poet Martial in particular is overused here, without due consideration of the willful distortions of satire. Worse, McLaren kneads Greece and Rome together like one big honey cake. There are omissions (such as the Greek gradations of maturing youth or the phallic imagery in the Eleusinian Mysteries) as well as a serious anachronism — the failure to distinguish the conservative Roman Republic from the cosmopolitan Roman Empire, when values radically changed. Furthermore, behavior at the decadent imperial court should not be confused with that among Romans as a whole, particularly those still rooted in the countryside. It is diverting to learn that bulbs like onions and garlic, as well as "orchidlike plants with two testicle-like tubers," were prescribed for genital problems. But McLaren's notes for this chapter betray a dangerous overreliance on ideology-laden gender-studies books of the past 20 years. Hence he has absorbed their manifold errors — missing the fertility symbolism in the ithyphallic Athenian herms, for example, which were apotropaic vestiges of the agrarian past (rather than a sexist parading of male power), or treating Pompeii, a small, hedonistic resort like Las Vegas or Monte Carlo, as if it were Rome itself. McLaren leaps a thousand years, into the Middle Ages, to address "impotence in the Christian West." He shows how Christianity broke from Judaism in lauding "continence, celibacy, and life-long virginity." Admitting that the ideal of "victory over the powers of the flesh preceded Christianity," he less persuasively asserts that "the pagans' goal was hygiene, not holiness." What about the virgin priestesses at Delphi and the Temple of Vesta? Though his description of medieval theology sometimes veers toward a horror-movie demonism (surely church teaching about nature was motivated by more than misogyny and hatred of sex), McLaren grippingly chronicles how charges of impotence were handled in divorce cases under canon law. "Courts implicitly adhered to a sexual double standard": A man's word meant more than that of his wife, who was physically examined by a "jury of matrons." Even so, husbands endured close inspection in 13th-century England. McLaren reproduces a startling Flemish illumination showing two women undraping the genitals of a very abashed husband before stern judges at a church tribunal. The organization of the following chapters seems haphazard. McLaren subscribes to the trend for ditching the term "Renaissance" for "Early Modern," which consequently must pack everything in helter-skelter from the late Middle Ages to the Age of Reason. Diverting anecdotes whiz by — the end of the Spanish Hapsburg line through Charles II's impotence; husbands incapacitated by black magic being advised to urinate through their wives' wedding rings; coffee, a new craze, being suspected of emasculating powers. An impotent man was scorned as a "malkin, pillock, fumbler, fribble, bungler, bobtail, domine-do-little, weak-doing man, Goodman Do-Little, and John Cannot." George Washington, "stallion of the Potomac" and father of his country, may have been sterile and perhaps impotent. Like Michel Foucault, to whom he makes passing nods of rote piety, McLaren seems not to notice the mammoth cultural movement called Romanticism and thus leaps directly into the high-bourgeois 19th century. More at home in the modern era, McLaren starts to hit his stride. His material on Victorian medicine and on Freudian psychoanalysis (with its castration fears) is engrossing. By the early 20th century, marriage manuals began to burden both sexes with "new pressures to perform." Outlandish gadgets to aid penetration were invented — Bier's Erectruss, Gerson's Constriction Bandage, the Potentor (a rubber ring), and the Juvenator (a glass vacuum pump). Hormones were discovered, and transplants of animal glands promised to spark flagging libido. McLaren mordantly observes, "Rejuvenation became the rage in the same decade in which Fascists in Italy, Nazis in Germany, and Communists in the Soviet Union all asserted their intentions of creating new men and new societies." McLaren's chapter on Alfred Kinsey and the sex therapists Masters and Johnson is absolutely superb — as is his final chapter on the production and aggressive marketing of Viagra. This is contemporary history-writing at its best. McLaren unsparingly captures the mix of political anxieties and utopian ideals just before and after the sexual revolution. Sexual potency had become "a key indicator of male well-being," where the definition of "normal" was uncomfortably keyed to a sometimes impossible ideal. In the 1950s, virility was heralded as the way "to beat back the perversions of communism and homosexuality": "Politicians accused opponents of being 'soft' and prided themselves on being 'hard' on subversion." Impotence, McLaren shows, unexpectedly became a key theme in major films, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Vertigo, and Midnight Cowboy. By the 1980s, there was "a new paradigm, a swing toward the medicalization of male sexuality," from which emerged Viagra, "the fastest selling pharmaceutical in history." At first pitched to respectable middle-aged couples, it became a party drug for the young. The jury is still out on whether Viagra has been a boon or bane for women. McLaren fiercely critiques corporate collusion with government, as in the freeing in 1997 of American pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers, which has escalated the demand for "lifestyle" drugs. Furthermore, most insurance companies paid for Viagra prescriptions, whereas women for 40 years had been denied coverage for oral contraceptives. All three of these books, in different ways, share the same dourly judgmental gender-studies doctrine, which surfaces at regular intervals. It asserts or implies that Western culture is inherently oppressive and based on male domination, which victimizes women, gays, and people of color. Gender differences are "constructed," not natural. Moral or legal codes "police" us as instruments of "social control." Our mental lives are hopelessly manipulated by invisible, impersonal power. Despite their progressive political stance, Moore, Aydemir, and McLaren show dismayingly little interest in anthropology — the comparative analysis of world cultures over time. Generalizations about gender are otiose without wider study. Social and legal codes are as old as (and, indeed, indistinguishable from) civilization itself. Furthermore, bourgeois standards of polite decorum and tasteful humor, predicated on "appropriate" behavior in a middle-class office, cannot be projected backward wholesale to the agrarian or industrial eras. Even so expert a historian as McLaren is given to broad-brush parochialisms like, "Western culture had always stressed male and female differences." Well, good grief, what society, aside from Andy Warhol's silver-walled salon, hasn't? Gender studies, for all its trafficking with porn and pop, too often paints a bleak, condescending picture of ordinary human life. Alternate views (even from among dissident feminists) are not considered or evidently even imagined. When any field becomes a closed circle, the result is groupthink and cant. The stultifying clichés of gender studies must end. But in the meantime, all faculty members should vow, through their own scholarly idealism rather than by external coercion, not to impose their political or sexual ideology on impressionable students, who deserve better. Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and a columnist for Salon.com. Her books include Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press, 1990), Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (Vintage Books, 1992), Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (Vintage Books, 1994), and Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, by Murat Aydemir (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) Impotence: A Cultural History, by Angus McLaren (University of Chicago Press, 2007) Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man's Most Precious Fluid, by Lisa Jean Moore (New York University Press, 2007) --
10/11/2007 10:01 AM
The study revealed that most search activity happens in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes countries such as China, Japan and India.
TOP SEARCH SITES - AUGUST* Google sites 37 billion searches Yahoo sites - 8.5 billion Baidu 3.2 billion Microsoft sites 2.1 billion NHN 2 billion eBay 1.3 billion Time Warner 1.2 billion Ask 743 million Fox 683 million Lycos 441 million Total worldwide searches: 61 billion *Source: comScore
Users performed more than 37 billion searches via Google, more than all the other major search engines combined.
10/10/2007 9:10 AM
The paranoid withdrawal fantasyWhy Iraq is not Cambodia, Mr. President. Plus: Britney's challenge, the Who's real magic, and lesbian bathroom sex.
Oct. 10, 2007 | Dear Camille: To end the Vietnam War fiasco, the U.S. did exactly what you are calling for in this Iraq fiasco: Get out now! We did get out in Nam and immediately, and nearly 3 million innocent souls were slaughtered by Pol Pot. Question: Are you not even a bit concerned that another "killing fields" situation will occur, as will surely come to pass this time in much larger numbers? Withdrawing U.S. troops and equipment from Iraq will be a complicated and dangerous process that will take many months. But it should be launched on a massive scale immediately. Iraq's fate needs to be decided by Iraqis, whose quarreling ancient tribes and factions have little motivation to compromise as long as the U.S. military is planted there to keep the peace. A democratic Iraq would be desirable in the best of all possible worlds, but it may be a desert mirage -- not worth the loss of thousands of American lives or the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars desperately needed for U.S. social services and infrastructure. If there are parallels between Cambodia in the 1970s and Iraq now (as President Bush asserted to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August), they simply prove the folly of current U.S. policy in the Middle East. We will never know how many horrific deaths can be traced to the ruthless dictator Pol Pot (it could have been half the number you cite), but they were not always due to "slaughter" per se. Hundreds of thousands of peasants died from starvation and untreated illness in Pol Pot's madly unrealistic plan to turn Cambodia virtually overnight into an agrarian communist utopia. But the destabilization of Southeast Asia was in fact the result of Western colonialism and intervention in the region by France and then (with all the best intentions) by the U.S., leading to the First and Second Indochina Wars. Cambodia's leader, Prince Sihanouk, who had warned that the U.S. could not win in Vietnam, was ousted in a 1970 coup that had American approval and perhaps covert support. A month later, the U.S. invaded Cambodia to clean out North Vietnamese guerrilla bases -- an incursion that sparked protests on American campuses, including Kent State University, where four students died after being fired on by the National Guard. American bombing of eastern Cambodia had been going on since the prior year, killing Cambodian civilians and inciting a refugee problem that would disorder the entire country. Thus U.S. actions strengthened Pol Pot's revolutionary movement by driving former Cambodian opponents (such as Sihanouk supporters) to him and by facilitating an alliance between his embryonic Khmer Rouge and Communist North Vietnamese insurgents. Pol Pot seized control of Cambodia in 1975, after the U.S. exit from Vietnam, and was deposed three years later by a Vietnamese invasion. After 17 more years of waging guerrilla war, he was arrested but died while awaiting trial. Thus President Bush's allusion to Cambodia was grossly simplistic. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has itself caused a massive and underreported refugee problem. America's removal of the aging dictator Saddam Hussein (whose regime was in economic decline because of U.N. sanctions), followed by the disbandment of the Iraqi military, played right into the hands of Iraq's volatile, meddling, next-door rival Iran, which now aspires to regional dominance. Our ally Turkey, a nation with a long, tough history, is also likely to respond harshly to any attempt by its Kurdish minority to break away and join the Kurds of northern Iraq in forming an independent Kurdistan. How would the U.S. respond to a Kurdish bid for freedom? Whatever its rationale for the invasion of Iraq (arguments rage over the relative weight of Israel, oil, Halliburton, al-Qaida or none of the above), the Bush-Cheney administration seems to have been blinded by its own naive idealism, provincialism and abject ignorance of history. The continued American presence in Iraq is not a solution but an obstruction to regional cooperation. Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't want Iran gobbling up its neighbors. But the shrewd Saudis, rolling in riches, have no incentive to take responsibility so long as the U.S. goes on playing policeman and footing the bill. Iraq is ringed with nations more economically and politically developed than Cambodia ever was in the 1970s. Geography and climate also play a role: Insurgents in the Middle East don't have thick canopies of tropical forests to hide under. Yes, there will be civil disturbances and loss of life when American forces exit Iraq -- whether now or 10 years from now. But order will gradually be reasserted from within, even if Iraq itself (originally a British fabrication) fragments. Only the Iraqis, not American soldiers with their barriers of language and culture, can identify and expel any rogue al-Qaida intruders in their midst. The idea that millions of Iraqis would be slaughtered in a new Holocaust is a paranoid fantasy promulgated by the Bush administration to manipulate popular emotion in the U.S., where knowledge of world geography and history has shrunk decade by decade, thanks to our mediocre public education and our shallow, timid and increasingly frivolous mainstream media. Frankly, I have greater respect for Osama bin Laden than for any of the Democratic senators. Finding myself between al-Qaida and the DNC/Moveon.org/Daily Kos in a war zone, I would be hard-placed to know which way to shoot. Phillip J. Hubbell Surely you don't really mean what you say. Surely this bloody scenario is a rhetorical sally, meant to shock and amuse. The senators of my party, with a few stellar exceptions like Dianne Feinstein, may be a pack of vain, spineless, poll-puking, strutting peacocks, but they are not mass murderers. They did not coolly plan an amoral strike on American landmarks and cause the unspeakable suffering, death and incineration of nearly 3,000 people, U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals. As for the Democratic Party's governing committee or the combative, impudent left-liberal activist groups, they are just as committed to their altruistic vision of a future America as are conservatives, who base their values on tradition and faith. Both sides deserve respect. However, I must confess my own exasperation with the Democratic leadership, who spout tiresome platitudes but achieve little and who stampede off on puerile publicity stunts that alienate potential voters across party lines. The latest example is the near-delusional campaign to turn popular radio host Rush Limbaugh, who has unwaveringly supported the military for nearly 20 years, into an anti-military antichrist. If Democrats are serious about ideology-based government regulation of talk radio, then the party is fast abandoning its fundamental principles, central to which should be constitutionally protected free speech. To return to your war zone hypothetical, I doubt that the sociopaths of al-Qaida would be moved to mercy by your extermination of (probably pacifist and fumblingly unarmed) fellow Americans. Wouldn't you be next in the terrorists' line of fire? This kind of partisan rancor and mutual recrimination are the sad legacy of two self-destructive administrations in a row. Bill Clinton's lies about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky paralyzed the government and tainted his legacy, while George Bush's poor judgment and managerial ineptitude have mired us in an endless, brutal war with little chance for a happy ending. I find it hard to believe that my fellow Democrats want to backtrack and relive every tedious scandal from the Clinton era. But that's what we'll get if Hillary is the nominee -- a long, sulfurous night of the walking dead, with chattering skeletons tumbling out of every closet. I've been discouraged by the clumsy missteps of the Edwards campaign, but I'm still hopeful about Barack Obama, who had the guts and good sense to publicly oppose the Iraq war from the start and whose ascent promises a clean, invigorating break from the sordid past. I too grew up in upstate New York. I am an environmental groundwater geologist (who almost majored in fine arts). Your take on the Al Gore/global warming pseudo-catastrophe was right on target. Anyone can read up on Holocene geology and see that climate changes are caused by polar wandering and magnetic reversals. It is entertaining, yet sad to read bloviage from Leonardo DiCaprio, who is so self-centered that he thinks the earth's history and climate is a function of his short personal stay on this planet. Still he, Al Gore, Prince Charles and so on, ad nauseam, continue with their jet-set lifestyles. What hypocrisy! Hanson Thank you for your input on the mass hysteria over global warming. The simplest facts about geology seem to be missing from the mental equipment of many highly educated people these days. There is far too much credulity placed in fancy-pants, speculative computer modeling about future climate change. Furthermore, hand-wringing media reports about hotter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are rarely balanced by acknowledgment of the recent cold waves in South Africa and Australia, the most severe in 30 years. Where are the intellectuals in this massive attack of groupthink? Inert, passive and cowardly, the lot of them. True intellectuals would be alarmed and repelled by the heavy fog of dogma that now hangs over the debate about climate change. More skeptical voices need to be heard. Why are liberals abandoning this issue to the right wing, which is successfully using it to contrast conservative rationality with liberal emotionalism? The environmental movement, whose roots are in nature-worshipping Romanticism, is vitally important to humanity, but it can only be undermined by rampant propaganda and half-truths. I was interested to see you claim in your Salon column to be a supporter of multiculturalism and was wondering if you could say more about what you mean by "multiculturalism." Personally, I feel that what most liberal multiculturalists mean by "multiculturalism" is really monoculturalism. For example, Japan is an extremely sexist society. I doubt any self-described multiculturalists would want sexist cultures included in their list of acceptable cultures. The same goes for female genital mutilation practiced in Africa or forcing women to wear the burqa in the Middle East. So-called multiculturalism is really a Western upper-middle-class liberal monoculturalism. It mostly amounts to urban hipsters and yuppies desiring many choices of restaurants. Furthermore, what is the relationship between multiculturalists and the multiple cultures they purport to love? Clearly a multiculturalist purports to like all of the multiple cultures that make up the diversity they demand to be celebrated, whether they be Muslim, Japanese, Chinese, Somali, African-American, etc. Oddly enough, however, none of these cultures are themselves multicultural. Japan, for example, is fiercely protective of its culture, as are most other cultures in the world. So do multiculturalists advocate we all adopt multiculturalism as our ethic? If so, multiculturalism advocates changing the cultures they purport to respect. My suspicion is that liberal multiculturalists really want everyone else to remain monocultural, while they aristocratically float above them all and reserve the multicultural perspective and arrogant, elitist moral and aesthetic superiority and sense of freedom for themselves. Michael Toynbe This is a delightful skewering of p.c. pretensions! Multiculturalism has become politicized in Great Britain and to a lesser extent Canada. But I can speak only from my own experience: Multiculturalism is an academic shibboleth to which many give lip service but which few honestly try to follow. Like "diversity," multiculturalism became a convenient rubric for the turf wars of identity politics, which began nearly four decades ago with women's studies and African-American studies and which generated one seceding fiefdom after another. All these new subjects were important and worthy ones, but whether universities should have accommodated them by splintering the curriculum into fiercely autonomous mini-majors is a completely different matter. I myself felt, from my college years in the mid-1960s on, that American higher education urgently needed a cosmopolitan broadening of perspective -- a dissolution of existing departments (such as English) into a few overlapping interdisciplinary fields. Identity politics worsened the provincialism, as suggested by the paucity of significant culture critics to emerge from the generation of academics now in their late 30s and 40s. Multiculturalism for me means the imperative for students and professors alike to learn about the art, literature, history and religion of every major civilization. We cannot understand our own culture fully until we juxtapose it with that of others. The gifts, limitations and repressions of each society come into focus through comparative analysis. For example, I want Judeo-Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam taught in every school. My portrait of Western
culture in
"Sexual Personae," Too many multiculturalists subscribe to a glib anti-Americanism and constantly sneer at the very European tradition that invented and shaped their mental tools. It's wearisome and amateurish and has seriously degraded scholarly standards in the U.S. You said in your latest article: "A hormonal factor has been theorized in outbreaks of violence among lager-swilling British soccer fans, who are packed in like sardines in the seatless stands and who freely piss in place." After the Hillsborough disaster and the subsequent Taylor Report, I believe England eliminated these standing-only areas ("terraces"), at least in the largest stadiums. So they can't quite pack them in like they did in the 1980s. How much that has changed things in reality I couldn't say. Many thanks to you and to a fellow Texan, Dave Brett Wasser of Austin, for citing the Taylor Report, published in 1990, which examined an incident the prior year at Sheffield's Hillsborough stadium where 96 Liverpool fans died through overcrowding. In 1985, British soccer teams were banned from European play for five years after a riot by Liverpool fans resulted in 39 deaths and 350 injuries at a stadium in Brussels. The government's abolition of standing-only areas at sports stadiums in England and Scotland evidently did result in a radical reduction of violence among British soccer fans, who had become notorious for hooliganism. So British brawling, amid all those rivers of urine flowing merrily down the terraces, may indeed have been fueled by testosterone intoxication! Yes, some women do seek sexual relief and excitement in the public bathrooms. During my four years in the Marine Corps, it was well understood that women Marines, bi and lesbian, sought out sexual encounters in the bathrooms on Marine Corps bases and military airports. Especially airports because of the enticement of different women coming through and it being a one-time event. Meanwhile, the gay male marines kept their sexuality pretty concealed and secret. It goes without saying the Marines have a long tradition of a gay-bisexual subculture that involves many career Marines. Kasmir J. Zaratkiewicz I appreciate this diverting glimpse of subterranean military life! Naturally, I accept your testimony about uniformed gals gone wild in the loo. But it seems as if such behavior is a temporary, makeshift measure, predicated on soldiers' distance from their own homes. It doesn't totally parallel the lifelong cruising style of so many gay men who haunt public toilets as an active erotic choice or preference. With its acrid hormonal smells, brisk traffic and mundane ritual of furtive self-touch, the men's john stimulates gay lust -- while the ladies' room is just another place to jabber and powder your nose! I have a quick question about your reference to Barbara Steele in "La Dolce Vita." I could be wrong, but I didn't think Barbara Steele (one of my two top cult actress favorites; the other is Kim Novak) was in" La Dolce Vita." I thought she was in "8 1/2," playing Gloria Morin. Now, she may have been in Italy at the time "La Dolce Vita" came out, because 1960 was the year of her breakthrough movie, "La Maschera del Demonio" ("Black Sunday"), but I don't remember seeing her in "La Dolce Vita." Tom Nassisi May Aphrodite forgive me! Of course you're quite right -- Barbara Steele (whom I compared to Lady Caroline Lamb and Edie Sedgwick in "Sexual Personae") does her charismatic, manic turn in "8 1/2." I apologize for the way that the peak Fellini films, united by Nino Rota's sprightly scores, dreamily run together in my mind. I'm delighted to hear from another Kim Novak fan. Her eerily seductive performance as a languid, wistful witch in "Bell, Book, and Candle" made a huge impression on me in childhood. In fact, it probably marked me for life! Alfred Hitchcock was of course disgruntled that he had to use Kim Novak instead of one of his more refined blondes in "Vertigo," but now it's hard to imagine anyone but Novak in that role. As the false Madeleine swathed in her shimmering green cape, she floats like a baroque apparition into Ernie's restaurant; as the slangy shop girl, she's sensuously beefy ("I'm gonna have one of those big, beautiful steaks!") and yet wears her hurt on the surface. Who today in Hollywood is capable of that hypnotic combination of the mystical and the concrete? I was thrilled to see your mention of "Absolutely Fabulous." I've watched the episodes on DVD more times than I care to mention. But I know you didn't neglect to mention the utterly brilliant Jane Horrocks in your listing of all the actresses who made the series so great! Come on, now. That's a fairly grievous omission. Daniel Enoch As Ann Landers might say, 20 lashes from a wet noodle! My hasty omission of Jane Horrocks was appalling. Please attribute it to the rigors of full-time teaching (I do have a day job!). Horrocks' priceless turns as Bubble, Edina's daffy, incompetent secretary with a Northern accent, are engraved in my brain. Her line readings and physical bits of business are ultra-sophisticated. And her surreal interchanges with her frustrated, distracted or coke-addled boss are glorious to behold -- through repeated viewings without number. Thanks to Horrocks, the elfin Bubble will live forever! Since you (and Alison) love "AbFab" and you wrote about Bergman's death in Salon, I just wanted to make sure you've seen the French & Saunders satire of Bergman. I also love the SCTV satires as well as the brilliant "De Düva." Go to Bergmanorama.com and scroll down the page to the parodies section. Stephen Ludwig No, I hadn't seen this French & Saunders episode -- thanks so much! However, "De Düva" ("The Dove") will never be surpassed as a Bergman satire. I found it utterly hilarious when I first saw it in 1968, and I never forgot it. Over the decades, I performed snatches of its fractured pseudo-Swedish in my classes. So it's wonderful to be able to encounter the film again via the Web. I still admire its classy cleverness. The site you kindly sent also has one of my favorite moments in Woody Allen -- the finale of "Love and Death" where two Bergman films ("Persona" and "The Seventh Seal") are parodied. Diane Keaton is terrific with her mordant, deadpan delivery. What comedic intelligence! I adore the Who. What are your thoughts on that extraordinary band? Tim Eimiller Pete Townshend, the Who's virtuoso lead guitarist and composer, is obviously one of the preeminent geniuses of modern popular music. While I always preferred the Rolling Stones, with their sinuous covers of African-American blues, the Who had a galvanizing impact on me in college and graduate school. I loved their raw power -- Townshend's crashing chords, Roger Daltrey's soaring vocals, John Entwistle's deft singing bass, and Keith Moon's crazed, even chaotic drumming. My favorite Who songs were the defiant manifesto "My Generation" (here it is from the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967), and the darkly magical "I Can See for Miles" (lip-synced on this vintage clip from a "Smothers Brothers Show"). Two years ago, the ingenious Petra Haden did a phenomenal a cappella version of the latter song. The Who's rock opera "Tommy" (1969) seemed to prefigure a renaissance of rock, where this once despised teenage genre would rise to the level of classical music. Alas, that never happened, and some of us '60s relics are still in the dumps about it. There are many marvelous songs on "Tommy," but my all-time favorite is "I'm Free" (here's the Who performing it at Woodstock in 1969). From the Who's later repertoire, there's a major standout for me: "Eminence Front" (1982), which I think is a masterpiece. In the original video, I've always loved the contrast between Townshend's punk intensity and Entwistle's cordial, magisterial reserve. Don't miss the look of ecstatic abstraction in drummer Kenney Jones' eyes. Daltrey looks tasty, but why is he clutching that guitar? Here's the grizzled band performing it (somewhat unsteadily) this year. I could go on and on about the poetic implications about identity (the persona as mask) and power politics in the lyrics of this song: "Eminence front -- it's a put-on!"; "Come on, join the party/ Dressed to kill." It's all coming from Townshend's own passionate spiritual quest for meaning, which has taken him from the violent mean streets through stratospheric fame to his present status as a near-deaf bard and sage. As I watched the quick disintegration of Britney Spears on the latest unwatched MTV Music Video Awards show in Las Vegas (she looked like Pillsbury Crescent Roll dough popping out of the tube while wearing an outfit that looked like the love child of Annette Funicello's bathing suit and Norma Desmond's shower cap), I have to ask what has happened to the showmanship of singers like this? Where, oh where, are the Ann-Margrets of today? C.F. Cantavero I haven't given up on Britney, despite the maelstrom of trashiness that she compulsively creates around herself and, worse, her children. To recover, she would need to ally herself with an ace team of producers, choreographers and stylists. But Britney obviously lacks Madonna's workaholic Italian-American drive as well as her shrewd instinct for finding and collaborating with cutting-edge talent. Your invocation of the feisty yet sweet-tempered Ann-Margret is well-taken. She was a hardworking singer and dancer who had performed in cabarets before she became a star. She benefited from the vitality of American musical comedy in the post-World War II era -- a razzmatazz spirit that explodes from the screen in "Viva Las Vegas" (1964), where she co-stars with Elvis Presley. It's no coincidence that Ann-Margret was discovered by George Burns, with his rich vaudeville past. American music, movies, TV and stand-up comedy benefited enormously from ex-vaudevillians, who learned their chops through seat-of-the-pants crowd-pleasing live performance. That tradition has now been broken. Britney Spears' pathetic free fall is partly due to her lack of basic professional skills. She's like a hologram vibrating in the depthless space of modern media -- a figment of our imagination who has lost her way in Wonderland. Postscript: I tartly assessed the current state of gender studies in a review of three new books about male sexuality in the Sept. 21 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Michael (Mr. Clooney) is the firm’s designated fixer, though he likes to call himself its janitor. He works in that rarefied gray zone where the barely legal meets the almost criminal and takes lunch at the private club.
