Month: June 2006

The Times recently published a curious article on the science of empathy after a case where an eight year-old girl broke her leg and several drivers apparently drove past without caring to stop and help.

Apart from the grating “empathy has a physical location” (the spirit of phrenology lives on…) it’s a brief but interesting look at some of the emerging research into empathy, although doesn’t do a great job of tying it together into a coherent overview.

For those wanting a more in-depth (and more accurate) look at the neuroscience of empathy, a 2003 review article by Drs Jean Decety and Philip Jackson is a fantastic four-page romp through the recent research in the area.

Link to article ‘In a sorry state of mind’.
Link to Decety and Jackson article on empathy.

Item at the excellent Mind Hacks

Note:

I met a fella a few years ago who had attempted suicide by crashing into an oncoming schoolbus with much sad injury. After years in court and much therapy he learned from his psychologists that he had little empathy. His brain lacked activity when presented with provocative stimuli originating from other people, affirmed by brain scans. He practiced various mental exercises in hope of increasing his ‘sense of others’. Alas, there must have been some improvement. He later successfully commited suicide over a tremendous California cliff. True.

I think we can divide ourselves by empathy.

Some folks cannot seem to relate to either the joy or pain of others.

Memories are most susceptible to misinformation following a one-on-one conversation.

The problem for police investigators is that the witnesses start contaminating each other’s memories. But do you think a witness’s memory would be most prone to distortion following a big group chat about the event, or following a one-on-one conversation?

More at the British Psychological Society

People with greater “food insecurity” are more likely to be overweight (48.1 percent) and to have diabetes (37.9 percent) than subjects from food secure households (25.8 percent and 35.1 percent, respectively).

read more at the Science blog

“If all of your fans bought through iTunes rather than buying CDs at the record store you’d be looking at an overall reduction in income of 85%!”

Weird Al Yankovic Says Digital Is a Raw Deal For Some Artists:

“I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED… I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure.“

Apple pays the labels $0.65 (some say its as high as $0.80) of the $0.99 cents paid for your song. So, for an album with the average 12 songs, Apple takes in $11.88. Apple sends the label $7.80 — 35%. The record label takes that $7.80.

…you could expect something like $45 of each thousand songs sold to be paid to you in royalties. That’s around 4% of the amount paid to Apple for your work, and around 5.7% of what was paid to the label.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are.

How public education cripples our kids, and why

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Graham Glass comments,
“…schools should aim to teach children to be leaders and adventurers,
not employees and consumers.”

People who want to take a swing at San Francisco should think twice. Yes, the Irish coffee at Fisherman’s Wharf is overpriced, and the bus tour of Haight-Ashbury is disappointing (where are the hippies?), but the Bay Area is the cradle of the computer and software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children. The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco. There may be a reason for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous. Creativity is a key to economic progress. Authoritarianism is stifling. I don’t believe that Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard were gay, but what’s important is: In San Francisco, it doesn’t matter so much. When the cultural Sturmbannfuhrers try to marshal everyone into straight lines, it has consequences for the economic future of this country.

NOTE TO REPUBLICANS: THE PARTY’S OVER by Garrison Keillor

Oil from the tar sands of Alberta Canada is expanding rapidly.

Production in Alberta is up 61 percent over the past four years. This year, Alberta’s oil sands are expected to produce 1.2 million barrels a day, roughly equal to the production of Texas.

However it’s extracted, all bitumen has to be transformed into oil in a process called upgrading. There are several different steps in upgrading, all of them using a lot of energy, usually natural gas. It costs $23 to $26 a barrel – depending on the project – to produce light oil from sticky goo of the oil sands.

Tar oil production will almost triple in the next 10 years.

CALGARY, Alberta – A massive rise in crude production from Canada’s oil sands region over the next decade will nearly triple the area’s call on strained natural gas supplies, Canada’s national energy regulator said Thursday.

Production from the oil sands of northern Alberta is expected to rise to more than 3 million barrels a day by 2015, according to a study by the National Energy Board, triple last year’s output.

Production might rise as high as 5 million barrels by 2020.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ forecast two weeks ago was higher than NEB’s at 3.5 million bpd by 2015 and 4.9 million bpd by 2020. Both said getting the increased oil production to markets must keep pace.

via Future Pundit

The USA imports about 25 million barrels per day consuming about 25% of all oil. Alberta’s bid to produce as much as 5 million barrels is a major shift in where dollars will travel.

