big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
“…indoor chlorinated pools promote childhood asthma.
These findings further support the hypothesis implicating pool chlorine in the rise of childhood asthma in industrialized countries.”
Chlorinated pool attendance, atopy and the risk of asthma during childhood (PDF; 610 KB)
“It’s already way late to acknowledge that the ideas that are shaping technology aren’t coming from Redmond, they aren’t even coming from companies.” Chris Pirillo via preoccupations
Is “maleness a genetic disorder”? The human male is, on most measures, more vulnerable than the female. Part of the explanation is the biological fragility of the male fetus, which is little understood and not widely known. A typical attitude to boys is that they are, or must be made, more resilient than girls. This adds “social insult to biological injury.” Culture and class make a difference to the health and survival of boys.
The data presented here have implications for the clinical management of male patients as well as for the upbringing of boys.
National City Network
http://www.nationalcitynetwork.org/
A “comprehensive resource that connects city leaders and engaged citizens with the knowledge needed to build stronger communities.” Browsable topics include Arts, Recreation & Culture, Civic Engagement, Planning & Land Use, Human Services, etc. The search engine retrieves full-text reports and other documents, as well as citations (and sometimes full text) for newspaper articles.
It’s no surprise that financiers are drawn in. Mobile data usage is the fastest-growing and most lucrative sector for wireless operators looking to expand beyond voice calls. Wireless location-based services have finally started to hit the U.S. market over the past few months, with recent launches by Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless. Researchers at ABI predict the global market will grow from $981 million in 2005 to $8 billion by 2010.
Plus there are the legions of kids who have signed onto social networking sites like MySpace (76 million users), Bebo (24 million), Facebook (9 million), and Tagged (2.5 million).
Innovations emerge easiest in communities where there are leaders – not managers and administrators – who invite and inspire people to thrive on the dynamic perifery of the core.
Innovations fail to emerge in community where managers and administrators keep the community tighly held in a defensive, stasist core.
This simple yet profound lesson speaks to the importance of the community’s willingness to value the development of leaders. Interestingly enough, it’s the emergent leaders at the perifieries that can do the most good in moving this agenda forward.
Jack & his Zen-ning
People flocking to megacities where droves of rural citizens are arriving all the time, this last point is particularly significant, are surviving on small-scale subsistence farming.
Many people face not only extreme poverty, but a new degree of food insecurity in a place where they don’t rely on themselves to grow their own sustenance.
Using the farming skills they brought with them from the countryside to grow food in the city can generate income and provide the most nutritionally rich food available.
A lengthy scientific paper from Swiss environmental researchers evaluates urban agriculture in the developing world as a key factor not only for food security, and poverty alleviation, but also public health and sustainable resource management. via WorldChanging
NextBillion continues: In the next two decades mass human migrations from rural to urban areas are expected to radically transform the world’s demographic landscape.
Also check out City Farmer’s news page, which contains a wealth of information about this social experiment being conducted around the world.
Marketing requires imagination and relentless exposure.
Repression and intimidation won’t fly.
Newsnight interviewed Dan Glickman (MPAA – Motion Picture Association of America) and John Perry Barlow (EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation), to hear what they had to say about each other. It’s pretty amusing.
Barlow was the songwriter of “The Grateful Dead”, advising its fans to share. He’s also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Here’s what Barlow has to say about the MPAA:
“These are aging industries run by aging men, and they’re up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices.”
Barlow continues:
If I were to encounter Dan Glickman on the street and we were to have a civilised conversation about this subject, which would be a long shot, I’d tell him to relax.
I’d tell him to spend less of the resources of his industry on fighting the inevitable and more on learning about the conditions that they find themselves in and recognising the opportunities, which I think are vast and very encouraging. But they can’t get to those opportunities until they quit trying to stop progress.
He goes on:
“But you know the problem is – the bad news is that you’re up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you’re dead. You’re 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they’re just smarter than you. So you’re gonna lose that one.
But the good news is that you guys are mean sons of bitches and you’ve been figuring out ways of ripping off audiences and artists for centuries….. “
Read more, and Dan Glickmans comments over here.
via TorrentFreak
In a landmark decision, the European Patent Office upheld a decision to revoke in its entirety a patent on a fungicidal product derived from seeds of the Neem, a tree indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.
The fungicidal properties of the Neem tree had been public knowledge in India for many centuries and that this patent exemplified how international law was being misused to transfer biological wealth from the South into the hands of a few corporations, scientists, and countries of the North.