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"It doesn't strike a regular person that by passing a CD around the neighborhood, they should have their house taken away," says Lew Rockwell, president of the free-market Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. "And by electronic means it shouldn't be any different."
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10/6/2007 12:35 PM
LESS CASH FROM SINGLES? According to Bongiovi, a singles-driven market would lead to less money for musicians and producers, and, ultimately, to fewer artists getting a shot at the big time. "When you go into a record label now, its got to be such a sure thing. Otherwise, there's no money for you," he said. --
http://promo.realestate.yahoo.com/ HOUSING:
-
- http://www.kontraband.com/pics/8298/Object-Assassin/
9/30/2007 10:53 AM
Can you read sheet music? 
9/28/2007 11:29 AM
Oprah earns four times more than other TV starsLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - When it comes to what pays on U.S. television, talk doesn't come cheap -- nor apparently does a loud mouth. Financial magazine Forbes on Thursday published a list of the highest-paid TV celebrities, with daytime talk show host Oprah Winfrey leading the way by earning an $260 million between June 2006 and June 2007. Nobody else came close. Second in the list was Jerry Seinfeld earning $60 million. Winfrey was joined at the top of the list by another talk show host, David Letterman, who landed at No. 4 by raking in $40 million in the same period from his "Late Night with David Letterman." Simon Cowell, the arrogant and harshly critical judge on top-rated talent show "American Idol" earned $45 million to land at No. 3, and Donald Trump, whose boisterous exclamation "You're Fired" from reality show "The Apprentice" became part of the pop culture lexicon, was No. 5 with $32 million. The list shows that in the media arena, it pays to own and produce either all or part of your shows, like Oprah. That notion becomes abundantly clear in the No. 2 slot, where Jerry Seinfeld sits with $60 million earned mostly from reruns of his co-owned 1990's sitcom "Seinfeld." Despite the fact that prime-time TV shows win awards and critical acclaim, Forbes Senior Editor Lea Goldman noted that daytime TV and news is where stars rake in the dough. "Daytime personalities dominate our list of TV's top earners, with most competition among morning and afternoon talk show hosts," said Goldman. Barbara Walters, another star who owns and co-produces her daytime show "The View," landed at No. 18 with $12 million. The remaining top 20 is as follows; 6. Jay Leno, $32 million 7. Dr. Phil McGraw, $30 million 8. "Judge" Judy Sheindlin, $30 million 9. George Lopez, $26 million 10. Kiefer Sutherland, $22 million 11. Regis Philbin, $21 million 12. Tyra Banks, $18 million 13. Rachael Ray, $16 million, 14. Katie Couric, $15 million 15. Ellen DeGeneres, $15 million 16. Ryan Seacrest, $14 million 17. Matt Lauer, $13 million 18, Barbara Walters, $12 million 19. Diane Sawyer, $12 million 20. Meredith Vieira, $10 million Reuters/Nielsen --
9/26/2007 10:36 AM
Table 2: Type of Individual Violence by Gender (Data on 272 husbands and 271 wives, as reported by wives)
Now, how do we identify terrorism and common couple violence? They are dyadic phenomena that require attention to the behavior of both partners in the marriage. Table 3 presents data only on violent individuals, that is, those who had been violent in their relationship at least once. It places individual violence within its dyadic context, distinguishing among four types of violent behavior. The first row, “mutual violent control,” refers to
Table 3: Individual Violent Behavior in a Dyadic Context (Violent individuals only, as reported by wives) Husbands Wives N Mutual Violent Control 50% 50% 10 (Patriarchal) Terrorism 97% 3% 97 Violent Resistance 4% 96% 77 Common Couple Violence 56% 44% 146 The relationship between gender and these types of violence supports the hypothesis that “terrorism” is indeed an almost exclusively male phenomenon in heterosexual marital relationships, thus appropriately referred to as “patriarchal terrorism,” while common couple violence is close to gender-symmetric, at least by these crude criteria. (Data on the frequency and severity of male and female common couple violence—not shown—indicate that by other criteria men are more violent than women even within common couple violence.)
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9/24/2007 3:09 PM
Sticking needles in a bad back ‘eases pain better than drugs’Acupuncture works better than conventional treatments in reducing lower back pain, according to researchers in Germany. But so does fake acupuncture, where the needles are inserted shallowly and in the wrong places. In a trial of more than 1,100 people, both were almost twice as effective as a combination of drugs, physiotherapy and exercise. The results suggest that both acupuncture and sham acupuncture act as powerful versions of the placebo effect, providing relief from symptoms as a result of the convictions that they engender in patients. A team led by Michael Haake, of the University of Regensburg, recruited 1,162 patients aged between 18 and 86 who had suffered lower back pain for an average of eight years. They were divided into three equal groups, and treated either with genuine acupuncture, with the needles inserted in precisely specified places and to a predetermined depth, with fake acupuncture, or with antiinflammatory drugs, painkillers and physiotherapy. Success was measured as a one-third improvement in pain, or a 12 per cent improvement in mobility. After six months, almost half of those on true acupuncture (47.6 per cent) and 44.2 per cent of those on sham acupuncture had met these criteria, while only 27.4 per cent of those treated conventionally had. This suggests, say the authors in Archives of Internal Medicine, that acupuncture, however incompetently it may be applied, is about twice as effective as conventional therapy. “The superiority of both forms of acupuncture suggests a common underlying mechanism that may act on pain generation, transmission of pain signals or processing of pain signals by the central nervous system and that is stronger than the action mechanism of conventional therapy,” the authors say. “Acupuncture gives physicians a promising and effective treatment option for those experiencing chronic low back pain, with few adverse effects or contraindications. The improvements in all primary and secondary outcome measures were significant and lasted long after completion of treatment.” They say that this is the largest and most rigorous trial to investigate the benefits of acupuncture, the technique in which sharp needles are introduced to a considerable depth into the body in precisely defined places in the body. Its results, they acknowledge, are surprising. That random pricking of the skin to a depth of one to three millimetres works almost as well as “true” acupuncture, which involves penetrations to a depth of five to forty millimetres in precise places, leads them to question the underlying mechanism. It also suggests that lengthy training in the technique may be superfluous. All that is needed is to declare that you are a practising acupuncturist and make a few shallow insertions, the trial suggests. The trial aimed to distinguish between the physical and the psychological effects of the technique. If true acupuncture worked better than sham, it would have shown that it has a genuine basis in physiology. But the trial failed to find any differences at all. So the authors conclude that the results send a confused message. One possibility is that there are no physical effects at all of acupuncture, or that they are are so small that they are overlaid by far stronger psychological effects. Alternatively, acupuncture does work, but it does not matter how well or badly it is done. Symptoms improve regardless of point selection or depth of needling. Since all the participants had long-term back pain, it is reasonable to assume that all had experienced conventional treatment, which often fails. Low back pain is notoriously hard to treat, so the use of acupuncture would have been novel, and likely to bring the placebo effect into play. That fake acupuncture appeared to have worked almost as well as true acupuncture supports this conclusion. Straight to the point –– In Oriental medicine, illness is said to be due to an imbalance of “vital energy” (Ch’i) which flows through the body along 12 pathways or meridians, each corresponding to one of the vital organs –– The acupuncturist inserts very fine stainless steel needles at specific points to stimulate energy flow; patients report a tingling sensation –– Trials have shown benefits in treating pain, nausea and headaches –– There appears to be no scientific basis for the medical concept or placement of needles –– It has been used in China since 3000 BC, with stone needles found in Mongolia –– The Cochrane Collaboration, the most authoritative review of evidence, says that it is effective for low-back pain but no better than conventional treatment --
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
"Only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. That's not saying much for the remainder."
a whole generation of students who learned to read on the computer and who watch more TV.
Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as "proficient" in prose -- reading and understanding information in short texts -- down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient -- compared with 40 percent in 1992.
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TV Hurts Kids Of All Ages, Studies Say(CBS) Many experts claim
that too much television isn't good for kids — they
should read books or play outside instead.
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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/
Baby wants a bottle, and her TV. Babies are glued to television sets these days, with 40 percent of 3-month- olds and 90 percent of 2-year-olds regularly watching TV, according to a University of Washington study released Monday. These tiny viewers are further proof that baby TV is a booming business in 2007. Today, infants have their own 24-hour network, Brainy Baby and Baby Einstein DVDs, and a growing list of other programs made just for them. Many also have sets in their bedrooms. --
– 34 percent of conservatives have not read a book within the past year, compared with 22 percent of liberals and moderates. – Among those who had read at least one book, conservatives “typically read eight” books in the past year. Liberals read nine, moderates five. – “By slightly wider margins, Democrats tended to read more books than Republicans and independents. There were no differences by political party in the percentage of those who said they had not read at least one book.” --
http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/
College students spend more time with the internet than other media:
Fully ConnectedPercentage of teens who say they can share more with a friend online than off: 30 Percentage of college student cellphone users who send and receive text messages: 75 Minutes per day that college students spend, on average, sending and receiving text messages: almost 20 Percentage of teens who say they are more willing to broach a touchy topic through instant messaging than in person: 29 Percentage of teens who report that talking to friends online makes them feel they are always connected: 62 Hours per week that college students spend, on average, on social networking sites: nearly 7 Percentage of college students ages 18 to 24 who e-mail daily: 93 Percentage of 16- to 21-year-olds who report making friends online: 57 Percentage of 18- to 21-year-olds who report meeting in person someone they met online: 26 [This stat must be encouraging to online sexual predators & other pervs. hg47] -- Stacy Weiner SOURCES: Harris Interactive, Alloy Media+Marketing More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Today's freshmen will have made e-contact with their roommates before they arrive on campus.http://www.valleymorningstar.com/
BEE CAREFUL
Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear cache’IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way. At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames. Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea. The Israeli government was not saying. “The security sources and IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers are demonstrating unusual courage,” said Ehud Olmert, the prime minister. “We naturally cannot always show the public our cards.” The Syrians were also keeping mum. “I cannot reveal the details,” said Farouk al-Sharaa, the vice-president. “All I can say is the military and political echelon is looking into a series of responses as we speak. Results are forthcoming.” The official story that the target comprised weapons destined for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi’ite group, appeared to be crumbling in the face of widespread scepticism. Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, and added that there were a “number of foreign technicians” in the country. Asked if they could be North Korean, he replied: “There are North Korean people there. There’s no question about that.” He said a network run by AQ Khan, the disgraced creator of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, could be involved. But why would nuclear material be in Syria? Known to have chemical weapons, was it seeking to bolster its arsenal with something even more deadly? Alternatively, could it be hiding equipment for North Korea, enabling Kim Jong-il to pretend to be giving up his nuclear programme in exchange for economic aid? Or was the material bound for Iran, as some authorities in America suggest? According to Israeli sources, preparations for the attack had been going on since late spring, when Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, presented Olmert with evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea. The Israeli spy chief apparently feared such a device could eventually be installed on North-Korean-made Scud-C missiles. “This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel,” said an Israeli source. “We’ve known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds, but Israel can’t live with a nuclear warhead.” An expert on the Middle East, who has spoken to Israeli participants in the raid, told yesterday’s Washington Post that the timing of the raid on September 6 appeared to be linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying North Korean material labelled as cement but suspected of concealing nuclear equipment. The target was identified as a northern Syrian facility that purported to be an agricultural research centre on the Euphrates river. Israel had been monitoring it for some time, concerned that it was being used to extract uranium from phosphates. According to an Israeli air force source, the Israeli satellite Ofek 7, launched in June, was diverted from Iran to Syria. It sent out high-quality images of a northeastern area every 90 minutes, making it easy for air force specialists to spot the facility. Early in the summer Ehud Barak, the defence minister, had given the order to double Israeli forces on its Golan Heights border with Syria in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes. Sergei Kirpichenko, the Russian ambassador to Syria, warned President Bashar al-Assad last month that Israel was planning an attack, but suggested the target was the Golan Heights. Israeli military intelligence sources claim Syrian special forces moved towards the Israeli outpost of Mount Hermon on the Golan Heights. Tension rose, but nobody knew why. At this point, Barak feared events could spiral out of control. The decision was taken to reduce the number of Israeli troops on the Golan Heights and tell Damascus the tension was over. Syria relaxed its guard shortly before the Israeli Defence Forces struck. Only three Israeli cabinet ministers are said to have been in the know � Olmert, Barak and Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister. America was also consulted. According to Israeli sources, American air force codes were given to the Israeli air force attaché in Washington to ensure Israel’s F15Is would not mistakenly attack their US counterparts. Once the mission was under way, Israel imposed draconian military censorship and no news of the operation emerged until Syria complained that Israeli aircraft had violated its airspace. Syria claimed its air defences had engaged the planes, forcing them to drop fuel tanks to lighten their loads as they fled. But intelligence sources suggested it was a highly successful Israeli raid on nuclear material supplied by North Korea. Washington was rife with speculation last week about the precise nature of the operation. One source said the air strikes were a diversion for a daring Israeli commando raid, in which nuclear materials were intercepted en route to Iran and hauled to Israel. Others claimed they were destroyed in the attack. There is no doubt, however, that North Korea is accused of nuclear cooperation with Syria, helped by AQ Khan’s network. John Bolton, who was undersecretary for arms control at the State Department, told the United Nations in 2004 the Pakistani nuclear scientist had “several other” customers besides Iran, Libya and North Korea. Some of his evidence came from the CIA, which had reported to Congress that it viewed “Syrian nuclear intentions with growing concern”. “I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” Bolton said last week. Syria, he added, was a member of a “junior axis of evil”, with a well-established ambition to develop weapons of mass destruction. The links between Syria and North Korea date back to the rule of Kim Il-sung and President Hafez al-Assad in the last century. In recent months, their sons have quietly ordered an increase in military and technical cooperation. Foreign diplomats who follow North Korean affairs are taking note. There were reports of Syrian passengers on flights from Beijing to Pyongyang and sightings of Middle Eastern businessmen from sources who watch the trains from North Korea to China. On August 14, Rim Kyong Man, the North Korean foreign trade minister, was in Syria to sign a protocol on “cooperation in trade and science and technology”. No details were released, but it caught Israel’s attention. Syria possesses between 60 and 120 Scud-C missiles, which it has bought from North Korea over the past 15 years. Diplomats believe North Korean engineers have been working on extending their 300-mile range. It means they can be used in the deserts of northeastern Syria � the area of the Israeli strike. The triangular relationship between North Korea, Syria and Iran continues to perplex intelligence analysts. Syria served as a conduit for the transport to Iran of an estimated £50m of missile components and technology sent by sea from North Korea. The same route may be in use for nuclear equipment. But North Korea is at a sensitive stage of negotiations to end its nuclear programme in exchange for security guarantees and aid, leading some diplomats to cast doubt on the likelihood that Kim would cross America’s “red line” forbidding the proliferation of nuclear materials. Christopher Hill, the State Department official representing America in the talks, said on Friday he could not confirm “intelligence-type things”, but the reports underscored the need “to make sure the North Koreans get out of the nuclear business”. By its actions, Israel showed it is not interested in waiting for diplomacy to work where nuclear weapons are at stake. As a bonus, the Israelis proved they could penetrate the Syrian air defence system, which is stronger than the one protecting Iranian nuclear sites. This weekend President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent Ali Akbar Mehrabian, his nephew, to Syria to assess the damage. The new “axis of evil” may have lost one of its spokes. --
Wow...a precursor to an attack on Iran? Wesley, Cheyenne, WY, USA Thank you for the excellent article! I wish we here in the US could find informative articles like this about what's really going on in the world, instead of pablum about how fat Britney Spears is, or how many times Lindsey Lohan has been in rehab this year... artemis, Felton, Delaware, US Does anyone think that
some of the nuclear material the Isaeli's destroyed
could have come from Iraq before, during and after the
initial war? Many US intelligence Agencies believe Sadam
moved his Weapons of Mass Destruction to Syria with the
help of the Russian special forces. Kent A. McNeil, Bellaire, Michigan We all know Israel is the only country allowed nuclear capabilities, that's nothing new. The problem, however, is all the 'Israel believes' , 'concern that it was', 'rife with speculation', 'may be in use', 'but suggested the target' that we saw so many times in the lead up to Iraq's invasion to rid that country of 'proven' WMD (even to the extent that the UN was shown diagrams and sat photos as evidence. Are these yet to come? Everything now seems to be pre-emptive on a pre-conceived idea. tariq , ashford, Great Job IDF, keep up the good work TampaJoe, Tampa, USA/FL Great work! Long live Israel, long live liberty! Derek, Shanghai, -- Of the presidents he worked with, Mr. Greenspan reserves his highest praise for Bill Clinton, whom he described in his book as a sponge for economic data who maintained “a consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth.” Say all the bad things you want about Bill Clinton, where he put his penis, where he put his cigars; but he put his money where his mouth is, and from an economic viewpoint is the best President we've had in decades. Too bad we can't bring the schmuck back! hg47 9/16/2007 11:27 AM
The trials of Ramadan fasting
Imagine going without food or water for the entire working day, and several hours more. With Ramadan about to start, that's the challenge facing Britain's 1.6 million Muslims. How do they cope? "Burgers. I crave burgers. I don't even like burgers normally." Thirty-one-year-old Sumaya Amra is just one of the billion or so Muslims who takes part in the holy month of Ramadan by fasting in daylight hours, each day for 30 days. Like many young Muslims, London-based Sumaya works in an office and has to fit the demands of a working day around her fast and her food cravings. Though there are some exceptions, fasting during Ramadan is obligatory for every fit and able Muslim over the age of puberty. As Muslims believe that their good deeds and actions bring greater reward during Ramadan than at any other time of year, most Muslims perform the fast, even if they do not follow their religion closely throughout the rest of the year. There is also a convivial, community aspect to the month which many find attractive; but for urban, singleton Muslims living away from home the traditional family evening get-together is often replaced by events held by Muslim organisations, or friends gathering to break the fast en masse. Ramadan is not purely about hunger; it is used as an exercise in self-control where food, drink (including water, smoking, sexual activity and even gossiping are all abstained from during sunlight hours.