Great writer, Colson Whitehead. Original, incisive. Clear and clean. Necessary.

bookofjoe says, “He’s that pure and gifted a writer. The first couple paragraphs of his debut novel, “The Intuitionist,” grabbed me and didn’t ever let go until I’d finished the book. It was so strangely different from whatever else is out there masquerading as original fiction. Whitehead is the real deal.

‘Apex Hides The Hurt’ is the story of a nomenclature consultant, a man whose rare talent is finding just the name to set a product soaring into the stratospheric heights of the economy and the collective needful unconscious.

“He loved supermarkets. In supermarkets, all the names were crammed into their little seats, on top of each other, awaiting their final destinations.

……………………………

“Isn’t it great when you’re a kid and the whole world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it. All those flying gliding things are just birds. Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it? He told himself: What he had given to all those things had been the right name, but never the true name. For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them.

……………………………

“A name that got to the heart of the thing — that would be miraculous. But he never got to the heart of the thing. What is the word, he asked himself, for that elusive thing? It was on the tip of his tongue. What is the name for that which is always beyond our grasp? What do you call that which escapes?

……………………………

“He adjusted quickly to the recluse lifestyle, which was much more complicated than it appeared to outsiders, who enjoyed their invigorating jaunts outdoors and frequent social interaction without considering the underlying structures holding everything together. Keeping away from people, that was easy. Neglecting one’s physical appearance, that wasn’t too difficult either. The hard part was accepting that the world did not miss you.”

A call-girl’s story

“If light were a drug, the government would not approve it,” says Professor Charles Czeisler of the Harvard Medical School. And Professor George Brainard of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, adds: “Humans evolved on a planet without electric light over thousands and thousands of generations. The body is designed to be alert and awake during daytime hours and to sleep at night. Now we have a 24-7 society that isn’t in harmony with our biological design.”

Studies show that light at night interferes with one of the body’s greatest natural defences against cancer – melatonin, dubbed “the hormone of darkness”. The hormone – which is secreted by the pineal gland at night, and particularly in the early hours of the morning – both impedes the growth of cancers and boosts the immune system.

Sleeping with the light on or staying up late could be a cause of breast cancer, authoritative new research suggests.

The research – which is being hailed as a “watershed”, providing “the first proof” of a link between artificial light at night and cancer – confirms a mass of the studies suggesting that modern life causes the disease by interfering with natural sleep cycles.

Carried out by the blue-chip National Cancer Institute and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in the United States, it offers a solution to the mystery of rising levels of breast cancer in rich countries, which are five times as high as in the developing world. One in 10 women will develop the disease.

Professor Richard Stevens of the University of Connecticut, who describes it as “a watershed study”, says: “Electric light as a driver of the breast-cancer epidemic worldwide – that’s a dramatic big thing.”

And Dr David Blask, who led the research – and calls it “the first proof that light is indeed a risk factor for cancer” – adds: “Breast tumours are awake during the day, and melatonin puts them to sleep at night.” Add artificial light and “cancer cells become insomniacs”.

Sleep Safely: What experts recommend

Shut out all light: Sleeping in a dark room aids production of neurotransmitter serotonin, which is crucial in making melatonin.

Get nine hours’ sleep: A Finnish study found that women who slept nine hours were one-third as likely to get breast cancer as those who slept seven-eight.

Get a red lightbulb: Place a red lightbulb in one fixture. If you get up in the night, only use this one.

Get outside in the morning: Just 10-15 minutes of morning light will send a strong time-keeping signal to the brain’s clock, leaving it less likely to be confused.

The story is at The Independent

The main active compound in marijuana leads to greater short-term impairment of learning in adolescent rats than in adults, according to researchers at Duke University Medical Center. The study directly compared the effects of delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) on the memory ability of adolescent and adult rats in order to learn if rats — and possibly humans — are more sensitive to THC at certain life stages.

read more

Purification without Chemicals? Yes, it’s possible and extremely effective.

• 2% to 3% of all food-borne disease are suspected to cause secondary long-term illnesses
• Food-borne disease cost the US economy approximately $37.1 billion yearly in medical costs and lost productivity

The PurPro process utilizes Activated Oxygen to naturally oxidize bacteria and fungi on food surfaces. This Activated Oxygen commonly called Ozone (O3) is a triatomic allotropic form of oxygen, which in a more simple definition means “Pure Air”.

Have you ever noticed that fresh, pure and clean smell in the air after a thunder storm? That is the smell of Ozone in a blue gas form.

The excellent cleaning ability of this natural antimicrobial PurPro process is completed by strong oxidation. Ozone, a very strong oxidizer, is non-selective against the target thereby penetrating its cell wall. Bacteria such as Salmonella, E-coli, Listeria Giardia and Cryptosporidium are killed on contact.