Most sacred of the holy months in Islam The Koran was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad Fasting one of 'five pillars' of Islam Ramadan moves forward by 10 or 11 days each year as Islamic calendar is lunar Exemptions include children below the age of puberty, the sick, elderly, pregnant and mentally ill Celebration of Eid-ul-Fitr marks the end The month is viewed as one for attaining greater spirituality, performing charitable deeds and spending time in prayer and contemplation. The spiritual aspect can be the hardest; resisting the desire to lose one's temper despite a thumping caffeine-withdrawal headache and an intrigued non-Muslim colleague asking you what fasting is like while trying to hide their lunchtime sandwich, is somewhat testing. To answer the two most common questions: no, you really cannot drink water and no, chewing gum is not allowed either. Unlike their peers in the Middle East who benefit from working hours adapted for Ramadan, Muslims in the West fit Ramadan around the demands of a regular working day. As well as hunger pangs, Ramadan often means less sleep - those performing the fast are supposed to rise before dawn each morning to eat a meal, known as the suhoor, before beginning their fast. But Sumaya adapts her fasting ritual: "I often don't get up for suhoor and I know that Islamically this is wrong, but I find the fatigue worse than any hunger I feel. I would rather have a longer sleep and be able to fast and do my work properly." Willpower This year Ramadan is due to start on Thursday 13 September and the late summer days mean that the first fast will break at about 1930 BST. Most Brits love the thought of an extra bit of sunshine, but the thought of a late sunset is not welcomed by all.
"A few years ago when the fast fell in December, it was a lot easier," says Sumaya. "It was like having a very early breakfast and then skipping lunch before having a good dinner." Hunger may seem the biggest difficulty to overcome, but fasting for belief seems to induce a willpower that puts food out of the mind. This willpower can drive even the most ardent of smokers to give up cigarettes - at least until after sunset. While most healthy Muslims are able to perform the fast without any major problems, as the month progresses the combination of lack of food and sleep can take its toll and a tired or grumpy Muslim colleague or school child can be found staring at the clock in the countdown to iftar time, when they can break their fast after sundown. While missing out on business lunches and the daily mocca-chocca-skinny latte may be difficult, those with more physical jobs have an even more arduous task. Professional boxer Amir Khan fasts even throughout his training. "Fasting makes you feel weak," he said last year. "You have to wake up at four or five in the morning to eat, but you're knackered and you don't feel like food, you have to force it down. I wouldn't fast on the day of a fight though." Many big companies have flexible working policies to help during Ramadan but Neil Payne, CEO of cross-cultural communications consultancy Kwintessential, says that not all companies know what Ramadan entails. "As a convert to Islam myself, I know what it's like to be working in an office surrounded by people who are not fasting. Our clients are always interested in Ramadan, but they're not always very knowledgeable about it. Even some of the big blue-chip companies in London have little awareness of what Ramadan is."
Owner of the Tiffinbites chain of Indian food restaurants, Jamal Hirani, recognised that breaking the fast and eating the meal afterwards, known as the iftar, was something that Muslim office workers wanted to do away from their desks. "I worked in the City myself. I know what it's like to fast at work. You miss out on colleagues' birthday lunches, for example, and then you struggle to try and find a quiet spot to break your fast and have something decent and quick to eat. "My experiences prompted me to have iftar meals at our restaurants. Customers pre-order their food and it's ready and waiting for them when they come to break their fast." After sunset, Muslims may eat and drink as normal but overindulgence at night is not in the spirit of Ramadan. "I try not to be a glutton during Ramadan, that's not what it's about," says Sumaya. "Admittedly sometimes I do seek out those burgers and I don't know why because they're always such as disappointment, and there's nothing worse than soggy chips. Really it's my mum's food that I miss the most." Below is a selection of your comments. Fasting during the
summer can be so difficult, with us not being able to
eat until 7.30pm having been at work all day and then
facing a difficult commute home just makes it all extra
difficult. But I think as Muslims, we all realise that
these difficulties are all just part of Ramadan and the
challenges we have to face, makes it all worth while 30
days or so later when life is back to normal. Helping us
appreciate food, or even just a glass of water. I have several Muslim
friends and during Ramadan, some of them moan from 8.30
in the morning about food, whereas the others make no
mention of it - citing the fact they are lucky they can
eat in the morning and in the evening, and billions in
the world should be so lucky to have that option. I do
admire the dedication of the likes of Amir Khan who
needs steady and balanced nutrition to maintain his
performance levels in training. Fasting makes one
stronger not weaker and there is the realisation that
for others around the world fasting is the norm. Bring
it on I say. Ramadan Mubarak to all and lets hope it
brings peace and unity for all. Lunch is for wimps
(Gordon Gecko "Wall Street" 1987) Ramadan Greetings! As
a footy fan, I was always wondering how the footy
players cope with fasting. There are many Muslim players
in the English League, are they allowed to fast? Some
players are recently converted to Islam, Anelka is one
of them. I would just like to
wish all my fellow Muslims Ramadhan Kareem. -- 9/14/2007 10:20 AM
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/
Vehicle crashes are the leading cause of teen death accounting for 44 percent of all teen deaths nationwide, Simitian said. Sixteen-year-old drivers have a crash rate three times higher than 17-year-olds and five times greater than 18-year-olds and nearly 10 times greater than drivers 30 to 59 years old, according to a 2001 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report. “The simple fact is that teenage drivers are more easily distracted. They are young, inexperienced and have a slower reaction time. We want to eliminate distractions so they can focus on paying attention to the road and being good drivers,” said Schwarzenneger. Cell phones were associated with 359 accidents — two of which were fatal — between 2005 to 2006 with drivers 15 to 18 years old, according to the California Highway Patrol. Six accidents were linked to cell phones during the same time period in San Mateo County.
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Challenge to Scientific Consensus on Global Warming: Analysis Finds Hundreds of Scientists Have Published Evidence Countering Man-Made Global Warming FearsWASHINGTON, Sept. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that 1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance. "This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850," said Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery. Other researchers found evidence that 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate. Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention. "Not all of these researchers would describe themselves as global warming skeptics," said Avery, "but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see." The names were compiled by Avery and climate physicist S. Fred Singer, the co-authors of the new book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, mainly from the peer-reviewed studies cited in their book. The researchers' specialties include tree rings, sea levels, stalagmites, lichens, pollen, plankton, insects, public health, Chinese history and astrophysics. "We have had a Greenhouse Theory with no evidence to support it-except a moderate warming turned into a scare by computer models whose results have never been verified with real-world events," said co-author Singer. "On the other hand, we have compelling evidence of a real-world climate cycle averaging 1470 years (plus or minus 500) running through the last million years of history. The climate cycle has above all been moderate, and the trees, bears, birds, and humans have quietly adapted." "Two thousand years of published human histories say that the warm periods were good for people," says Avery. "It was the harsh, unstable Dark Ages and Little Ice Age that brought bigger storms, untimely frost, widespread famine and plagues of disease." "There may have been a consensus of guesses among climate model-builders," says Singer. "However, the models only reflect the warming, not its cause." He noted that about 70 percent of the earth's post-1850 warming came before 1940, and thus was probably not caused by human-emitted greenhouse gases. The net post-1940 warming totals only a tiny 0.2 degrees C. The historic evidence of the natural cycle includes the 5000-year record of Nile floods, 1st-century Roman wine production in Britain, and thousands of museum paintings that portrayed sunnier skies during the Medieval Warming and more cloudiness during the Little Ice Age. The physical evidence comes from oxygen isotopes, beryllium ions, tiny sea and pollen fossils, and ancient tree rings. The evidence recovered from ice cores, sea and lake sediments, cave stalagmites and glaciers has been analyzed by electron microscopes, satellites, and computers. Temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period on California's Whitewing Mountain must have been 3.2 degrees warmer than today, says Constance Millar of the U.S. Forest Service, based on her study of seven species of relict trees that grew above today's tree line. Singer emphasized, "Humans have known since the invention of the telescope that the earth's climate variations were linked to the sunspot cycle, but we had not understood how. Recent experiments have demonstrated that more or fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth create more or fewer of the low, cooling clouds that deflect solar heat back into space-amplifying small variations in the intensity of the sun. Avery and Singer noted that there are hundreds of additional peer-reviewed studies that have found cycle evidence, and that they will publish additional researchers' names and studies. They also noted that their book was funded by Wallace O. Sellers, a Hudson board member, without any corporate contributions. Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years is available from Amazon.com: For more information, please contact Dennis Avery, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow and co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, at 540-337-6354: Email: cgfi@hughes.net Hudson Institute
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How secure are you?By Camille Paglia
Petraeus' empty words and the real terror threat. Plus: Larry Craig's libidinal misstep is grounded in modern male sexuality. Sept. 12, 2007 | Six years after the attack on the World Trade Center, what is the state of national security in the U.S.? The Bush administration assures us that, thanks to its invisible hand, we are far safer than we would have been with a bleeding-heart Democrat at the helm. I suspect this is true: The lack of scruple about constitutional guarantees that has been openly flaunted by Vice President Dick Cheney might well have nipped nascent conspiracies in the bud -- though at the price of the massive surveillance and targeting of innocent citizens. Should there be another major attack on U.S. soil, even Democrats suspicious of Republican hype would snap into survivalist mode, where defense of hearth and home is an elemental instinct. What Bush and company puff as the "war on terror" is no mirage: radical jihadism, exacerbated by the arrogant stupidity of our invasion of Iraq, does indeed threaten the very existence of Western civilization, whose peace and prosperity depend on a complex infrastructure and communications system vulnerable to catastrophic disruption by small bands of ruthless saboteurs. But if some Democrats too facilely dismiss the gravity of the threat, Republicans have not helped their cause by their propagandistic conflation of shadowy al-Qaida with the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein, who held Iraq together, as his fascist forebears in Assyria and Babylon had done, through brutal repression. Some conservatives can go off the deep end: earlier this year, for example, I heard New York radio host Steve Malzberg deride Barack Obama's cautious caveat that, after another attack, we would need to learn "whose fingerprints are on the bomb." Malzberg flatly proclaimed, "If we're hit again with a dirty bomb, we should immediately tactically nuke Tehran and Damascus." Welcome to World War III. Psychological survival seems to demand mental erasure. The liberal mainstream media censor the raw footage of the burning and collapsing WTC towers out of contorted deference to the victims' families, while conservatives block out the horrific suffering and devastation inflicted on innocent Iraqis through our bombing and occupation of Iraq. Noble motives cannot excuse injustice. A moment that will surely live in political infamy was the confident declaration by the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, that the air was safe to breathe in lower Manhattan -- a statement that, only a week after 9/11, seemed bizarrely premature to me but that was blatantly designed to restore faith in the viability of the financial district. Meanwhile, the acrid fumes from subterranean fires kept pumping out their toxic brew, whose delayed effects are still unknown. It isn't simply the selfless, tireless search-and-recovery workers at ground zero who need be concerned about their long-term health. Whitman was a vigorous, genial former governor of New Jersey who seemed primed for an eventual presidential run, but her career was shipwrecked amid the blinkered partisanship and general managerial mediocrity that have characterized the George W. Bush White House. Whitman's fall was a loss for feminism. I had no interest whatever in Gen. David Petraeus' predictable report this week of the success of the troop surge in Iraq. Words and more words -- what's new? Just get our troops the hell out of there -- now! A phased withdrawal, requiring the removal of massive amounts of supplies and equipment, will take months. But there isn't the sketchiest plan because Bush is dug in to the bitter end and will toss this hot potato to the incoming president -- who (no matter which party wins) won't dare to act. And of course Iraq needs to remain neutralized when American or Israeli bombs start dropping on Iran, which I have little doubt they will do by next year. Bush-Cheney, lacking a clear record of achievement, want to go out with a bang. Apropos of other news, it's unclear whether the prize for worst performance of the past month should go to slatternly Britney Spears (who bombed at the Video Music Awards) or to ultra-whitebread Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, who got caught with his pants down in a Minnesota airport restroom. During the wave of ribald reaction to the latter flap, it was remarkable how few radio hosts and their callers (including on sports shows) had been aware of the cult status of toilets as a pickup joint for gay men. I certainly recall my own surprise when informed by a fellow Yale graduate student that a certain john in the stacks of august Sterling Library (the third floor?) was a renowned hot spot for man-on-man action. I found it a bit de trop: When I wanted an erotic break, I simply riffled through the volumes of Paris Match for photos of Catherine Deneuve. I'm of mixed mind: On the one hand, consensual sex, even if anonymous and faceless, should be a fundamental liberty. On the other hand, public restrooms are shared spaces, especially in airports or train stations, where children may be present. Therefore policing (though not entrapment) is justified. Without reasonable borderlines, sex automatically expands to the max. In the polemical first chapter of
"Sexual Personae," But of course it's true! Oh, don't give me that crap about drug-dazed hot girls getting it on in the stalls of hip lesbo clubs. No women, except for muttering psychotics, are hanging around in grungy bus-station ladies' rooms hoping to score. It's not just furtive, closeted gay men who frequent toilets: Flamboyant pop star George Michael, who eats up stranger sex like a pastry cart of eclairs, got nailed for soliciting a cop in a public john right across from his posh Los Angeles hotel. The sleaziness is a turn-on, probably inflamed by the hyper-distillation of testosterone smells. A hormonal factor has been theorized in outbreaks of violence among lager-swilling British soccer fans, who are packed in like sardines in the seatless stands and who freely piss in place. What most fascinated me about the Craig case, however, was the circuitous audiotape of his police interrogation. The senator's affectless banality was classic WASP, and his archaic diction and tone evoked the 19th century. Craig was born on an Idaho ranch that had been homesteaded by his grandfather. Until relatively recently, that vast state has been far removed from the ethnic or racial infusions that transformed other regions of the country, to which people once migrated en masse to work in factories. I found Craig's mild voice (embarrassingly negotiating about fallen squares of tissue paper) alarming and suffocating: It took me back to my early childhood in the small towns of upstate New York's Southern Tier, where immigrant Italians were still seen as alien interlopers. I was recently intrigued by an archaeology article, "Ritual Killing at Mochlos," written by Jerolyn E. Morrison and Douglas P. Park for Kentro (Fall 2006), published by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The killing is oddly of ceramic jugs, whose handles or spouts were crisply sheared off before they were buried in a Bronze Age tomb on Crete. A bronze dagger was also found ritually snapped in half. To discover the method as well as "the social meaning of the act of ritual killing," the study team borrowed a Cretan ceramic studio and produced their own clay vessels, which were then efficiently "executed" on different surfaces and with various tools. This patient gathering of experimental evidence of ceramic fracture patterns wonderfully demonstrates the scientific spirit of contemporary archaeology at its best. Too often defamed these days as racist, imperialist piracy, archaeology has more scholarly soul than, well, most of the Ivy League's humanities departments ensconced in their plush, airless tombs. On the pop front, I've been mesmerized as always by "Absolutely Fabulous," currently being rebroadcast by BBC America. The latest episode, "Magazine," was first aired 15 years ago but seems fresh as a daisy. I regard Jennifer Saunders as a genius -- not only an ace performer and astute social observer but a brilliant artist whose work has far more substance and staying power than the glitzy rubbish turned out by her fine arts contemporaries of the '90s, notably that overpraised, overpriced pack of Young British Artists whose balloon, except for the redoubtable Tracey Emin, has slowly sagged. My partner Alison and I know virtually all of "Absolutely Fabulous" by heart -- its phrases echo in my brain like vintage poetry. Saunders was blessed with a fiendishly gifted collaborator, Dawn French, as well as a crackerjack ensemble -- Joanna Lumley, June Whitfield, Julia Sawalha, and director Bob Spiers. The series is a dazzling marriage of verbal and physical humor, with even minor or cameo roles (Germaine Greer, Suzi Quatro) wonderfully cast. "Magazine" has satirical surreal flashbacks (starring the formidable Eleanor Bron as Patsy's daft bohemian mother) produced and edited with the inspired verve of a European art film. Speaking of classic comedy, I nearly fell out of my chair while eating lunch recently when Turner Classic Movies broadcast a 1952 black-and-white film I had never heard of, "Never Wave at a WAC," with Rosalind Russell. Alert, all "Auntie Mame" fans! (That sparkling 1958 movie, starring Russell and based on Patrick Dennis' witty book, was one of the central, formative experiences of my youth -- a taste inexplicably shared with battalions of gay men worldwide.) The opening of "Never Wave at a WAC," where Russell as a Washington society hostess gaily descends her curving staircase, is a drop-dead rehearsal for the posh Prohibition party where we first meet Auntie Mame, floating down her own curving Beekman Place staircase. Even Russell's broad gestures and arch banter with her guests stunningly prefigure "Mame." So the history of "Auntie Mame" needs to be rewritten. Never mind Dennis' real-life madcap aunt, his alleged inspiration. Rosalind Russell was Mame before that book was ever published. And with her 1930s-era feisty spirit, the rat-a-tat, motor-mouthed Russell was a superb model of no-excuses, can-do feminism. My YouTube.com discovery du jour is "I Feel Like Saying a Beatnik Poem 1950s B Movie Style" (from "High School Confidential," 1958), where a deliciously insouciant gal does a terrific cafe reading improbably backed by a peppy honky-tonk band. "Tomorrow's dragsville, cats. Tomorrow is a king-size drag! ... Dig the vacuum," she drones. She's in the Juliette Greco ("Orphée") or Barbara Steele style ("La Dolce Vita"), broodingly smart and very high-maintenance. The uncredited bit role is vivaciously played by Phillipa Fallon. I've been startled and delighted to hear Byrds music returning to radio after a very long absence. This aboriginal California folk-rock group has unfortunately been overshadowed by its cofounder David Crosby's epochal later work with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The Byrds have always been dear to my heart: Their ecstatic, silvery lyricism permeated my early college years in the mid-1960s. Check out "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" (distractingly peppered with manic go-go dancers on NBC's "Hullabaloo!") or "It Won't Be Wrong" (a blurry, wavering video of the group awkwardly standing around at a ranch). Heavy metal, disco and hip-hop successively made the Byrds' brand of idealistic melodic charm unfashionable. Let's bring it back! The Byrds' masterpiece, "8 Miles High," released in 1966, crudely stereotyped them as hippie-dippie druggies smuggling pot into the Los Angeles airport. But as a non-drug taker, I indignantly protest: "8 Miles High," with its eerie earthquake rumble and seductive, melismatic, sitar-flavored riffs, is about the clash between nature and culture, seen from a height through the visionary power of art. Editor's Note: On October 10, Camille Paglia will be announcing the finalists for the 2007 National Book Awards at the Library Company in Philadelphia. -- 9/12/2007 11:22 AM
Today: September 12, 2007 at 0:50:4 PDT 'Killer Bees' Descend on New Orleans
MERAUX, La. (AP) - Africanized honeybees, a fierce hybrid strain sometimes referred to as "killer bees," appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the state agriculture commissioner said. A swarm of the bees was captured about five miles from where demolition workers found a colony of Africanized bees in January, commissioner Bob Odom said Tuesday. The most recent find was close enough to the earlier find that the bees might have come from the same colony. But they might also have flown ashore from a passing ship or barge, Odom said in a news release. "Although the exact source can't be identified, we have to assume Africanized honeybees are now established in the area and people should be careful when working outside," Odom said. The Department of Agriculture and Forestry keeps traps along a north-south line through the state and at all deepwater ports to monitor the bees, which are smaller and more aggressive than the European honeybees raised for honey. "Because Africanized bees have been labeled 'killer bees' for years, there's an idea around that they are bigger than European honeybees," Odom said. "The truth is they're actually smaller but a lot fiercer." They have the same venom as honeybees, but attack in groups. Experts recommend that anyone confronted with Africanized bees find cover quickly. Africanized bees are the result of an experiment to increase honey production in Brazil. A swarm escaped a lab in 1957 and headed north. When they mated with native strains, the offspring were as aggressive as the African parents. They reached Texas in 1990 and have spread west to California and east to Florida. They were first found in Louisiana in Caddo Parish, in June 2005, and identified the following month. They have moved steadily east since then, and were most recently found near Pecan Island and Turkey Creek. -- 9/11/2007 9:58 AM
Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water
ERIE, Pa. (AP) - An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century. John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn. The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel. Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations. The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said. The discovery is "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years," Roy said. "This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywhere," Roy said. "Seeing it burn gives me the chills." Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding. The scientists want to find out whether the energy output from the burning hydrogen—which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit—would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery. "We will get our ideas together and check this out and see where it leads," Roy said. "The potential is huge." -- 9/9/2007 5:37 AM
Teen suicide is a serious problem in the United States. It is the third leading cause of death among teenagers — almost 2,000 teens kill themselves each year.1 Many more teens attempt suicide. A recent survey of high-school students found that:
If you look around a class of 25 students, at least five are likely to have seriously considered suicide, and at least two are likely to have tried to kill themselves in the past year. Female teens are much more likely to attempt suicide than males 3, but male teens are four times more likely to actually kill themselves.4 Over sixty-percent of teens who kill themselves use guns.5
Now about this
Senator Craig thing. --
Small, offbeat trends can change the worldNEW YORK (Reuters) - While Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point" explores how a trend emerges from obscurity to the mainstream, a new book says even small trends can have big effects. College-educated nannies, home-schooled children, spouses who are together only at weekends and home-buyers with bad credit all have the potential to change society, according to "Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes" (Twelve, $29.99). "By the time a trend hits 1 percent, it is ready to spawn a hit movie, best-selling book, or new political movement," says author Mark Penn, who is credited with identifying soccer moms as a key to Bill Clinton's re-election campaign and who is now an adviser to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Multiple small trend groups are harder for marketers or politicians to target, but offer opportunities for those who identify new or often-ignored groups, Penn writes wth co-author Kinney Zalesne. Among groups he identifies in the 2008 presidential election are the 12 million illegal immigrants, who cannot vote in the United States but who may influence the outcome anyway. Anti-immigration moves, which already provoked a mass demonstration, could mobilize naturalized citizens to vote in sympathy of illegal relatives, the authors note. "For the first time in American history, noncitizens' needs and passions might actually be the critical element that tips a presidential election," they write. Other small groups that may bring big changes include the 5 million Americans still working after they turn 65 years old. Aside from the effect on jobs, this trend may also hurt golf club sales but boost sales of reading glasses, special phones or computers. Then there are cougars, the 3 million older women already dating men six years younger than them. They may shrink the dating pool for younger women but do the opposite for young men, while also creating new service opportunities. The book asks if rising numbers of well-educated nannies, often on the way to becoming teachers, will drive traditional nannies out of the market or be their champions, for example by writing about mistreatment or forming nanny unions. It also notes that between 1999 and 2003 the number of U.S. children being taught at home rose 30 percent to 1.1 million, or 2.2 percent of school-age children. As a result, 83 percent of colleges had formal evaluation policies for home-schooled children in 2005 up from 52 percent in 2000. Penn, the Chief Executive of public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, also foresaw difficulties in the subprime loan market, which began to show clearly between writing and publication of the book. The book's last example is about how many of the world's roughly billion Muslims are members of extremist groups. About 0.004 percent are now in such groups but if this rose to 1 percent, it would be the world's biggest army. But on the flip side, an earlier chapter says there are enough moderate U.S. Muslims to be a force for peace, depending on their views on U.S. policies. --
Concern as net hits data limits We are starting to hit the limits of the net's current capacity to carry data, says Bill Thompson. But it isn't a reason to panic
At the turn of the last millennium financial markets around the world realised that the valuations they were offering for companies whose business plans included the word internet were completely ridiculous and that there was no way most of them were ever going to make money. Share prices for those that had already floated collapsed; second round venture funding for start-ups disappeared, even for good ideas with a solid track record; and the angel investors took their money elsewhere. Individual investors - the "day traders" who had sunk their savings into stocks that looked like they would grow forever - lost the most money, but pension funds, insurance companies and other big holders of shares also suffered. The companies, large and small, went under. Who now remembers etoys.com or Online Publishing? But the effect of the collapse was like a neutron bomb, a nuclear weapon that produces high doses of radiation but with a relatively small explosion, and the damage it did was limited. A neutron bomb is designed to kill people but leave buildings standing, while the effect of the dotcom crash was to close down companies but leave the network intact. The web servers went as companies like boo.com turned off their sites, but the cables in the ground, the routers that connected them together and the infrastructure of the internet itself remained in place.
How often do we notice that many instant messages cross the Atlantic - twice - on their way between two people sitting in the same room?
Billions of dollars were spent making the network fast enough to support the anticipated growth in e-commerce and online activity, and when the revolution was halted in its tracks by the collapse it was already in place. Most importantly, the long-haul links of the net's backbone, the fibre-optic cables that cross continents and oceans and make geography largely irrelevant for most network use, most of the time, were in place. After all, how often do we notice that many instant messages cross the Atlantic - twice - on their way between two people sitting in the same room? Foolish investors One of the reasons the growth in broadband use in the West has been so trouble-free has been that spare network capacity, paid for by the foolish investors in the late 1990s, was sitting there for us all to use once we got our high-speed home connections. But now there are signs that we've used up our inheritance, pawned the last of the family silver and run down the estate by not looking to the future. More people are online than ever before, and many of us are as profligate in our use of bandwidth as a decadent aristocrat who can't believe that the peasants will ever revolt. We can see this most clearly in the growth of online video, where concerns about network congestion are already being expressed. Recently I've been playing with Joost, the recently-announced video-streaming service from the people behind Skype and, before that, Kazaa. It's still in beta, but already it's clear that it provides an easy-to-use front end and decent quality video, something that other streaming services are going to find hard to match. Unfortunately it is a real bandwidth hog that will suck up as many bits per second as it can get, and because it is a peer-to-peer service it sends as well as receives. Joost adoption rates are likely to be high, especially if they manage to sign up some interesting content, and when the BBC's iPlayer is finally made available it will add to the load. Online audience Channel 4 and Five both have video on demand services, and it can't be long before Sky fully embraces the online audience too. When that happens network congestion will become more and more common, and ISPs will find it increasingly difficult to maintain performance for their customers. The problems with increasing demand are behind the current debate, largely taking place in the US, about network neutrality and how service providers should be able to shape the traffic they carry by charging different prices for different services. Others are considering how to change the network itself to cope with the demand. The Clean Slate project at Stanford University, for example, believes that "the internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and "backward-compatible" style of academic and industrial networking research" and are trying to develop a new network architecture from scratch. The idea of a clean slate is always appealing but the team will have to come up with something exceptional if they are to make any real impact. Grand project For one thing, it isn't clear yet that today's internet really needs this sort of grand project or that the approach we have used for the last 30 years of packet-based networks should be abandoned. The Internet Protocol, the core standard that determines how data moves around between computers, is a wonder of our age, as significant in its impact as the invention of the internal combustion engine, and it has proved its adaptability and capability again and again. Ask the telephone companies, who watched IP-based telephony completely overturn their business models. And sometimes just muddling along can lead to a solution that is not just as good as one which was designed from scratch but is actually superior. I have always believed
that evolution has given us a richness and complexity of
life on earth far beyond the imaginative capacity of any
creator, even a supernatural one, and I don't see why
the "get something that sort of works and then fix it"
model that we have always taken with the network should
fail us now. -- 9/8/2007 9:48 AM
http://news.independent.co.uk/
Switzerland: Europe's heart of darkness?Switzerland is known as a haven of peace and neutrality. But today it is home to a new extremism that has alarmed the United Nations. Proposals for draconian new laws that target the country's immigrants have been condemned as unjust and racist. A poster campaign, the work of its leading political party, is decried as xenophobic. Has Switzerland become Europe's heart of darkness? By Paul VallelyPublished: 07 September 2007At first sight, the poster looks like an innocent children's cartoon. Three white sheep stand beside a black sheep. The drawing makes it looks as though the animals are smiling. But then you notice that the three white beasts are standing on the Swiss flag. One of the white sheep is kicking the black one off the flag, with a crafty flick of its back legs. The poster is, according to the United Nations, the sinister symbol of the rise of a new racism and xenophobia in the heart of one of the world's oldest independent democracies. A worrying new extremism is on the rise. For the poster – which bears the slogan "For More Security" – is not the work of a fringe neo-Nazi group. It has been conceived – and plastered on to billboards, into newspapers and posted to every home in a direct mailshot – by the Swiss People's Party (the Schweizerische Volkspartei or SVP) which has the largest number of seats in the Swiss parliament and is a member of the country's coalition government. With a general election due next month, it has launched a twofold campaign which has caused the UN's special rapporteur on racism to ask for an official explanation from the government. The party has launched a campaign to raise the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to reintroduce into the penal code a measure to allow judges to deport foreigners who commit serious crimes once they have served their jail sentence. But far more dramatically, it has announced its intention to lay before parliament a law allowing the entire family of a criminal under the age of 18 to be deported as soon as sentence is passed. It will be the first such law in Europe since the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft – kin liability – whereby relatives of criminals were held responsible for their crimes and punished equally. The proposal will be a test case not just for Switzerland but for the whole of Europe, where a division between liberal multiculturalism and a conservative isolationism is opening up in political discourse in many countries, the UK included. SWISS TRAINS being the acme of punctuality, the appointment was very precise. I was to meet Dr Ulrich Schlüer – one of the men behind the draconian proposal – in the restaurant at the main railway station in Zürich at 7.10pm. As I made my way through the concourse, I wondered what Dr Schlüer made of this station of hyper-efficiency and cleanliness that has a smiling Somali girl selling pickled herring sandwiches, a north African man sweeping the floor, and a black nanny speaking in broken English to her young Swiss charge. The Swiss People's Party's attitude to foreigners is, shall we say, ambivalent. A quarter of Switzerland's workers – one in four, like the black sheep in the poster – are now foreign immigrants to this peaceful, prosperous and stable economy with low unemployment and a per capita GDP larger than that of other Western economies. Zürich has, for the past two years, been named as the city with the best quality of life in the world. What did the nanny think of the sheep poster, I asked her. "I'm a guest in this country," she replied. "It's best I don't say." Dr Schlüer is a small affable man. But if he speaks softly he wields a big stick. The statistics are clear, he said, foreigners are four times more likely to commit crimes than Swiss nationals. "In a suburb of Zürich, a group of youths between 14 and 18 recently raped a 13-year-old girl," he said. "It turned out that all of them were already under investigation for some previous offence. They were all foreigners from the Balkans or Turkey. Their parents said these boys are out of control. We say: 'That's not acceptable. It's your job to control them and if you can't do that you'll have to leave'. It's a punishment everyone understands." It is far from the party's only controversial idea. Dr Schlüer has launched a campaign for a referendum to ban the building of Muslim minarets. In 2004, the party successfully campaigned for tighter immigration laws using the image of black hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports. And its leading figure, the Justice Minister, Christoph Blocher, has said he wants to soften anti-racism laws because they prevent freedom of speech. Political opponents say it is all posturing ahead of next month's general election. Though deportation has been dropped from the penal code, it is still in force in administrative law, says Daniel Jositsch, professor of penal law at Zurich University. "At the end of the day, nothing has changed, the criminal is still at the airport and on the plane." With astute tactics, the SVP referendum restricts itself to symbolic restitution. Its plan to deport entire families has been put forward in parliament where it has little chance of being passed. Still the publicity dividend is the same. And it is all so worrying to human rights campaigners that the UN special rapporteur on racism, Doudou Diène, warned earlier this year that a "racist and xenophobic dynamic" which used to be the province of the far right is now becoming a regular part of the democratic system in Switzerland. Dr Schlüer shrugged. "He's from Senegal where they have a lot of problems of their own which need to be solved. I don't know why he comes here instead of getting on with that." Such remarks only confirm the opinions of his opponents. Mario Fehr is a Social Democrat MP for the Zürich area. He says: "Deporting people who have committed no crime is not just unjust and inhumane, it's stupid. Three quarters of the Swiss people think that foreigners who work here are helping the economy. We have a lot of qualified workers – IT specialists, doctors, dentists." To get rid of foreigners, which opponents suspect is the SVP's real agenda, "would be an economic disaster". Dr Schlüer insists the SVP is not against all foreigners. "Until war broke out in the Balkans, we had some good workers who came from Yugoslavia. But after the fighting there was huge influx of people we had a lot of problems with. The abuse of social security is a key problem. It's estimated to cost £750m a year. More than 50 per cent of it is by foreigners." There is no disguising his suspicion of Islam. He has alarmed many of Switzerland's Muslims (some 4.3 per cent of the 7.5 million population) with his campaign to ban the minaret. "We're not against mosques but the minaret is not mentioned in the Koran or other important Islamic texts. It just symbolises a place where Islamic law is established." And Islamic law, he says, is incompatible with Switzerland's legal system. To date there are only two mosques in the country with minarets but planners are turning down applications for more, after opinion polls showed almost half the population favours a ban. What is at stake here in Switzerland is not merely a dislike of foreigners or a distrust of Islam but something far more fundamental. It is a clash that goes to the heart of an identity crisis which is there throughout Europe and the US. It is about how we live in a world that has changed radically since the end of the Cold War with the growth of a globalised economy, increased immigration flows, the rise of Islam as an international force and the terrorism of 9/11. Switzerland only illustrates it more graphically than elsewhere. Switzerland is so stark an example because of the complex web of influences that find their expression in Ulrich Schlüer and his party colleagues. He is fiercely proud of his nation's independence, which can be traced back to a defensive alliance of cantons in 1291. He is a staunch defender of its policy of armed neutrality, under which Switzerland has no standing army but all young men are trained and on standby; they call it the porcupine approach – with millions of individuals ready to stiffen like spines if the nation is threatened. Linked to that is its system of direct democracy where many key decisions on tax, education, health and other key areas are taken at local level. "How direct democracy functions is a very sensitive issue in Switzerland," he says, explaining why he has long opposed joining the EU. "To the average German, the transfer of power from Berlin to Brussels didn't really affect their daily lives. The transfer of power from the commune to Brussels would seriously change things for the ordinary Swiss citizen." Switzerland has the toughest naturalisation rules in Europe. To apply, you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years, pay taxes, and have no criminal record. The application can still be turned down by your local commune which meets to ask "Can you speak German? Do you work? Are you integrated with Swiss people?" It can also ask, as one commune did of 23-year-old Fatma Karademir – who was born in Switzerland but who under Swiss law is Turkish like her parents – if she knew the words of the Swiss national anthem, if she could imagine marrying a Swiss boy and who she would support if the Swiss football team played Turkey. "Those kinds of questions are outside the law," says Mario Fehr. "But in some more remote villages you have a problem if you're from ex-Yugoslavia." The federal government in Berne wants to take the decision out of the hands of local communities, one of which only gave the vote to women as recently as 1990. But the government's proposals have twice been defeated in referendums. The big unspoken fact here is how a citizen is to be defined. "When a Swiss woman who has emigrated to Canada has a baby, that child automatically gets citizenship," Dr Schlüer says. But in what sense is a boy born in Canada, who may be brought up with an entirely different world view and set of values, more Swiss than someone like Fatma Karademir who has never lived anywhere but Switzerland? The truth is that at the heart of the Swiss People's Party's vision is a visceral notion of kinship, breeding and blood that liberals would like to think sits very much at odds with the received wisdom of most of the Western world. It is what lies behind the SVP's fear of even moderate Islam. It has warned that because of their higher birth rates Muslims would eventually become a majority in Switzerland if the citizenship rules were eased. It is what lies behind his fierce support for the militia system. To those who say that Germany, France, Italy and Austria are nowadays unlikely to invade, he invokes again the shadow of militant Islam. "The character of war is changing. There could be riots or eruptions in a town anywhere in Switzerland. There could be terrorism in a financial centre." The race issue goes wider than politics in a tiny nation. "I'm broadly optimistic that the tide is moving in our direction both here and in other countries across Europe, said Dr Schlüer. "I feel more supported than criticised from outside." The drama which is being played out in such direct politically incorrect language in Switzerland is one which has repercussions all across Europe, and wider. Neutrality and nationality * Switzerland has four national languages – German, Italian, French and Romansh. Most Swiss residents speak German as their first language. * Switzerland's population has grown from 1.7 million in 1815 to 7.5 million in 2006. The population has risen by 750,000 since 1990. * Swiss nationality law demands that candidates for Swiss naturalisation spend a minimum of years of permanent, legal residence in Switzerland, and gain fluency in one of the national languages. * More than 20 per cent of the Swiss population, and 25 per cent of its workforce, is non-naturalised. * At the end of 2006, 5,888 people were interned in Swiss prisons. 31 per cent were Swiss citizens – 69 per cent were foreigners or asylum-seekers. * The number of unauthorised migrant workers currently employed is estimated at 100,000. -- 9/7/2007 10:49 AM
Corrupt China official felled by 11 mistresses
BEIJING (Reuters) - A corrupt senior Chinese official was denounced by his 11 mistresses after some of their husbands were sentenced to death for graft, state media said on Friday. The news comes just days after a senior provincial Communist Party official was executed for blowing up his mistress with a car bomb. "Second wives" are common among government officials and businessmen in China and are often blamed for driving men to seek money through bribes or other abuses of power. Pang Jiayu, 63, former deputy head of the provincial political advisory body in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, was sacked and expelled from the Communist Party for graft, Xinhua news agency reported. "Pang did not expect that he would be brought down by his own 11 mistresses," the official People's Daily said in a report carried on its Web site. Pang, who was also Party boss of Baoji city, had lured several women, mostly "pretty and young" wives of his subordinates, to be his mistresses, it said. He helped them "make big money" by assigning them or their husbands huge government or other financial projects, it added. In one water-diversion project in which Pang's wife and mistresses were involved, water pipes exploded and collapsed only half a year after completion, it said. The mistresses decided to denounce Pang to the Party after some of their husbands were sentenced to death for graft in cases related to Pang. The Party's discipline inspection commission said in July that they would deal with the case severely. "What awaits Pang Jiayu is severe punishment," the report said. Chinese media said this week that 90 percent of the country's most senior officials punished for "serious" graft in the last five years had kept mistresses. Duan Yihe, former Party chief of Jinan city in the eastern province of Shandong, was executed Wednesday for blowing up his mistress after growing tired of her constant money demands. Hong Kong newspaper reports said former finance minister Jin Renqing was sacked last month in part for a dalliance with a local socialite. A government spokesman said he had resigned for "personal reasons." With a five-yearly Communist Party Congress due to open next month, and the fight against rampant corruption likely to loom large, official media these days are full of reports of venal officials meeting their comeuppance. Top leaders have warned that the level of official corruption is so serious that it could threaten the Party's continuing rule. --
9/5/2007 12:09 PM
Advanced cruise missiles can be mounted with nuclear warheads that yield between 5 to 150 kilotons of TNT.