This PurPro process is much more effective and up to 3,000 times faster than chlorine.

Minimizing the occurrence of micro-organisms on fruits, vegetables, meats and other foods is a primary food-safety concern. At the same time, sanitizers – such as the chlorine used both to wash produce as well as disinfect processing equipment – may potentially harm the environment. Some consumers also prefer these by-products not be present as residue on the foods they eat.

One way the food industry can address food safety and the negative perception of some sanitizing agents is through the use of ozone treatment. Application of liquid and vapor phases of water saturated with ozone is gently applied to the product surfaces. Microbial contamination is reduced.

PurePro via Feed Biology

Simply put, Hilbertz has found a way to use sunlight to turn the minerals in seawater into limestone — accretion — depositing waterborne solids.

Autopia Ampere will begin as a series of wire-mesh armatures anchored atop a sea mountain. Once in place, they will be connected to a supply of low-voltage direct current produced by solar panels. Over time, electrochemical reactions will draw minerals from the sea to the armatures, creating walls of calcium carbonate, which is what us landlubbers commonly call limestone.

The fact that ocean-grown cities could stand on their own economically and become independent and self-governing entities poses what Hilbertz believes to be one of the biggest barriers to their creation. He says there is no legal precedent regarding national ownership of a newly formed island that is beyond a nation’s territorial waters.

from Popular Mechanics:

Mineral accretion technology was developed originally in the 1970s by architect Wolf Hilbertz to generate alternative construction materials The Army Corps of Engineers has used electrical accretion to build reefs and seawalls.

In 1980, I experimented with building mineral boxes by sending DC current generated by a windmill into submerged metal re-bar and screen. I imagined houseboat-sized barges could be manufactured, and this may become true someday.

 

Here are “startling numbers”. 80% of earners, which includes the middle class, have made only slight gains in income over the past 38 years.

But the percentage of income needed to purchase the median home has skyrocketed.

This is a table showing the income levels
and the ratio of a median home price to yearly salary in 1967:

Income Level	1967 Salary (2004 Dollars)	1967 Median Home Price (2004 Dollars)	Ratio: 1967 Median Home Price To 1967 Median Yearly Salary
Lowest Fifth	$7,668	$125,843	16.4 to 1
Second Fifth	$21,246	$125,843	5.9 to 1
Third Fifth	$33,918	$125,843	3.7 to 1
Fourth Fifth	$47,457	$125,843	2.7 to 1
Highest Fifth	$85,406	$125,843	1.5 to 1
Top 5%	$134,722	$125,843	0.9 to 1

Here is the same table, showing the data for 2004:

Income Level	2004 Salary	2004 Median Home Price	Ratio: 2004 Median Home Price To 2004 Median Yearly Salary
Lowest Fifth	$10,264	$221,000	21.5 to 1
Second Fifth	$26,241	$221,000	8.4 to 1
Third Fifth	$44,455	$221,000	5.0 to 1
Fourth Fifth	$70,085	$221,000	3.2 to 1
Highest Fifth	$151,593	$221,000	1.5 to 1
Top 5%	$264,387	$221,000	0.8 to 1

So what’s the conclusion?

Both young people and older people think that young people are happier than older people — when in fact research has shown the opposite.

Older people “mis-remember” how happy they were as youths, just as youths “mis-predict” how happy (or unhappy) they will be as they age.

The study is published in the June issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies, a major research journal in the field of positive psychology.

“Overall, people got it wrong, believing that most people become less happy as they age, when in fact this study and others have shown that people tend to become happier over time,” says lead author Heather Lacey, Ph.D., a VA postdoctoral fellow and member of the U-M Medical School’s Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine. “Not only do younger people believe that older people are less happy, but older people believe they and others must have been happier ‘back then’. Neither belief is accurate.”

The findings have implications for understanding young people’s decisions about habits — such as smoking or saving money — that might affect their health or finances later in life. They also may help explain the fear of aging that drives middle-aged people to “midlife crisis” behavior in a vain attempt to slow their own aging.

Stereotypes about aging abound in our society, link

Child abuse can cause schizophrenia.

The groundbreaking and highly contentious theory, co-presented by New Zealand clinical psychologist Dr John Read, has been described as “an earthquake” that will radically change the psychiatric profession.

Dr Read said: “I hope we soon see a more balanced and evidence-based approach to schizophrenia and people using mental health services being asked what has happened to them and being given help instead of stigmatizing labels and mood-altering drugs.”