The atomic bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima in August 1945 had a yield of approximately 15 kilotons.
--
9/5/2007 11:04 AM
Consumer Reports' "Good bets" for making 200,000 miles: Honda Civic, Honda CR-V, Honda Element, Lexus ES, Lexus LS, Toyota 4Runner, Toyota Highlander, Toyota Land Cruiser, Toyota Prius, Toyota RAV4
--
Iraqi tales of life under the militias The power of the Shia and Sunni militias presents the Iraqi government with one of their most challenging problems. BBC Arabic.com asked a number of Iraqis how the militias affected their lives. OMAR ALI MOHAMMED, 18, BAGHDAD
My mother liked the idea that through my name I was reflecting both the Sunni and the Shia traditions, despite the fact that we are Shia. It turns out her decision to call me Omar was not a good one. My name is not to the liking of either Shias or Sunnis, and I was nearly killed recently because of it. During my exams, I had to travel between my mainly Sunni neighbourhood to a Shia district. As always, there were militias belonging to each sect on the outskirts of each area. As I was about to enter the Shia area, an armed militiaman stopped me. He asked me to show him my ID card. The militiamen saw my name, and they asked me whether I was Shia or Sunni. I told them that I was Shia, but my mother called me Omar to bring the two sects closer. They started beating and kicking me severely because they thought I was a liar, and they told me that if they saw me again, they would kill me.
The same thing happened to me at the hands of Sunnis, because my father's name is Ali. I narrowly escaped being killed. It is strange, I do not feel that I belong to either side. I am Shia by birth, but I have always seen myself as an Iraqi. I have always been proud of my name which unites the two sects. There is no solution.
Either I change my name and accept being forced to take
sides, or I leave the country altogether. Now, I am even
afraid to leave the house. KHALID, 29, BAGHDAD
Our neighbourhood is currently under the control of the Mehdi army, one of the most powerful Shia militias. The Mehdi army is made up of ordinary people who took matters into their own hands after the regime collapsed and they saw that the government was not doing anything to protect them. These individuals now play a major role in our area. You see them driving expensive cars and carrying arms. People go to them for help and protection.
I agree that militias play a negative role, but given the weakness of the police, army and the state of lawlessness, we find ourselves forced to rely on them. For example, the militias helped a family to get their son released after he was kidnapped by militias in another area. The militias have an effective intelligence network, and they know everyone in the area. They are becoming
indispensable to us because they provide us with
protection. MOHAMMED, POLICEMAN, BAGHDAD
For example, you see militiamen helping traffic police in their work, and they also help in deterring thieves and burglars. Merchants and grocers used to be very frightened of sending their goods to be sold in Jamila market, one of the biggest vegetable and fruit markets in Baghdad. But now there are no thieves in Jamila market, thanks to the militias. I cannot call these
men outlaws, because there is no law in the first place.
They are people whose existence is dictated by the
lawlessness and chaos in Iraq. ABU MUSTAFA, DOCTOR'S ASSISTANT
Although I am Sunni, I haven't suffered any ill-treatment in this area, even after the increase of sectarianism in the country. People in my area come to me for medical help any time day or night. However, I think that the existence of militias is a problem.
I fear that I may be attacked if the Shia militias in the area were to be provoked by Sunni militias. One day I found a threatening note pinned to my door warning me to leave the neighbourhood. I took the note and I went to the militia's headquarters. They told me that it was not their work, and asked me to call them should anything untoward happen. They assured me they knew me very well, and that they were aware that I helped people and that I did not behave in a sectarian way. But I am not happy or comfortable that the militia have control. The only authority that should carry arms is the government police and security, or else we will have chaos. But for the time
being, they make the place more secure, because the
government is still weak. KHALIDA, 40, BAGHDAD
There were a large number of Saddam's senior army officers and many ex-Baath party senior officials living here; all of them made wealthy during the reign of Saddam. After Saddam was toppled, most of them lost their power and privileges and they were struggling both financially and psychologically. It was easy for them to join the pro al-Qaeda militias. I told the neighbours that we were Sunnis, but after months of fear, I have decided to leave Iraq. I have seen killings every day. I saw with my own eyes young men being killed simply for being the sons of Shia families in the area. I saw a 20-year-old girl being killed simply for having worked in a hairdresser's shop. The militias have turned our lives into a living hell. They want us to live according to their laws and rules. Young children are not allowed to wear shorts and western hairstyles are not permitted. --
Iraqi voices: Escaping abroad
The United Nations estimates two million Iraqis have fled to neighbouring countries to escape sectarian violence. It's estimated that 50,000 Iraqis flee the country every month. Many of them choose Syria and Jordan, where they often face extreme hardship. Their refugee status gives them no automatic benefits. With help from the charity, Refugees International, the BBC website spoke to four Iraqis about fleeing religious and professional persecution in their country. FATIMA, DAMASCUS Fatima is a single woman working as a hairdresser in Damascus. She fled Baghdad three years ago after armed militants attacked the salon where she worked. They disapproved of women having their hair cut in a public place. They had also threatened to attack the building where she lived with several other women. The militiamen disapprove of women living alone. "It's impossible to live as a single woman in Iraq; you are treated very badly and it's dangerous," says Fatima, a Shia Muslim. She sold her jewellery to raise cash, and together with three other women, headed for Damascus. "In Syria it's OK. Nobody interferes with my life if I just do my job and go home." Fatima styles hair for women in their own homes; most of her customers are Iraqi. But she says her earnings barely cover the rent.
Every six months she has to leave Syria to renew her tourist visa. She hires a taxi to take her to the border. "One taxi driver wanted to charge me 25,000 Syrian Lira (about US $480) for the journey. I said that was too much. "He said that I must be making lots of money, that as an Iraqi woman in Syria, I must be working in a nightclub." Some Iraqi women in Damascus have turned to prostitution to make ends meet. "People judge me because of what they see in clubs in Syria, they assume every Iraqi woman is doing the same thing." Fatima has no family to help her out so she feels isolated - especially in a society which is sceptical of single women. "I want to be independent. I don't want to be judged badly; I don't want to be humiliated by anything. "I just want to feel settled and to know I can survive." KHALIL AND DALAL, DAMASCUS Khalil and Dalal, both Chaldean Christians, fled Baghdad for Damascus in December 2004. Only Dalal agreed to be photographed. Khalil, a painter, was afraid the people who attacked him would find out he is now in Syria. In 2004 he began to receive anonymous threats from someone who objected to his painting of a woman, calling it blasphemous. He was also threatened because he had been asked to paint portraits for American troops in Baghdad. Three weeks after the first threat, his gallery was burned to the ground. Shortly afterwards, someone threw a firebomb into the couple's living room in the middle of the night, while they slept upstairs. It took them two months to raise the money to leave. The couple have three grown up children. Their youngest son lives with them and their daughter lives in Canada. Their oldest son, Ziad, lives in Sweden. He was visiting his parents for the first time in five years and explained, from Damascus, their situation: "They can't work and they don't have much money. They have a little from what they brought over from Iraq, but there's not much left because they have to pay for their food and rent out of it." The couple know a few Iraqi families in Damascus and Ziad says his 19-year-old brother plays football in the street with some Iraqi friends. But, he says his mother misses having her wider family around her and "feels lonely inside". The couple appear to have taken on the informal role of community activists in Damascus. Khalil teaches art at the local church and Dalal helps orient new arrivals from Iraq to life in Syria. Ziad says his parents cannot return to Iraq and are trying to move either to Canada, or Sweden, to join one of their other children. AHMED and MAYYADA ABDEL SALAM, AMMAN Ahmed is a doctor and his wife Mayyada is a pharmacist. They belong to the Sabian faith, a monotheistic non-Muslim minority in Iraq. They left Baghdad in 2005 after Mayyada's pharmacy was attacked when she refused to wear a headscarf. Ahmed explains: "One of the radical Muslims came into the pharmacy and asked Mayyada why she was unveiled. She explained she was not Muslim and that there was no hijab in her religion. "He told her she was an infidel and that she should leave Iraq." A few days later the radicals targeted the pharmacy in a drive-by shooting. Ahmed says they had a lucky escape. "I, my wife and children were in the pharmacy when the attack happened. They shot several rounds, smashing the shop window and the shelves of drugs. "We were terrified. My wife was injured in the leg, but only superficially." The family didn't return to the pharmacy, but stayed at home preparing to leave Iraq. They arrived in Jordan less than two months later. Ahmed says they chose Jordan because it was close and at the time it was easy to get to. But life is difficult in Amman. "We arrived as refugees; we have no rights. We can't work and we can't send the children to school. We have three daughters, aged six, three and one. We are considered illegal residents in Amman, although we are refugees." They arrived with their life savings which Ahmed reckons will last another four or five months. After that, they will have to ask for help from relatives abroad. Ahmed's parents are living in their family home in Baghdad. "We speak to them on the phone, we are very anxious about them because it is so dangerous." They family is renting a two-bedroom apartment in Amman and educating their six-year-old at home. They are in touch with other Iraqis in the city and they also know a few Jordanians. "We do have some contact with them, but it's usually superficial. There's no time for anything deeper and we are not in the right frame of mind to reach out to others. "We keep it superficial because we are depressed and we don't know what the future holds." Ahmed and his wife want to move to Australia. They have already had one application rejected, but they are putting in another. "We want to start a new life for our children. They are more important than us." SAAD MOHAMED AND FAMILY, AMMAN Saad brought his family to Jordan in June 2006, after narrowly escaping two direct attempts on his life. Under Saddam's regime Saad, a Sunni, was a soldier in the army and his ID card identifies him as a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. He is therefore considered a "Saddamist". "I received letters at my house, telling me to leave within 24 hours or be killed. "One time, I was driving the car - with our three young children - and somebody started shooting at us. I managed to drive away quickly and we escaped. That was in Baghdad." The family fled with no possessions. They had money sent from home after they arrived in Amman - but it was stolen within 24 hours. Saad believes someone followed them from Iraq and stole the money as soon as it was safe to do so. He has no work permit and was unemployed for the first five months in Jordan. "About three weeks ago someone gave me a job. I'm working as a porter, guarding a building. The pay barely covers the rent, food and water. It's hardly enough to live on." After Saddam's regime was toppled, Saad used to work in a shop, selling electric cables and lighting equipment. He has no friends or family in Jordan. He says he chose Amman because it was the only place he could escape to. "Our children are aged seven, six and four. They need to go to school, but I can't afford to send them." Saad is applying for asylum in Europe. He says he has contacted the Spanish embassy, but he hasn't heard from them yet. One of his children was born with a disability and has already had several operations. Saad has applied to children's organisations to see if his son can be offered a place in school. He says he has no idea what happened to his house in Baghdad. "All I know is that the Mehdi Army have now got hold of many houses in the area where I used to live." Would he ever think of going back? "I don't even think about it. It's highly unlikely. I have a psychological block about it. "Five of my cousins were killed in front of my eyes immediately before I left." Saad says he conjures up the memory of Iraq to try to get his children to behave: "If they're playing up, I threaten them with moving back to Iraq." --
Cyber crime tool kits go on sale
Malicious hackers are producing easy to use tools that automate attacks to cash in on a boom in hi-tech crime. On sale, say security experts, are everything from individual viruses to comprehensive kits that let budding cyber thieves craft their own attacks. The top hacking tools are being offered for prices ranging up to £500. Some of the most expensive tools are sold with 12 months of technical support that ensures they stay armed with the latest vulnerabilities. Tool time "They are starting to pop up left and right," said Tim Eades from security company Sana, of the sites offering downloadable hacking tools. "It's the classic verticalisation of a market as it starts to mature." Malicious hackers had evolved over the last few years, he said, and were now selling the tools they used to use to the growing numbers of fledgling cyber thieves.
At the top end of the scale, said Mr Eades, were tools like the notorious MPack which costs up to £500. The regular updates for the software ensure it uses the latest vulnerabilities to help criminals hijack PCs via booby-trapped webpages. It also includes a statistical package that lets owners know how successful their attack has been and where victims are based. MPack has proved very popular with criminally minded groups and in late June 2007 managed to subvert more than 10,000 websites in one attack that drew on the tool. Hacking groups also operate volume pricing schemes and discounts for loyal customers, he said. "It's almost a play-by-play of good business practices of software marketing," he said. "When it comes to the hacking industry and level of business acumen there's no limit to what your money can buy." Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at Secure Computing, said the numbers of downloadable hacking tools was growing fast. According to Mr Henry there were more than 68,000 downloadable hacking tools in circulation. The majority were free to use and took some skill to operate but a growing number were offered for sale to those without the technical knowledge to run their own attacks, he said. But, he added, many hacking groups were offering tools such as Mpack, Shark 2, Nuclear, WebAttacker, and IcePack that made it much easier for unskilled people to get in to the hi-tech crime game. Mr Henry said the tools were proving useful because so many vulnerabilities were being discovered and were taking so long to be patched. Little risk "MPack used more than 12 different vulnerabilities that were launched against any web browser that visited any compromised site," he said. Many hacking groups were attracted to selling the kits because it meant they took little risk themselves if the malicious software was used to commit crimes. "The only thing you are going to find is a disclaimer that this was distributed for educational purposes and the user accepts any responsibility for any misuse," he said. The only risk the hacker groups faced in making the tools available was in having someone else steal them and offer them at a lower price. Already, he said, the sheer number of tools for sale was driving down prices. Garry Sidaway, a senior consultant at security firm Tricipher, said the success of MPack and the attendant publicity was rumoured to be worrying its creators. "It was made by a group of friends and they all have regular jobs," he said. Mr Sidaway said the group would not lose much money if they did stop selling it because they made much more from other lines of business. In particular, he said, the groups can sell information about unpatched or unknown vulnerabilities in software for thousands of pounds per bug. --
TruthPic on suicide
Mental illness is indeed life-threatening. About 800,000 a year commit suicide. More than four out of five are in low or middle income countries. --
The ISG recommended that with nearly 100 Americans dying every month in Iraq and the US spending $2bn a week on the war, too much blood and treasure was being shed to make staying the course an option any longer.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6975794.stm
Why kissing means more to women
But kissing was more important as a bonding mechanism to women. In long-term relationships females not only rate kissing as more important than men, but they indicated that kissing was important throughout a relationship. Meanwhile, men placed less importance on kissing as the relationship progresses.
9/3/2007 8:01 AM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6976084.stm
US workers top productivity table
Workers in the US are still more productive per person than any others in the world, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) says in a report. In 2006 each US worker produced $63,885 (£31,651) of wealth, well ahead of second placed Ireland at $55,986. But East Asian staff are the most improved - they are now twice as productive as they were 10 years ago.
According to Professor Diener the evidence suggests that happy people live longer than depressed people. "In one study, the difference was nine years between the happiest group and the unhappiest group, so that's a huge effect. "Cigarette smoking can knock a few years off your life, three years, if you really smoke a lot, six years. "So nine years for happiness is a huge effect." For added happiness, look for meaning in your life
How to Make Your Wife HappyBy Sara Goudarzi, LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 14 March 2006 08:17 am ET The key ingredient to a woman's marital bliss is her husband's emotional commitment, suggests a new study based on a survey of 5,000 couples across the country. The finding is in contrast to previous research that focused on a husband's salary and division of household work as the main drivers of a woman's perception of a happy marriage.
Boyfriends Do More Housework Than HusbandsMarried men do less housework than live-in boyfriends, finds an international survey. But married women do more housework than their live-in counterparts. “Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples—even couples who see men and women as equal,” said co-researcher Shannon Davis, a sociologist at George Mason University in Virginia.
8/30/2007 6:32 AM
Global warming could delay next ice age: study
LONDON (AFP) - Burning fossil fuels could postpone the next ice age by up to half a million years, researchers at a British university said Wednesday.
Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by burning fuels such as coal and oil may cause enough residual global warming to prevent its onset, said scientists from the University of Southampton in southern England. The world's oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but in doing so they are becoming more acidic, said a team led by Doctor Toby Tyrrell, which conducted research based on marine chemistry. Ice ages occur around every 100,000 years as the Earth's orbit round the Sun alters. However, carbon dioxide levels can affect their onset. Humans have already burned about 300 gigatonnes of carbon of fossil fuels. If 1000 Gt C are burnt then it is likely the next ice age will be skipped. Burning all possible fossil fuels (about 4,000 Gt C) could lead to avoidance of the next five, the study said.
8/25/2007 10:31 AM
Poll: 1 in 4 adults read no books last yearThe Associated Press WASHINGTON - There it sits on your
night stand, that book you've meant to read for who
knows how long but haven't yet cracked open. Tonight, as
you feel its stare from beneath that teetering pile of
magazines, know one thing - you are not alone. 8/24/2007 11:38 AM
"Even the most intensive users of newspapers and magazines spend less time reading these publications than they do online or watching TV," said Barry Parr. "TV and newspaper companies risk losing an entire generation of users unless they immediately start promoting their online products," added Parr. In addition to matching the time spent watching TV, the Internet is displacing the use of other media such as radio, magazines and books. Books are suffering the most; 37% of all online users report that they spend less time reading books because of their online activities. The JupiterResearch report also reveals that intensive online users are the most likely demographic to use advanced Internet technology, such as streaming radio and RSS. 8/23/2007 11:02 AM
TruthPic on old sex
Survey: Seniors Have Sex Into 70s, 80s
Sex and interest in it do fall off when people are in their 70s, but more than a quarter of those up to age 85 reported having sex in the previous year. And the drop-off has a lot to do with health or lack of a partner, especially for women, the survey found.
TruthPic on running speeds
T. rex 'would outrun footballer'
The work used data taken directly from dinosaur fossils, rather than referring to previous work on modern animals. The University of Manchester study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows T. rex had a top running speed of 8m/s (18mph). 8/21/2007 11:00 AM
http://www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=28456
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE PRINCETON, NJ -- A new Gallup Poll finds Congress' approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974. Just 18% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, while 76% disapprove, according to the August 13-16, 2007, Gallup Poll. http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCKThe Outstanding
Public Debt as of 15 Oct 2007 at 08:14:25 PM GMT is:
The estimated
population of the United States is 303,263,388 The National
Debt has continued to increase an average of 8/14/2007 9:50 AM
Learn from the fall of Rome, US warnedBy Jeremy Grant in Washington Published: August 14 2007 00:06 | Last updated: August 14 2007 00:06 The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned. David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”. These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt. Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.
MadConomist.com These Numbers Can't Be Right
41 Weird Money Facts You've Never Heard AboutTruthPic City
Submitted by Dmitri Davydov on Tue, 2007-07-24 08:37. Posted in: Statistics And Other Lies Do you think you know a lot about money? Maybe you do. Maybe you don't. But let's see if any of the following facts are in any way surprising to you:
Nude blonde, gold stilettos and a Ferrari..BERLIN (Reuters) - A mysterious blonde paid a visit to a petrol station shop in the small eastern German town of Doemitz on Sunday -- wearing nothing but a pair of golden stilettos and a thin gold bracelet. The tall, slender woman strolled into the shop in the town of Doemitz on the warm afternoon and bought cigarettes, petrol station employee Ines Swoboda told Reuters on Monday. "I wasn't surprised because she's come in naked before -- she's a very nice woman," Swoboda said, adding none of the other customers was bothered. The woman could have faced charges of creating a public disturbance if anyone had complained. A quick-witted customer did, however, snap pictures of the woman believed to be about 30 years old as she walked back to a waiting Ferrari and climbed into the passenger seat. Several of those photos appeared in the German media on Monday. 7/19/2007 10:11 AM
Eating beef ' is less green than driving'Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours, it was claimed yesterday. 7/18/2007 9:27 AM How to Earn $1 Million by Not Watching TV A recent study found that it would take $1 million for someone to be willing to give up TV for the rest of their lives. Guess what? If you decided to give up TV and invested the money you saved, you would get that $1 million -- and probably a lot more. Opportunity costs: Another cost often overlooked when considering the price of watching TV is the opportunities forfeited when you choose viewing over something else. You could start a business, take on a part-time job or take care of your garden so you don't have to pay someone else to do it. Assuming that your time is worth at least the minimum wage of $5.85 per hour, your opportunity cost is $737 a month if you view the average amount of TV. So what does this all add up to? Say you're 25 years old and you initially spend $2,000 for your TV, DVD player, entertainment cabinet and gaming system after getting your first job. Add in monthly costs of $100 for cable, $10 for electricity use, $20 for renting movies, $25 for buying games and $20 for an occasional pay-per-view event, and you're looking at $175 a month. Add in another $525 a month extra you spend due to the influence of commercials if you are the average person, and you are costing yourself $700 a month watching TV. If you instead invested this money and received a return of 8% compounded annually over 45 years until you're 70 years old, you would have more than $3.7 million in your account. 7/14/2007 7:34 AM http://dating.personals.yahoo.com/ Five Breakup Signs How to tell when you're about to get the boot By Elina Furman Special to Yahoo! Personals
One day, you are madly in love. You're cuddling on the couch, reading love poems and feeding each other sushi. And that's when it happens: Your partner sits you down for the "It's-Not-You, It's-Me" talk. You're confused and left wondering, "How could I have missed the signs?" Breaking up is never easy. Your ego and heart are bound to get bruised. But if you could just see the breakup coming, it might make the whole business easier to stomach.
While hindsight is 20/20, there are always warning signals along the way. Top five signs you're about to get dumped 1. Picking fights. No one is saying you have to get along 24/7. Constructive conflict can actually be good for your relationship. But if you find that your partner has become argumentative over petty issues like your clothes or choice of restaurant, that should serve as a warning sign that he/she may be looking for an excuse to bail. 2. Forgetting to call. Used to be that your phone would ring all day long with your sweetie wanting to make plans or calling just to say, "I love you." Now your significant other doesn't even call when he/she is running three hours late. It may seem obvious, but going from speed dial to a blocked number is a sure sign that your relationship may be nearing its expiration date. 3. Changing their stripes. A major change in appearance can be a sign that your partner is looking toward greener pastures. Whether they've chopped off their hair, lost 40 pounds or gone from a bold brunette to a sultry blonde, major cosmetic changes should be noted. Of course, there's nothing wrong with being a little vain, but if the change is accompanied by any of the other signs listed here, you may need to get ready to go solo. 4. Criticizing. If your sweetie isn't feeling you anymore, don't be surprised if he/she becomes less tolerant of everything, from how you brush your teeth to how you tie your shoes. Constant criticism is a telltale sign that your days as a twosome are numbered. 5. Losing sexual interest. A healthy sex life can make or break a relationship. If you find that your partner is becoming more sexually aloof, you need to get to the root of the issue. While it's natural to have less sex as you settle into a comfortable groove together, waiting weeks or months to have sexual contact is a sign that something is amiss. Now that you know the warning signs, don't panic. Just because your partner exhibits some of these behaviors, that doesn't necessarily mean the relationship is over. In fact, it's usually a combination of signs and not one isolated incident that foreshadows a breakup. If you're worried that your partner is itching to get out, the most important thing you can do is sit down and discuss your issues in an honest and open manner. If you take these signs as your cue to improve communication, your relationship may just have a fighting chance. Seth: There are even more blogs than books. Part of the challenge in breaking through is finding a niche you can overwhelm. Everyone is lonelyPeople spend money (and make money) and join organizations and invest time and enormous energy to solve this problem. Every day.
One of my junior agents, Jenny Rappaport, loves Science Fiction and Fantasy,
--
DEFINING THE HIGH-CONCEPT NOVELIn
thinking about this kind of story, we realized that it
has certain traits that set it apart from other tales: WHY EDITORS LOVE THE HIGH-CONCEPT NOVEL
Jenny learned this early in her
career when she sold a short-story collection called
Her Infinite Variety by Pamela Raphael Berkman.
Ordinarily such books are impossible to sell, but this
collection was all about the women that Shakespeare
knew, and Jenny sold it at auction to Simon and
Schuster. How to Come Up With Your High-Concept IdeaFind
something you want to write about.
Then start thinking about what
you'd love to happen in the real world but never could.
What do you fantasize about? What do you like
reading? What do you like watching on television? The
idea is to blend your conventional story with your
fantastical thinking. START DREAMING, START WRITINGSo now you
know. The high-concept novel is
simply a conventional idea taken to the next level by
adding a fantastical element. As a writer, find the
characters and plot that you love, then mix in some
fantasy that you've always dreamed would come true. Did
you always wish you could be a superhero? Add it in. Do
you wish you could be the supreme empress of the world?
Add it in. Do you wish you could fly? Add it in. You get
the drift.
--
At the "Beyond the Da Vinci Code" panel, which was fascinating, Steve Berry's explanation was the most concise and funniest definition of "high concept" fiction that I've heard so far. It's a simple equation: "ooooh" + "so what?" = "high concept." In other words, you take a subject so intrinsically interesting that people go "ooooh"when they hear it, add a catchy hook to the storyline that answers the "so what?" question, and there you have it, a high concept novel. Berry's examples: Knights Templar (ooooh). The Romanovs (ooooh). These subjects automatically capture many readers' attention. Add an interesting twist to the usual storyline - a Knight Templar tries to keep a secret that could change history (Robyn Young's The Brethren); Rasputin's daughter Maria narrates the story of her father's life and death (Robert Alexander's Rasputin's Daughter). The examples of book titles are mine, not Berry's, but I think they illustrate his point. This discussion calls to mind Irene Goodman's article on Anne Boleyn, which was discussed on Carla's blog a couple months ago. Berry doesn't write historical fiction, but he writes fact-based fiction about the past, and the panel encouraged me to pick up his novels. Besides, he said he likes detailed authors' notes, and he especially liked those that Sharon Kay Penman uses in her novels. He has good taste.
High concept: High concept fiction is generally work with a solid hook. Agents and editors like high concept work because it's easier to sell a novel when the book can be described in a phrase or sentence.
Sci-fi and fantasy gatherings attract many more people. Internet forums and portals in these genres attract many more people. Sarah Weinman’s ‘Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind’ is probably the most heavily-trafficked crime site on the net, with, from memory, 8,000 visitors a day. There are dozens, hundreds of SF/F sites with much higher traffic and a larger user base. And while there certainly are readers of all ages in these genres – just as there are in crime – the slant, in particular within the ‘active’ fanbase, the crowd who go to events and make noise online, is very much towards the younger end of the spectrum. SF is very much all about the flight of fancy high concept story. Camille Paglia: I certainly agree that force is absolutely necessary for dealing with bona fide terrorists. As a supporter of the death penalty, I would applaud the execution, in the field or after trial, of any and all committers of atrocities. However, in calling for the persuasion of art and culture, I was speaking of the larger task before us: How do we convince the rising and future generations of young Muslims that the West is not the Great Satan that must be destroyed by any means necessary? There is no finite group of "bad guys" (the Bush administration's juvenile term) who can be identified and obliterated. Many Muslims are cautious or wavering in their sympathies; let us beware of pushing ambivalence into open hostility. I could care less who does or does not hate us. The real issue is when hatred takes the next step into active terrorism. I am less sanguine than you about the possibility of Iraq's becoming, even over the next decade, "stable, peaceful and functioning under some sort of representative government." There are too many genies out of the box. Aside from its shocking and insupportable costs, long-term American occupation of a Muslim nation is a grievous affront to billions around the world. Our presence there has ceased to have any rationale except to stave off a series of "what ifs" and to avoid the appearance of retreat. Hypotheticals and appearances: Are they worth the death of even one more American soldier? High
concept is a term stolen from the mooovies. Remember
Robert Altman's hilarious The Player? The movie opens
with a variety of people pitching movie ideas in 15
second sound bites. "Jaws in Space" = Alien. "Jaws in
Heels" = Miss Snark's memoirs. "Cujo: The Early Years" =
Killer Yapp Takes Manhattan
The plot
of a high concept movie is easily understood by
audiences, and can often be described in a sentence or
two.
You can't have it! Mine is A Christmas Carol meets The Hot Zone. The villain has 12 hours to learn the true spirit of Christmas or everyone in the world will get the Ebola virus and die. 7/9/2007 8:53 AM
Powell tried to talk Bush out of warTHE former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces. “I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.” Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. “The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now.” He added: “It is not a civil war that can be put down or solved by the armed forces of the United States.” All the military could do, Powell suggested, was put “a heavier lid on this pot of boiling sectarian stew”.
What women talk about
The process by which magazine picture editors oppress women in an underhand way http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19031744/
7 secrets to a long — and happy marriage
1. “Divorce? Never. Murder? Often!” In the
end, the old saying holds true: where your attention
goes, energy flows. So the next time you’re facing a
mountain in your marriage, focus on the next foothold
and soon enough you’ll find yourself over the top. 7/4/2007 9:22 AM
Ms Ceeney said: "If you put paper on shelves, it's pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years. "If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago, you'd have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it." "Digital information is in fact inherently far more ephemeral than paper," warned Ms Ceeney. She added: "The pace of software and hardware developments means we are living in the world of a ticking time bomb when it comes to digital preservation. 6/30/2007 9:27 PM
For Bird, the secret to successful set pieces is having the audience care about the characters. "I think all movies are an illusion, whether they are live action or animation," he says. "And I think the best special effect that people don't pay enough attention to is caring about the characters who are going through the set pieces. If you can be invested in the characters that you're putting in danger, then you can amp up the pressure, and it really means something because people are rooting for them to survive. Characters are the special effect." 6/21/2007 10:39 AM
Study: Drugs, Sex Prominent In Teen Online Chats(CBS) NEW YORK Parents who think their teens' online conversations with peers are innocent may want to reconsider. A new study shows 1 in 10 of their messages discuss drugs or sex.The messages are posted on common online message boards. "'Crunked' is like the cool way of saying 'I got drunk,'" said 19-year-old Lucky O'Donnell. "'Scag' is one of the harder ones to figure out and that's heroin." Designer Vaginas are HotAuthor Robert Roy Britt Here in Arizona, at least in ritzy places like Scottsdale, one of the most common question among wealthy women at lunch is, “Who did yours?” Even wealthier doctors hope their names pop up in these conversations. But boob jobs (linked to
higher rates of suicide, by the way) are already
passé.
Demand for "designer vagina" surgery risingFri May 25, 2007 8:32AM BST
LONDON (Reuters) - Rising numbers of women are asking the NHS to provide cosmetic surgery on their genitals, doctors said on Friday. Writing in the British Medical Journal, they said the number of "labial reductions" carried out in NHS hospitals had doubled to 800 a year over five years. "More and more women are said to be troubled by the shape, size or proportions of their vulvas", wrote Lih Mei Liao and Sarah Creighton from London's UCL Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Institute for Women's Health. 6/4/2007 9:34 AM
CHINA'S EMISSIONS Between 1994 and 2004, China's greenhouse gas emissions grew by 4% a year China currently depends on coal to meet two-thirds of its energy needs It hopes to raise its use of renewable energy from 7% to 10% by 2010 China may overtake the US as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases by the end of this year http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ Here's today's entrepreneurial trivia question: Even after Starbucks had five
stores and more than 20 employees, which item was
unavailable for purchase at their stores: Actually, it's a trick question. The answer is 'all of the above.' It wasn't until several years after the company was up and running that they realized it would be a good idea to sell any beverages at all. All they sold was beans (but you could get a free taste of coffee if you asked nicely). It might not be too late to fix your marketing/story/product mix.
'Stealth racism' stalks deep South Three rope nooses hanging from a tree in the courtyard of a school in a small Southern town in Louisiana have sparked fears of a new kind of "stealth" racism spreading through America's deep south. Although this sinister episode happened last August, the repercussions have been extensive and today the town of Jena finds itself facing the unwelcome glare of national and international publicity. Jena has a mixed community, 85% white, 12% black. The bad old days of the "Mississippi Burning" 60s, civil liberties and race riots, lynchings, the KKK and police with billy clubs beating up blacks might have ended. But in the year that the first serious black candidate for the White House, Barak Obama, is helping unite the races in the north, the developments in the tiny town of Jena are disturbing. Nooses in the playground It all began at Jena High School last summer when a black student, Kenneth Purvis, asked the school's principal whether he was permitted to sit under the shade of the school courtyard tree, a place traditionally reserved for white students only. He was told he could sit where he liked. The following morning, when the students arrived at school, they found three nooses dangling from the tree.
5/24/2007 7:54 AM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6687303.stm
Bribes paid In its report, TI says that judicial systems are being corrupted in two ways - through political interference and bribery. In 20 countries around the world more than 30% of households said bribery was involved in getting a "fair outcome in court", TI reported. In Africa and Latin America, about one in 5 people paid a bribe, compared to 15% in "newly independent states" and the Asia Pacific, 9% in South East Europe, 2% in North America and 1% in the European Union and other Western European countries. In 20 countries, more than 30% said bribery involved in getting "fair outcome" in court In Russia, an estimated $210m paid in bribes to courts annually In Pakistan, 96% of people surveyed found courts corrupt Source: Transparency International 5/23/2007 8:18 AM
'Troubling' views on suicide bombingsTruthPic: One hand on the Koran, one hand on the Bomb: 78% of U.S. Muslims opposed, but young adults are less sureAbout 1 in 4 young adult American Muslims says suicide bombings against civilian targets "to defend Islam" can be justified rarely, sometimes or often, according to a new Pew Research Center poll -- a finding that disturbed American Muslim leaders and thinkers across the country. 5/19/2007 10:00 AM
Global warming debunkedClimate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week. Man's contribution to the greenhouse gases was so small we couldn't change the climate if we tried, he maintained. "We're all going to survive this. It's all going to be a joke in five years," he said. A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin had created the current hysteria and it was time to put a stop to it. "It is time to attack the myth of global warming," he said. Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained. 5/18/2007 10:06 AM Mysteries of the Sexes Explained 5 Secrets You Should Keep From Your Partner
It starts out simply enough: A man and woman
get together, they share some wine, they go back to her
place, their relationship grows, they laugh and they
fight, and they become-tada!-a
couple. And then something happens: They're supposed to
share everything
with each other. Their fears. Their dreams. Their
thoughts. Their bills. Their medicine cabinets. And
that's when this simple little romance starts to get
complicated. in most relationships, there's such a thing
as too much sharing-and I believe that a little
discretion at the right time in the right situation is
not only a good thing, but also could actually improve
relationships. As long as you're not breaking the
relationship rules-like playing tonsil hockey while the
goalie isn't watching-then a little mystery can be a
good thing. Here, five secrets you should keep to
yourself-because not saying something will actually
speak volumes. (And just so you don't think that I'm
pushing to abolish the honesty policy, you'll read about
the things you should never keep from your partner next
time.) 5/14/2007 6:40 AM Laughter is not the Arab way Saturday, May 12, 2007 Aside from inheriting money, the best way to get rich in the Arab world is to find yourself an emir. Young men sometimes set out in search of an emir, as young men elsewhere might search for a guru or audition for Donald Trump's The Apprentice. Emirs, Arab nobility, cherish a bizarre prejudice that makes them wildly popular with ambitious businessmen: By ancient tradition, they consider it undignified to deal with money. So each needs an associate to handle the actual business. Since the best sort of emir maintains close connections with his government's oil rights, the associate, if clever, can become quite rich. Carbon Joins the Magnetic Clubhttp://www.physorg.com/news98111007.html
The exclusive club of magnetic elements officially has a new member—carbon. Using a proton beam and advanced x-ray techniques, researchers at the Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Leipzig in Germany have finally put to rest doubts about carbon's ability to be made magnetic. The results appeared in the May 4 edition of Physical Review Letters. Scientists have long suspected that carbon belongs on the short list of materials that can be magnetic at room temperature, but proof of that hypothesis has languished in controversy for nearly a decade. Since antiquity, magnetism has appeared to be a trick performed only by iron, nickel, cobalt and a handful of rare alloys.5/10/2007 11:08 AM http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6640297.stm The bond between George W Bush and Tony Blair, one of the most defining and controversial relationships of modern politics, started with humble toothpaste. At their first meeting in Camp David they discovered a mutual affection for Colgate. "So what?" the world shrugged. We wondered how the close friendship between Mr Blair and Bill Clinton could ever be matched by the man with the Texan swagger. How wrong we were. Their initial bond was forged in the dust of 9/11, when the president singled out the prime minister as a special friend. Then came Afghanistan and, of course, Iraq, in which Mr Blair proved himself by far the most willing member of the coalition of the willing. In fact the British ambassador to Washington once told me that "if he wanted to, the prime minister could veto this war". But he didn't and the war went ahead. 4/28/2007 8:52 AM CAMILLE PAGLIA ON GLOBAL WARMING: http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/ 2007/04/11/global_warming/index3.html
Just wondering what your thoughts are on the global warming issue. Have you seen the Al Gore movie? Any thoughts on the current debate on climate science? Many thanks, Oh, great, here comes the hornet's nest! As a native of upstate New York, whose dramatic landscape was carved by the receding North American glacier 10,000 years ago, I have been contemplating the principle of climate change since I was a child. Niagara Falls, as well as the even bigger dry escarpment of Clark Reservation near Syracuse, is a memento left by the glacier. So is nearby Green Lakes State Park, with its mysteriously deep glacial pools. When I was 10, I lived with my family at the foot of a drumlin -- a long, undulating hill of moraine formed by eddies of the ancient glacier melt. Geology and meteorology are fields that have always interested me and that I might well have entered, had I not been more attracted to art and culture. (My geology professor in college, in fact, asked me to consider geology as a career.) To conflate vast time frames with volatile daily change is a sublime exercise, bordering on the metaphysical. However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved. Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done. Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began "Sexual Personae" (parodying the New Testament): "In the beginning was nature." And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.
2/24/2007 10:31 AM
Now I'm in trouble! Why? Because I'm going to toss out my two bits on Global Warming!
Global Warming is now beyond Science—it has acquired a mandatory level of Political Correctness. Deniers of Global Warming are compared to Holocaust Deniers.
Bad Kitty!
Disclaimer: Hey, if you don't like my facts, go Google your own! I don't need eight hundred eMails telling me I'm wrong on Global Warming. That would just tell me that I struck a chord, and am therefore doing something right!
The Short Form first, the Bottom Line first, the Last Page first, the Conclusions first, <Spoiler Alert>:
The Best Global Warming Experts Don't Know Dick And Admit That They Don't Know Dick (Hell, They Don't Even Get Clouds!) But They Guess And Hint And Prudently Suggest Restraint Because All These Bad Things Might Happen! (Long List Of Scary Shit)
I ask: "Anything worse than an Ice Age?"
They answer: "Well, er, no."
I reply: "So, Shut Up, Already!"
Before we start arguing over Global Warming, let's resolve this KEY CLIMATE QUESTION first.
Which would be the greater disaster: A) The Global Warming Worst Case Scenario B) The Next Ice Age.
Answer: B) The Next Ice Age!
I am using Larry Page Rank as my barometer of truth. Any Googler can verify this. Go to it, Dude(tte)! Click through (the bullshit)! Research "Ice Age"; Research "Global Warming"; then we'll eMail each other with the Gospel according to Sergey Brin.
Sure, it would be nice if we lived in Pleasantville (well, maybe for a day), and the weather everyday was Sunny, high of 72, low of 72, zero chance of rain, 100% chance of making the next basketball shot, 100% chance the bride is a virgin.
But we don't. We live on Spaceship Earth. Our best scientists have plenty of temp readings, they've got charts, they've got computers. They haven't a clue. Mother Nature is just too complex for our bit-brains.
I may not know what's what, who's who, or even why's why; but I get that the downside to COLD is scarier than the downside to HOT.
You say we're warming up?
And that's a Bad thing?