Hammersley and Read argue that two-thirds of people diagnosed as schizophrenic have suffered physical or sexual abuse and thus it is shown to be a major, if not the major, cause of the illness. With a proven connection between the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia, they say, many schizophrenic symptoms are actually caused by trauma.

see more at the scienceBlog

warrantless

’nuff said

Government says AIDS Tests for all of us.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that doctors offer AIDS screening to all of their patients, noting that close to 250 million Americans don’t know their HIV status.

Currently, doctors offer AIDS testing to high-risk patients and pregnant women. Under the new CDC recommendations, the tests would be offered to everyone between the ages of 13 and 64 as part of their regular physical exam.

…can’t confirm link

These tips are more nuanced than the usual conscensus science or dominance crap. Negotiation is a part of life we all have to deal with. Being able to do so successfully can make a big difference to our outcomes. Here are eight tips that have helped Paul. Found at his Australian site — “tips in order to help others enjoy their lives”.

1. Be willing to negotiate in the first place
2. Don’t get emotional
3. Don’t get suckered by the “rules” trick
4. Never be the first person to name a figure
5. Ask for more than you expect
6. Let them believe the final decision doesn’t rest with you
7. Don’t act too interested
8. Don’t leave the other person feeling as if they’ve been cheated

There is a bunch of tough, brave, good-hearted confrontation here. Perhaps written to speak to the end of life, this is rare language with honest insight.

If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly’s blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.
Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.
If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.
A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones.
The flutes of your gills discolor.
You have become a ship for parasites.
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
You have cried to the wind
and heard the wind’s reply:
“I did not choose the way,
the way chose me.”
You have tasted the fire on your tongue
till it is swollen black
with a prophetic joy:
“Burn with me!
The only music is time,
the only dance is love.”
If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels you
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.

by Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)
via bookofjoe

How medical science got female sexuality wrong. An Australian urologist, Dr Helen O’Connell, is forcing a re-write of anatomy books and a rethink among medical professionals.

“They left it out,” she said. “It boils down to rivalry between the sexes: the idea that one sex is sexual and the other reproductive. “The truth is that both are sexual and both are reproductive.”

“The original anatomists weren’t interested in the clitoris. The penis was much more interesting. “It was bigger and you didn’t have to wear your spectacles to see it.”

We are not here merely to earn a living and to create value for our shareholders. We are here to enrich the world and make it a finer place to live. We will impoverish ourselves if we fail to do so.

—Woodrow Wilson

from SlowLeadership

This year’s Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics was presented by David Graeber, until recently an Associate Professor at Yale, entitled Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity. PDF link, via metaFilter, with neat follow-up and comments such as,

Every time intellectuals have the chance to speak yet do not speak, they join the forces that train men not to be able to think and imagine and feel in morally and politically adequate ways. When they do not demand that the secrecy that makes elite decisions absolute and unchallengeable be removed, they too are part of the passive conspiracy to kill off public scrutiny. When they do not speak, when they do not demand, when they do not think and feel and act as intellectuals … they contribute to the moral paralysis, the intellectual rigidity, that now grip both leaders and led around the world.

—C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III (1958)

---

In the late nineteenth century most people honestly believed that war between industrialized powers was becoming obsolete; colonial adventures were a constant, but a war between France and England, on French or English soil, seemed as unthinkable as it would today. By 1900, even the use of passports was considered an antiquated barbarism. The ‘short twentieth century’ was, by contrast, probably the most violent in human history, almost entirely preoccupied with either waging world wars or preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, that anarchism quickly came to seem unrealistic, if the ultimate measure of political effectiveness became the ability to maintain huge mechanized killing machines. This is one thing that anarchists, by definition, can never be very good at. Neither is it surprising that Marxist parties —who have been only too good at it—seemed eminently practical and realistic in comparison. Whereas the moment the Cold War ended, and war between industrialized powers once again seemed unthinkable, anarchism reappeared just where it had been at the end of the nineteenth century, as an international movement at the very centre of the revolutionary left.

Carl Sandburg once opined: “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” Unless we have a big dream, a multicolored mental image (in 3D), we will be unlikely to do the necessary foundation work to realize that dream. You know what I mean. The goal setting and action plan steps that are so vital to our vision.

But the dream is the key. Until we get emotionally involved and fired up about the positive direction our life is taking, it will be too easy to get sidetracked by the inevitable distractions along the way.

On the subject of emotion, Carl Jung said: “There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” In order to really put the gusto in our goals we have to get our senses involved.

an essay by Leonard Quilty at The Charter (via emergic)

A quote from jack/zen’s teacher’s teacher, Sunryu Suzuki:

In the beginner’s mind, the possibilities are many.
In the expert’s mind the possibilities are few.