At least we're moving away from my worst nightmare. hg47
airapparent - Ü
Greenhouse warming of the Earth due to human activities is a possibility,44 moreover one for which mitigative/remedial actions of the types proposed here can be at once deliberate and effective.45 In contrast, Ice Age-severity cooling, another in the series of events that have occurred quasi-periodically many times during the last 1.2 million years,46 is a practical certainty. Moreover, a several-decade duration ''cold snap'' of Ice Age Maximum temperature-drop is known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere with essentially no warning during the last interglacial period, under precursor climatic conditions only slightly warmer than the present-day one.47 wikipedia - Ü Economics of global warming
sunysuffolk - Ü The Little Ice Age In Europe
grisda - Ü This uncertainty as to the cause for this cooling which so markedly affected life should warn those who demand that the Earth responds only to massive (forceful) events. Very subtle changes in the factors determining climate during the Little Ice Age occurred. One wonders how much greater they need be to cause a true ice age.
ornery - Ü If you want a perfect example of this, look at the Kyoto Protocols. The consensus among serious scientists is that the Kyoto Protocols, even if they were completely implemented, would not have any serious effect on global warming for the next century. Yet they insist that we should adopt and obey the protocols with all the force of law that international treaties have. Why? Because it will show that we take the problem seriously. Because it's a first step. Because it's the Right Thing. In other words, we should blindly obey even though we know that it's pointless. And let's also keep perspective. We are in the midst of a steady progression toward colder and colder climate (the 22,000-year cycle is only one of the solar radiation cycles that affect us). Quite accidentally, we may have postponed the next ice age. And I, for one, think that's a good thing. Those who bemoan the dangers of global warming are forgetting the far more cataclysmic effects of ice ages. atangledweb - Ü WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE ICE AGE?The scientists are all agreed - and who am I to doubt them?. Science magazine has warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," ) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance" "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950." So, generalised agreement by the scientific lobby and mass media approval for such a view, along with a tidal wave of literature to support the Ice Age theory - AND ALL UTTERLY WRONG!! The above quotes come from the last period of scientific hype on the "end of the world" from the mid-1970's. As this article by George Will asks... In fact, the Earth is always experiencing either warming or cooling. But suppose the scientists and their journalistic conduits, who today say they were so spectacularly wrong so recently, are now correct. Suppose the Earth is warming and suppose the warming is caused by human activity. Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Midwest -- must be bad? Or has the science-journalism complex decided that debate about these questions, too, is "over"? kitsapsun - Ü And 30 years ago, the “disaster-du-jour” was the coming ice age, complete with “extensive Northern Hemispheric glaciation.” Most news stories on the topic of climate change pay scant attention to the views of scientists who disagree on the causes and ultimate consequences of global warming. They question the imposition of restrictions on economic activity to reduce some greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, which is suspected in increasing the Earth’s temperature. Some even postulate that increased levels of carbon dioxide may not be a cause of global warming, but a by-product of warmer temperatures. cache - Ü
It is the published
view of the Met Office that is it likely that more than half the
But this is highly uncertain, and reputable climate scientists differ sharply over
The uncertainty derives from a number of sources. For one thing, the science of
4/2/2007 10:28 AM
Monday, April 02, 2007UK Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending MuslimsBy LAURA CLARK (DAILY MAIL) — Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.
'Unsatisfied' 110-year old Saudi take second wife
A 110-year old Saudi man has taken a second wife because his first 85-year-old wife no longer satisfies his needs, the daily Arab News said on Friday. The report did not explain why the man considered his current wife to be unfulfilling, but it did point out that his new spouse is only 30 years old. http://blog.wired.com/biotech/2007/04/dirt_is_cheaper.html
Dirt Is Cheaper Than Prozac: Mood-Boosting Bacteria?I've heard about exposure to dirt strengthening the immune system -- but could it make you feel better, too? Treatment of mice with a ‘friendly’ bacteria, normally found in the soil, altered their behavior in a way similar to that produced by antidepressant drugs, reports research published in the latest issue of Neuroscience. [...] Interest in the project arose after human cancer patients being treated with the bacteria Mycobacterium vaccae unexpectedly reported increases in their quality of life. Lowry and his colleagues reasoned that this effect could be caused by activation of neurons in the brain that contained serotonin. Spring is here. Let's get dirty! http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-6172360.html
Google flush with laughs after porcelain prankApril 1, 2007 8:20 PM PDT Google was apparently trying to bowl over Web surfers with its April Fool's Day prank Sunday by offering a service that lets people stay online when they are on the john. The Web search giant launched a gag offer on its home page called "Dark Porcelain" that that offered high-speed wireless Internet access via consumers' toilets. Google said its "Toilet Internet Service Provider" (TiSP) would be available in three speeds: Trickle, The No. 2, and Royal Flush. Google's prank included an online installation guide, an FAQ and a press release quoting Google co-founder and President Larry Page. 4/1/2007 4:01 AM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6507309.stm
In the developed world, the risk of mother-to-child HIV transmission has been cut from 25% to under 2% because of the use of antiretroviral therapies, exclusive formula feeding and good healthcare support. But these benefits are often unavailable in the developing world. 3/27/2007 7:44 AM http://www.physorg.com/news94137297.html
Women of all sizes feel badly about their bodies after seeing modelsThe rail-thin blonde bombshell on the cover of a magazine makes all women feel badly about their own bodies despite the size, shape, height or age of the viewers. A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes. "Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone," said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory." 3/26/2007 Camille Paglia writes: Finally, I read a fabulous book last week -- John Lauritsen's "The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein," which will be published in May by the gay-themed Pagan Press, based in Dorchester, Mass. Lauritsen, who is known for his work in gay history and for his heterodox views of the AIDS epidemic, sent me an advance copy, which arrived as I was on my way to midterm exams. Its thesis is that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and not his wife, the feminist idol, Mary Shelley, wrote "Frankenstein" and that the hidden theme of that book is male love. Lauritsen assembles an overwhelming case that Mary Shelley, as a badly educated teenager, could not possibly have written the soaring prose of "Frankenstein" (which has her husband's intensity of tone and headlong cadences all over it) and that the so-called manuscript in her hand is simply one example of the clerical work she did for many writers as a copyist. I was stunned to learn about the destruction of records undertaken by Mary for years after Percy's death in 1822 in a boating accident in Italy. Crucial pages covering the weeks when "Frankenstein" was composed were ripped out of a journal. And Percy Shelley's identity as the author seems to have been known in British literary circles, as illustrated by a Knights Quarterly review published in 1824 that Lauritsen reprints in the appendix. 3/18/2007 8:17 AM -- If a guy is shown a picture of a sad-looking polar bear adrift on an ice floe, his first thought will be something like, "I've heard that bear steaks are tough, but maybe if you marinated them in beer, they'd turn out all right." -- One definition of an Internet URL is "Ubiquity first Revenue Later," Schmidt joked at the Bear, Stearns conference. 3/19/2007 7:58 AM 
The amount of money sent home by Latin American migrant workers to their families has reached more than $62bn. This figure now exceeds the combined total of all direct foreign investment and foreign aid to Latin America. According to the Inter-American Investment Bank, the figure could reach $100bn in four years' time. The biggest share of money, $23bn, was sent back to Mexico, mostly from workers living in the United States remitting small sums each month. Foreign remittances now rank along with oil and tourism as Mexico's biggest foreign currency earner. The Inter-American Development Bank, which supports the region with aid and other help, says the remittances will increase by about 15% a year during the next four years. The bank describes the money as a very effective poverty reduction programme because it keeps between 8m and 10m families above the poverty line. 3/26/2007 6:40 AM I am a hot, sexy, vibrant woman who cannot get enough geek love. I've found them to be the best lovers (athletes are the worst). Geeky guys are open-minded, eager, and very, very generous in bed. And, because they're brilliant, they know more about the human body and how to make it sing than anyone else. Posted by: Terradea | Mar 15, 2007 3:15:08 PM http://blog.wired.com/furthermore/ Iranian Bank Note Goes Nuclear Iran is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to its controversial nuke program, emblazoning a new 50,000-rial (about $5.40) bank note with a nuclear symbol, the Associated Press reports. The orange, green and blue currency's design shows the international nuclear symbol -- electrons orbiting an atom -- atop a map of Iran, and includes a quote from the Prophet Muhammad that's sure to pump up the country's atomic lab geeks: "Men from the land of Persia will attain scientific knowledge even if it is as far as the Pleiades." -- http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/2286.html Overall, we find that America's lowest-earning one-fifth of households received roughly $8.21 in government spending for each dollar of taxes paid in 2004. Households with middle-incomes received $1.30 per tax dollar, and America's highest-earning households received $0.41. Government spending targeted at the lowest-earning 60 percent of U.S. households is larger than what they paid in federal, state and local taxes. In 2004, between $1.03 trillion and $1.53 trillion was redistributed downward from the two highest income quintiles to the three lowest income quintiles through government taxes and spending policy. 3/12/2007 8:52 AM Some words of wisdom from Seth: Cristóbal Colón,
marketer. Columbus was a thief. He didn't invent the idea that the world was round. In fact, Ertosthenes, Aristotle and Ptolemy pretty much made it an established fact among educated people long before Columbus was born. Just because he didn't invent the idea doesn't mean he couldn't use it. Columbus didn't do his research carefully, reinforcing his optimism. He thought that calculations of the size of the Earth were in Italian miles, not in the longer Arabic miles. The correct calculations would have 'proven' he should never have left. Columbus took advantage of human nature. The rulers of Spain were desperate to find an edge and Columbus offered them a quest that could address their state of emergency. Columbus was
persistent. It
took him seven years at court in order to get funding. Columbus didn't consider side affects until it was too late. In order to help repay his investors, Columbus took slaves (the first person to do so in the New World) and in one notorious case, arranged to cut the hands off of each Haitian adult male who failed to bring a minimum amount of gold to his ships. Ultimately, in death, Columbus became a brand, a story bigger than his own facts. Buried in Spain, moved to Santo Domingo, then to Havana and then back to Spain. Namesake of the Knights of Columbus. Honored by statues and streets and even cities. In many ways considered the "first American," demonstrating vision, persistence, insight, brilliance, bravery and world changing paradigm shifting... almost none of it true, of course. I think the lesson of Columbus Day is a marketing lesson. Successful marketers allow people to tell themselves a story they want to hear. Columbus did that his entire life, and especially in death. Great marketers then do work that they're proud of, using their leverage to create things that people might not want in the short run, but are delighted in later on. I think Columbus was certainly successful. I wonder what would have happened if he had been great. 2/28/2007 9:13 AM
http://www.physorg.com/news91864715.html
Want to get pregnant? Drink whole milk, not skimmedWomen with a taste for full-fat milk and ice cream stand a better chance of getting pregnant, while those who consume low-fat dairy foods may actually impede fertility, according to a study published Wednesday.
The results of the study, which
monitored 18,555 women between 24 and 42 in the United
States who tried to or became pregnant between 1991 and
1999, sharply challenges US government dietary
guidelines, the authors said.
Consumption of saturated fats should be kept to a
minimum, he added, and total calorie intake should
remain the same.
2/13/2007 10:18 AM
With accelerating technology, the new version of something is going to be so much better than the old version, that you definitely do not want to buy extended service contracts. hg47
10:48 AM
49% of Americans believe Biblical Prophecy predicts the future better than the Farmer's Almanac, Astrologers, or Pollsters. hg47
10:57 AM
Family Quality Time is a myth. It's Quantity Time that holds Families together. hg47
2/12/2007 9:55 AM
Fun facts from Harper's Index, November 2006: Percentage of Americans who cannot say in which year the September 11 attacks occurred: 30 [Washington Post‒ABC News Poll (Washington)] Percentage who think that U.S. Muslims should have to carry special I.D.: 39 [Gallup Poll (Princeton, N.J.)] Chance that a U.S. Muslim is Arab: 1 in 5 The point? Muslims in the United States are not a threat. Average percentage change in the U.S. aid a country receives when it sits on the U.N. Security Council: +59
Who says you can't buy votes? Who says you can't buy consensus? Number of people whom tobacco will kill this century, if current trends hold: 1,000,000,000[Richard Peto, Oxford University (Oxford, England)] Factor by which this exceeds the number it killed last century: 10 [Richard Peto, Oxford University (Oxford, England)] Percentage change since 1998 in the average amount of nicotine that cigarettes deliver to the lungs: +10 [Massachusetts Department of Public Health (Boston)] Percentage change for Kool menthol cigarettes: +20 I used to smoke. I didn't quit—my body quit for me. First my lungs started bugging me. But I really liked smoking. I liked the tough image. I liked playing with fire. I tried not inhaling. I tried a pipe. I tried cigars. Then my throat started bugging me. Eventually, I quit. Willpower was not a factor. My body just couldn't handle it anymore. I have scars. Tobacco war wounds. Smoking destroyed the little hairs in my throat and at the top of my lungs that draw up automatically mucus out of the lungs. So now I'm always clearing my throat, and spitting out gobs of gunk from my lungs. When I get a cold or the flu, I stay sick and cough for weeks because the excess mucus in my lungs can't get out "normally." Chance that an African-American woman says that she worries about becoming a “bag lady”: 1 in 3 [Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America (Minneapolis)] Chance that a white American woman does: 1 in 2 What the hell is that all about? hg47
1/28/2007 9:46 AM
Stats. Provable statistics are the essence of Reality Therapy. Some gems from Harper's Index, December 2006:
Number of people the U.S. counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer personally killed last season on the TV show 24: 38 And this is the Good Guy! Correct me if I'm wrong—but each show is supposed to be one hour of real time, and each season is supposed to be one day. Right? So he dusted 38 dudes in one day. And this is the good guy!
Number of private firms that have
been hired since 2002 to recruit soldiers for the
Army: 7[U.S. Army Recruiting Command (Fort
Knox, Ky.)] Patriotism dead in America? American Politicians don't dare vote to re-establish a mandatory draft—they know they would be voted out of office! Dads & Moms don't want their Sons & Daughters yanked over to Iraq. Most Sons & Daughters have no desire to serve their country: "What's in it for me?" they ask. America needs soldiers—American Military bribes the tykes to fight. Appeals to duty just don't do it. So there are huge Enlistment Bonuses, Medical, Dental, and if the tyke survives Iraq & Afghanistan there are tens of thousands of dollars for advanced training and schooling and degrees. Wanna be a doctor but can't afford medical school—no problem, the Army will pay! It's gotten so bad that gigantic bribes to kids aren't enough. The American Military has to bring in private recruiting firms to get the word out. We have to Advertise the Bribes!
Percentage of
N.F.L. fourth downs on which teams are better off “going for it,”
according to a Berkeley study: 40[David Romer,
University of California, Berkeley] More statistical proof that "Going for it!" is the right thing to do.
And hg47 leaves you with: Minimum number of checkpoints Mary and Joseph would face today on their journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem: 10
1/24/2007 10:24 AM
The nice thing about a HUGE web page, is that there's lots of real estate to hide dead bodies. hg47
1/23/2007 11:19 AM
Do I have ideas? OR do the ideas have me? hg47
1/21/2007
My real life has been distracting me from my online life.
Sorry. hg47
3/1/2007 10:46 AM
January 19, 2007 When Being a Verb is Not Enough: Google wants to be YOUR Internet. I spoke recently with an old friend who is a bandwidth broker. He buys and sells bandwidth on fiber-optic networks around the world. And he told me something that I found not completely surprising, but I certainly hadn't known: Google controls more network fiber than any other organization. This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber, just that they control it through agreements with network operators. I find two very interesting aspects to this story: 1) that Google has acquired -- or even needs to acquire -- so much bandwidth, and; 2) that they don't own it, since probably the cheapest way to pick up that volume of fiber would be to simply buy out any number of backbone providers like Level 3 Communications. Google loves secrecy. That they've been acquiring fiber assets hasn't been a secret, but the sheer volume of these acquisitions HAS been. Why? One thought is that it kept down the price since people didn't really know it was Google snatching up this stuff (they've done it under a number of different corporate names). But if price was the issue, then why hasn't Google just bought the companies that own the fiber? It made no sense until I scratched my head and thought a bit further, at which point it became obvious that Google wants to -- in its own way -- control the Internet. In fact, they probably control it already and we just haven't noticed. There are two aspects to this control issue, but let's take the legal one first. If Google bought a bunch of Internet backbone providers, such a move would of course get the attention of regulators from the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the two federal agencies charged with looking at large corporate mergers for signs of anti-competitive activity. But simply acquiring legal control of those same assets through leases and other long-term contracts doesn't trigger such an examination, though perhaps it should. By renting instead of buying, Google was able to acquire its fiber assets primarily in secret. The game was over before most of us even knew there WAS a game. The second aspect of this is the whole idea that the game is already over for control of the Internet. I touched on this concept back in 1998 when I wrote my first column about PayPal, which at the time had been offering its core service for less than a year and already had eight million members. I wrote then that PayPal had already won the Internet payments race, which time has since showed they had. PayPal's confidence was based on analysis of its own growth. Understanding the potential range of growth, looking at the rate of subscriber acceleration, and using second derivative analysis of these data, PayPal was pretty darned sure, even back in 1998, that its competitors at the time would never be able to catch up. Topix.net founder Rich Skrenta recently took a similar approach to argue that Google, like PayPal, has already won the game and represents to most users the face of the Internet. Skrenta (in this week's links) argues that Google's dominance of search and advertising is so profound that most competitors -- especially Yahoo -- would probably be better off NOT even attempting to compete and simply let Google handle search and advertising while Yahoo provides content. He's probably correct. Skrenta argues that even if services come along that are superior to Google's, in order to become dominant they'll have to overcome Google's brand recognition with users, which is almost impossible to do. So just being better than Google isn't enough. All this is prelude for understanding what Google intends to actually DO with all this technology, which I have only lately begun to figure out. I live in South Carolina, a state that I can argue qualifies as a technology backwater despite being the shrimp and grits capital of the world. Why, then, are the local business pages filled with stories about Google preparing to build massive data centers here? Google is apparently negotiating to build data centers in Goose Creek, a town not far from Charleston, where I live, in Columbia, the state capital, and a third location across the border in Georgia. To read the papers, Google might choose one or another of these locations, but according to people I have spoken with who are fairly close to the action, Google actually seems intent on building in all three locations. Why? Why would Google need two data centers in a state with only four million residents? Why would they need to buy 520 acres in a Goose Creek industrial park when that's probably 100 times as much land as any conceivable data center would require? Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity. In Goose Creek they bought those 520 acres from the local state-owned electric utility, which probably answers the land question posed above. By buying out all the remaining building sites in an industrial park owned by an electric utility, Google guarantees itself a vast and uninterruptible supply of power, much as it has done in Oregon by building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam or back here again in Columbia by building near a nuclear power station. Of course this doesn't answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don't. I'll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That's perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources? The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television. The Internet as we know it is a shell game, with ISPs building their profits primarily on how many users they can have practically share the same Internet connection. Based on the idea that most users aren't on the net at the same time and even when they are online they are mainly between keystrokes and doing little or nothing when viewed on a per-millisecond basis, ISPs typically leverage the Internet bandwidth they have purchased by a factor of at least 20X and sometimes as much as 100X, which means that DSL line or cable modem that you think is delivering multi-megabits per second is really only guaranteeing you as much bandwidth as you could get with most dial-up accounts. This bandwidth leveraging hasn't been a problem to date, but it is about to become a huge problem as we all embrace Internet video. When we are all grabbing one to two hours of high-quality video per day off the net, there is no way the current network infrastructure will support that level of use. At that point we can accept that the Internet can't do what we are asking it to do OR we can find a way to make the Internet do what we are asking it to do. Enter Google and its many, many regional data centers to fill this gap. Looking at this problem from another angle, right now somewhat more than half of all Internet bandwidth is being used for BitTorrent traffic, which is mainly video. Yet if you surveyed your neighbors you'd find that few of them are BitTorrent users. Less than 5 percent of all Internet users are presently consuming more than 50 percent of all bandwidth. Broadband ISPs hate these super users and would like to find ways to isolate or otherwise reject them. It's BitTorrent -- not Yahoo or Google -- that has been the target of the anti-net neutrality trash talk from telcos and cable companies. But the fact is that rather than being an anomaly, these are simply early adopters and we'll all soon follow in their footsteps. And when that happens, there won't be enough bandwidth to support what we want to do from any centralized perspective. A single data center, no matter how large, won't be enough. Google is just the first large player to recognize this fact as their building program proves. It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we'll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY -- a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center. Seeing Google as their only alternative to bankruptcy, the ISPs will all sign on, and in doing so will transfer most of their subscriber value to Google, which will act as a huge proxy server for the Internet. We won't know if we're accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won't matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won't be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined -- about $1 trillion in all -- which places today's $500 Google share price about eight times too low. It's a grand plan, but can Google pull it off? Yes they can. Just came across this story in one of my old electronic notebooks; it's a bit dated, but I can't resist posting the puppy. Autoerotic: A woman is on trial for manslaughter in the accidental death of a man, in what we can only imagine was a terrific car accident. Prosecutors allege she was driving the man's Mercedes when it veered off the road and hit several trees; she says it was a hummer.
Woman uses sex act as manslaughter defense
Wednesday, March 3, 2004 Posted: 1:52 PM EST (1852 GMT)
MIDDLETOWN, Connecticut (AP) -- A woman charged with causing a fatal car crash in 1999 says that she couldn't have been behind the wheel because she was performing a sex act on the driver at the time. Heather Specyalski, 33, was charged with second-degree manslaughter in the crash that killed businessman Neil Esposito. Prosecutors allege that she was driving Esposito's Mercedes-Benz convertible when it veered off the road and hit several trees. But Specyalski claims that Esposito was driving, and she was performing oral sex on him at the time, said her attorney, Jeremiah Donovan. He noted that Esposito's pants were down when he was thrown from the car. Superior Court Judge Robert L. Holzberg ruled Tuesday that Specyalski can proceed with the defense, despite objections by the prosecutor. "A defendant has a right to offer a defense no matter how outlandish, silly or unbelievable one might think it will be," Holzberg said. He added: "No one ever told me in law school that we'd be having these kinds of conversations in open court." Assistant State's Attorney Maureen Platt said the defense is flawed. "His pants could have been down because he was mooning a car he was drag racing," Platt said. "His pants could have been down because he was urinating out of a window. His pants could have been down because he wasn't feeling well." Also Tuesday, Holzberg denied Donovan's motion to use gender as grounds to eliminate jurors. Donovan had argued that women would be biased and more likely to convict.
Wealthy New Yorkers are advertising rent-free rooms to women in exchange for sexual favours. The New York Daily News reports the trend and lists a number of ads on the popular Craigslist.org website. One, entitled "Take Care of My Needs and Live Rent Free", offers: "All you have to do is take care of all my urges, and I'll let you live in a one-bedroom apartment I own rent free." Another ad reads: "All I am looking for is an attractive, playful, and submissive woman who is uninhibited to my proposal... substituting rent for sexual encounters." In the posting, the 33-year-old man living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, adds that the room comes with a TV, DVD player, internet-ready computer and a phone line. "I don't need the rent but would like to fill it up with a woman who would love to show her appreciation for my generosity," he wrote. But Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne warned that the advertisements amounted to prostitution. "It is illegal to trade or solicit sex for monetary consideration or other consideration," he said. 12/6/2006 9:26 AM
A Dutch carpenters' erotic furniture is to be exhibited at a top German art gallery.
Cabinet maker Mario Philippona designed a range of stylish wooden cupboards, wardrobes and tables using the female anatomy as his inspiration. His newest piece is a fruit bowl decorated with realistically shaped life-size wooden breasts called 'TittyFruity'. Other pieces include a wine-glass cupboard in the shape of a pair of large breasts, a table supported by legs moulded from a female model and a bedside drawer which opens by pressing a button in the piece's 'vagina'. Philippona said: "The shape of a woman, her organic architecture, combined with my passion for wood inspired me to sculpt these sexy designs." His furniture can be seen at Amadeus Art in the German capital for the month of DecemberFour out of ten Britons would be prepared to give up sex if it meant they could live to be 100, according to a new poll. Almost half of the women asked in the Bupa survey said they would take up celibacy to reach the milestone . However, only 31% of men said they would be prepared to sacrifice nookie for a telegram from the Queen. Many people - 39% - would be prepared to give up eating and drinking whatever they wanted to ensure they lived to 100, while 42% would give up travel. But there were some things people would not give up - 94% would not be ready to give up the company of friends and family for a long life, and 74% would not sacrifice money. The Ipsos MORI research of more than 1,000 adults reveals that if we had a choice, we only aspire to live on average to 85. Unsurprisingly, young and old people were divided on when old age begins. The 16-24 year olds see it as starting at 61, while those 75 and over said it began at 71. But nearly half agreed scientists should continue to keep trying to prolong people's life spans. When asked about the main advantages of science being able to extend life, 16% said to be there for family and friends and 14% to see grandchildren grow up. Dr Andrew Vallance-Owen, Bupa's medical director, said: "Britain is facing an ageing time bomb with major challenges presented by retirement, the desire to live longer and the increasing burden of caring for older people."Richest 2% hold half the world’s assetsBy Chris Giles, Economics Editor in London Published: December 5 2006 13:13 | Last updated: December 5 2006 13:13 Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth. A survey released on Tuesday shows that middle-income countries with high growth rates still have a long way to go before they have a hope of catching up with the levels of prosperity of the richest. Adults with more than $2,200 of assets were in the top half of the global wealth league table, while those with more than $61,000 were in the top 10 per cent, according to the data from the World Institute fpr Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-Wider). To belong to the top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest adults you would need more than $500,000, something that 37m adults have achieved. So much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in few hands that if all the world’s wealth was distributed evenly, each person would have $20,500 of assets to use. Almost 90 per cent of the world’s wealth is held in North America, Europe and high-income Asian and Pacific countries, such as Japan and Australia. While North America has 6 per cent of the world’s adult population, it accounts for 34 per cent of household wealth. 11/28/2006 10:24 AM Women talk three times as much as men, says study
Last updated at 13:39pm on 28th November 2006 It is something one half of the population has long suspected - and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men. In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man. Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests. The book - written by a female psychiatrist - says that inherent differences between the male and female brain explain why women are naturally more talkative than men. In The Female Mind, Dr Luan Brizendine says women devote more brain cells to talking than men. And, if that wasn't enough, the simple act of talking triggers a flood of brain chemicals which give women a rush similar to that felt by heroin addicts when they get a high. Dr Brizendine, a self-proclaimed feminist, says the differences can be traced back to the womb, where the sex hormone testosterone moulds the developing male brain. The areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are all pared back the unborn baby boy. The result is that boys - and men - chat less than their female counterparts and struggle to express their emotions to the same extent. "Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," said Dr Brizendine, who runs a female "mood and hormone" clinic in San Francisco. There are, however, advantages to being the strong, silent type. Dr Brizendine explains that testosterone also reduces the size of the section of the brain involved in hearing - allowing men to become "deaf" to the most logical of arguments put forward by their wives and girlfriends. But what the male brain may lack in converstation and emotion, they more than make up with in their ability to think about sex. Dr Brizendine says the brain's "sex processor" - the areas responsible for sexual thoughts - is twice as big as in men than in women, perhaps explaining why men are stereotyped as having sex on the mind. Or, to put it another way, men have an international airport for dealing with thoughts about sex, "where women have an airfield nearby that lands small and private planes". Studies have shown that while a man will think about sex every 52 seconds, the subject tends to cross women's minds just once a day, the University of California psychiatrist says. Dr Brizendine, whose book is based on her own clinical work and analyses of more than 1,000 scientific studies, added: "There is no unisex brain. "Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they're born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values and their very reality. "I know it is not politically correct to say this but I've been torn for years between my politics and what science is telling us. "I believe women actually perceive the world differently from men. "If women attend to those differences they can make better decisions about how to manage their lives." Other scientists, however, are sceptical about the effects of testosterone on the brain and say many of the differences between the male and female personality can be explained by social conditioning, with a child's upbringing greatly influencing their character. Deborah Cameron, an Oxford University linguistics professor with a special interest in language and gender, said the amount we talk is influenced by who we are with and what we are doing. She added: "If you aggregate a large number of studies you will find there is little difference between the amount men and women talk." Already available in the US, The Female Brain will be available in the UK from April. 11/22/2006 9:38 AM For the past decade, about 13,000 people, sometimes more, have died every year on the roads at the hands of drunks. But,
here’s something to remember. A “first-time offender”
probably isn’t a first-time drunk driver. In fact,
MADD’s research shows the average “first offender”
drives under the influence 88 times before he’s ever
pulled over. 11/10/2006 9:51 AM Doctors using Google to diagnose illnessesLast updated at 00:01am on 10th November 2006
The internet search engine Google has added another impressive string to its bow - by helping doctors diagnose illnesses, according to a new study. Researchers found that almost six-in-10 difficult cases can be solved by using the world wide web as a diagnostic aid. Doctors fight disease by carrying about two million facts in their heads but with medical knowledge expanding rapidly, even this may not be enough. Misdiagnosis is still a common occurrence in the medical profession despite all the tools available such as the blood tests and state of the art scanning equipment. Studies of autopsies have shown doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 per cent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease. And the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930s. So a team at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane identified 26 difficult diagnostic cases published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, including obscure conditions such as Cushing's syndrome and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. They selected three to five search terms from each case and did a Google search while blind to the correct diagnoses. Google gives users quick access to more than three billion medical articles. The researchers then selected and recorded the three diagnoses that were ranked most prominently and appeared to fit the symptoms and signs, and compared the results with the correct diagnoses as published in the journal. Google searches found the correct diagnosis in 15 (58 per cent) of cases. Respiratory and sleep physician Dr Hangwi Tang, who led the study, said: "Doctors adept at using the internet use Google to help them diagnose difficult cases. "As described in the New England Journal of Medicine, a doctor astonished her colleagues including an eminent professor by correctly diagnosing IPEX (immunodeficiency, polyendocrinopathy, enteropathy, X linked) syndrome. She admitted that the diagnosis 'popped right out' after she entered the salient features into Google." The researchers, whose findings are published online by the British Medical Journal, suggest Google is likely to be a useful aid for conditions with unique symptoms and signs that can easily be used as search terms. But they stress the efficiency of the search and the usefulness of the retrieved information depend on the searchers' knowledge base. Dr Tang added: "Doctors and patients are increasing proficient with the internet and frequently use Google to search for medical information. "Twenty five million people in the United Kingdom were estimated to have web access in 2001, and searching for health information was one of the most common uses of the web. "Computers connected to the internet are now ubiquitous in outpatient clinics and hospital wards. Useful information on even the rarest medical syndromes can now be found and digested within a matter of minutes. "Our study suggests that in difficult diagnostic cases, it is often useful to 'google for a diagnosis'. Web based search engines such as Google are becoming the latest tools in clinical medicine, and doctors in training need to become proficient in their use." 11/5/2006 9:52 AM The Fountain of Youth at the Bottom of a Wine Bottle?
Researchers have found that resveratrol--a molecule found in the skin of red grapes and therefore in red wine--can prolong the life span of obese mice. They report their findings in today's advanced online edition of Nature. Resveratrol has been touted as an antiaging therapy since 2003, when Robert Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School pathologist and co-author of the current study, found that the life span of yeast could be extended by up to 60 percent when treated with the molecule. The same effect has been replicated in worms, flies and fish. In the case of the obese mice, Sinclair observes, resveratrol increased insulin levels while decreasing glucose levels, resulting in healthier liver and heart tissue when compared with obese mice that did not receive treatment. "After six months, resveratrol essentially prevented most of the negative effects of the high-calorie diet in mice," says study co-author Rafael de Cabo of the National Institute of Aging (NIA). Three groups of middle-aged mice (about a year old) were studied: one group ate a normal diet, in which fewer than 30 percent of calories came from fat, while two others were fed high-calorie diets in which 60 percent of the calories came from fat. Of the two groups on the high-fat diets, one received resveratrol. After 114 weeks, 58 percent of the normally fed mice and the resveratrol group were still alive, compared with only 42 percent of the untreated, high-calorie-intake mice. Sinclair reports that resveratrol reduced the risk of death from a high-calorie diet by 31 percent, leading to an increase in life span of 15 percent thus far. More accurate numbers will be available when all the mice pass away. "We are around five months from having final numbers," Sinclair notes, "but there is no question that we are seeing increased longevity." The researchers also note that the resveratrol-treated mice not only live longer than their untreated counterparts, but have more active lives, too--their motor skills have actually improved as they have aged. The researchers believe resveratrol confers its effects by activating the enzyme SIRT1, which is known to play a part in life extension. When the nonmammalian analog to SIRT1, Sir2, is blocked in lower order species like fruit flies, the healthy effects of low-calorie diets, versus high-calorie diets, are neutralized. Sinclair thinks that these mouse models indicate that resveratrol may be effective in preventing age-related diseases in humans, like cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Reservatrol has previously been shown to prevent damage to liver tissue, says Matt Kaeberlein, a pathologist at the University of Washington; the compound could be staving off age-related diseases by keeping the liver healthy. But, he notes that more work needs to be done to determine if resveratrol affects other parts of the body as well. "There are several other compounds that are undergoing testing," Kaeberlein notes, explaining that the NIA is looking at about a dozen other antiaging treatments. "If resveratrol turns out not to be as wonderful as we all hope it will, it's not the last hope." Even if resveratrol does turn out to be a miracle drug, a wine glass would probably not be the preferred delivery method. According to Kaeberlein, it would take over 300 glasses of wine per day to equal the amount of resveratrol fed to the obese mice in this study. --Nikhil Swaminathan 10/29/2006 3:20 AM
Special to World Tribune.com Friday, October 27, 2006
This might have dropped below the radar, but Al Qaida and its allies are literally battling the Crusaders every day in Europe. And so far, Europe isn't doing so well. "We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists," said Michel Thoomis, secretary general of the Action Police trade union. "This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifada, with stones and firebombs." The French Interior Ministry has acknowledged the Muslim uprising. The ministry said more than 2,500 police officers have been injured in 2006. This amounts to at least 14 officers each day. The battles have been under-reported but alarming to French authorities. Muslim street commanders, who run lucrative drug networks, have organized youngsters in housing projects to ambush police and confront security forces. The response time allows hundreds of Muslims to storm police cars and patrols within minutes. "You no longer see two or three youths confronting police," Thoomis said. "You see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their comrades free when they are arrested." France's huge Muslim minority community has come under the influence of agents often influenced and financed by Al Qaida. These agents have recruited Muslim youngsters for urban warfare in which police and government representatives are injured daily. Not surprisingly, Muslim neighborhoods are becoming autonomous zones, with police and government workers too scared to enter. The police union is demanding the Interior Ministry supply officers with armored cars. European law enforcement sources say France could be a model for other countries. The most worried are Britain and the Netherlands. 10/21/2006 12:33 PM 'Poverty Is Relative'Latinos Defy 'Downtrodden' Status, Sending Their Successes Home
Special to washingtonpost.com WASHINGTON -- The cat is out of the bag -- the majority of Latino immigrants in the United States are poor. By one calculation, up to three-fifths are "working poor" or "lower middle class," with annual incomes of less than $30,000. The bad news seems worse when one considers that as Hispanics gain in the U.S. population, the share of Hispanics in poverty doubled from 12 percent in 1980 to 25 percent in 2004. Recent immigrants fared worse. In 2006, the U.S. government drew the poverty line at $20,000 annually for a family of four, or a little more than $1,600 a month. But for those newly arrived from Latin America, the average monthly salary was $900, according to a new report released this week by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). If immigrants, especially Hispanics, are card-carrying members of the U.S. underclass, society at large is having a hard time convincing them of it: Latino immigrants are too busy working, buying cars, purchasing homes, and even investing abroad. Such a lifestyle is not exactly the picture of poverty. The poor are supposed to be the down and out -- the hungry and depressed standing in bread lines. Under this stereotype, they struggle for basic goods and services and are left outside the mainstream, unable to get ahead. Yet observers of the Latino experience in the United States say that Hispanic immigrants generally don't fit this mold for two basic reasons: choices and attitude. Immigrants cut what corners they can to keep rent, health care, sundry expenses and taxes to a minimum. They also leave family behind, clearly the most painful among their money-saving strategies to reduce the number of dependents in the United States. The income they pull together from their jobs is pumped into work-related expenses and living essentials, putting 90 percent of their earnings back into the U.S. economy, according to the IDB. Most of the rest of their incomes they invest in their homelands as remittances. The IDB report found that immigrants will send home approximately $45 billion in remittances in 2006, creating "one of the broadest and most effective poverty alleviation programs in the world." It also found that the majority of migrants want to purchase a family home or open a small business in their home country. One-third said they had already made investments, mainly in real estate. These are not the actions of the economically deprived. Hispanic immigrants don't necessarily feel excluded or underserved either. In an education survey, the Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation found two years ago that Hispanic immigrants were notably positive about the quality of public school education in their area. More pointedly, the survey concluded that Hispanics are not a "disgruntled population that views itself as greatly disadvantaged or victimized." What Hispanics do with their money and how they live reflect not deprivation or exclusion but an attitude of abundance. Poverty is relative. Less than $20,000 a year may rank an immigrant statistically poor, but this income may be seen as a fortune to someone who was making less than a tenth of that back home. So, at the end of the day what do we have? A growing number of immigrant poor? Well, yes. A growing number of depressed and downtrodden? Heck no. Hispanic immigrants, just as their immigrant predecessors, are optimists. The IDB found that despite the fact that 64 percent of remittance senders have an annual household income of less than $30,000, most believe their economic situation in the United States is good (58 percent) or excellent (10 percent), and that they are confident about the future. Optimists, of course, make poor fodder for those who would cast immigrants as down and out. The poor that strive, spend and invest do not easily fit the argument so often used over the past months: that immigrants represent a drag to the U.S. economy. Sure, due to immigration, the ranks of Hispanics among the poor in this country have grown. And while their incomes initially may be lower than those of native workers, economists such as Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute have found that they "improve more quickly" than those of natives. Those who use poverty to disparage immigration will continue to argue that immigrants -- particularly those here illegally -- hurt the U.S. economy. The reality is that rather than increasing poverty rates in this country, Hispanic immigrants are helping decrease poverty rates south of the border -- and with that they are doing more than anyone else to stem the future flow of immigration. 9/21/2006 8:34 PM 
Average Home Has More TVs Than People
NEW YORK - The average American home now has more television sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said. With televisions now on buses, elevators and in airport lobbies, that development may have as much to do with TV's ubiquity as an appliance as it does conspicuous consumption. The popularity of flat-screen TVs now make it easy to put sets where they haven't been before. Rick Melen, a facilities manager, has three sets in the Somers, N.Y., home he shares with his wife. That doesn't count the bathroom set that broke down and hasn't been replaced or the speakers installed near their hot tub, allowing them to watch a wide screen set through a window. "It's really just a matter of where your living takes place, what rooms you tend to spend your time in," Melen said on Thursday. "Other appliances you can move from room to room but if you have cable, you can't move a television." His wife might want to watch something while she's cooking while he's got a baseball game on downstairs, he said. Half of American homes have three or more TVs, and only 19 percent have just one, Nielsen said. In 1975, 57 percent of homes had only a single set and 11 percent had three or more, the company said. David and Teresa Leon of Schenectady, N.Y. and their four-year-old twins have seven sets, plus an eighth they haven't set up yet. They include TVs in both the parents' and kids' bedrooms, the family and living rooms and one in the kitchen that is usually turned to a news station. "No one ever sits down for more than a few seconds in this house," said Teresa, a stenographer. "This way you can watch TV while you're moving from room to room, folding laundry or taking care of the kids." In the average home, a television set is turned on for more than a third of the day - eight hours, 14 minutes, Nielsen said. That's an hour more than it was a decade ago. Most of that extra TV viewing is coming outside of prime time, where TVs are on only four minutes more than they were 10 years ago. The average person watches four hours, 35 minutes of television each day, Nielsen said. While people are watching more television, ratings for the big broadcast networks have declined steadily. That's a function of the greater number of channel choices available in each home, the company said. One new Nielsen finding - that young people aged 12 to 17 watched 3 percent more television during the season that ended in May than they had the previous year - is a particular relief to TV network executives. For a few years, Nielsen had been finding that TV viewing among teenagers was flat or even declining, a trend blamed on the Internet or the popularity of electronic games and other devices. "There are just more opportunities for them to watch whatever they want to watch," said Patricia McDonough, Nielsen's senior vice president of planning policy and analysis. Oddly, one of the driving factors is teenage girls watching more TV late at night or early in the morning, she said. 9/17/2006 2:40 AM iPod fans 'shunning iTunes store'
Despite the success of Apple iTunes, few people stock their iPod with tracks from the online store, reports a study. The Jupiter Research report reveals that, on average, only 20 of the tracks on a iPod will be from the iTunes shop. Far more important to iPod owners, said the study, was free music ripped from CDs someone already owned or acquired from file-sharing sites. The report's authors claimed their findings had profound implications for the future of the online music market. Ripped disks They estimate that during 2006 Europeans will spend more than 385m euros (£260m) on digital music - the majority of this spending will be on tracks from Apple's iTunes store. However, the report into the habits of iPod users reveals that 83% of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly. The minority, 17%, buy and download music, usually single tracks, at least once per month. On average, the study reports, only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites. The report warned against simple characterisations of the music-buying public that divide people into those that pay and those that pirate. "It is not instructive to think of portable media player owners, nor iPod owners specifically, as homogenous groups," warned the report. It said: "Digital music buyers do not necessarily stop file-sharing upon buying legally." The importance of "free" to digital music fans should not be underestimated, warned the report, and should be a factor for newer digital music firms, such as Spiral Frog, which use an ad-supported model. Perhaps the only salient characteristic shared by all owners of portable music players was that they were more likely to buy more music - especially CDs. "Digital music purchasing has not yet fundamentally changed the way in which digital music customers buy music," read the report. 8/31/2006 Thursday 11:45 PM Porn Up, Rape DownANTHONY D'AMATO Northwestern University - School of Law June 23, 2006 Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 913013 Abstract: The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence. 8/31/2006 Thursday 11:45 PM
10/22/2006 7:05 PM
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The cost
of the war... is becoming the first thing the people mention
after the loss of life when they are opposed to this war 
however, was not value free. I argued that the grand
achievements of the West are inextricable from its
restless egomania and its perverse phobias. I accepted
the worst things said about the West but connected them
to the birth of brilliant, world-changing ideas --
individualism, democracy, civil liberties and feminism,
among others. 
While
hindsight is 20/20, there are always warning signals