The Board of Appeals dismissed an Appeal by the would-be proprietors —the United States of America and the company Thermo Trilogy— and maintained the decision of its Opposition Division five years ago to revoke the Neem patent in its entirety, thus bringing to a close this ten-year battle in the world’s first legal challenge to a biopiracy.
Source:
Ben Bagdikian in this book
“The New Media Monopoly”
via bopnews who continues by stating “The US is a propaganda state”.
There is no other explanation for the fact that pluralities or majorities of Americans believe things that are clearly untrue, and known to be untrue to the public in every other democratic state in the world.
Rare case study illustrates the cash factors when operating small farms from 3 to 12 acres.
We are what we eat:
Estimated distance a tomato travels from farm to market: 1,569 miles.
Estimated distance a head of lettuce travels from harvest to market: 1,823 miles.
The typical American prepared meal contains, on average, ingredients from at least five countries outside the US. Average time spent preparing meal in US, 1954: 2.5 hours. Average time spent preparing evening meal in US, 2004: 6.5 minutes.
During the past 50 years, an average of 219 farms per day have closed or been amalgamated into a larger enterprises.
People who see their relationships as either all good or all bad tend to have low self-esteem, according to a series of seven studies by Yale researchers published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In two of the studies participants were asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether each of 10 adjectives applied to their relationship partner, adjectives such as caring and warm or greedy and dishonest. Partners in this study included college roommates and mothers.
read more
Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.
Being poor is living with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.
Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.
Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.
Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.
The numbers are startling: When you adjust for inflation, the minimum wage in this country has actually decreased 38 percent since 1968, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, the booming economy of the 90s did not assist many of those in the lowest income categories, especially in areas where housing prices rose while incomes remained stagnant. In 2002 alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 1.7 million more Americans dipped below the poverty line, bringing the national total to 34.6 million. Nearly one-third of those– 12.1 million– are children.
It is an American face.
People everywhere are afraid that very little separates them from disaster, that their jobs are not secure, and that if they lose their jobs there will not be another one waiting. They know something is wrong in our country, and they don’t know what they can do to make it right. Most are good people who work hard. I have seen their joys, their frustrations, and their attempts to change their reality. The problem is not one of the motivated versus the lazy.
To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, our work may not be finished in the next few months or the next few years or perhaps in our lifetimes. But for the sake of our United States and all who dream of living out its promise, let us begin– one face and one community at a time. link
By the year 2016, no one under the age of forty will remember a world without personal computers.
The average twenty year old will find it hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t any email to check or Web sites to visit. When we reach this point, even the novelty of the term “Internet” will have long since faded to join such golden buzz-words of yesteryear as “space age” and “atomic”. …more at PBS.org
Model of an ant colony
Department of Biological Science at Florida State University pours orthodontal plaster down ant holes, and creates perfect molds of the topology of the inside of an ant-colony.
This is a plaster cast of a large Pogonomyrmex Badius nest.
The nest is 135 chambers and 12 meters of vertical shafts.
The top-heavy distribution of chamber area and spacing is typical for the species, as are the helical shafts and the decrease of chamber size with depth
Link to picture series via betuman
An individual ant is not very bright, but ants in a colony, operating as a collective, do remarkable things. A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant. Collective intelligence: Ants and brain’s neurons
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that will require any agency receiving money from FEMA to have an evacuation plan to accommodate household pets and service animals in a disaster.
Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (PETS Act), S. 2548 and H.R. 3858
Fun
exposition
of
seamless
art,
a la
M. C. Escher.
We are so often merely commodities for each other. This snippet captures the issue.
“You should stop jerking off, Jack, and just write books. It is what you are supposed to do.”
I thought about that all the way home from New York. Perhaps he was right – I may have a book to write after all.
A little fable that tells how these people are fakers, their pretence on film just the tip of the iceberg. How publicity is a lifestyle to he who seeks it, his lies indiscernible from our daily prayers, his conscience forgiven by his movie star dreams. How success can make a good man swollen with lust for praise, needlessly bluffing his way into good books and buying his way out of bad. About how this egotist’s plaything called Motion Pictures is out of control, the characters jumping from the screens and swinging their dicks in ordinary lives.
All the world’s a stage, it seems, and an elite few are aware of the plot. We clueless extras are there to be deceived, abused and bullied into playing our parts, for the show that celebrates the stars must go on.
From “I was Russell Crowe’s stooge” at Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald
The German company ESG has developed personal STRAP-ON WINGS for use by special forces to fly over enemy lines.
The wings will enable soldiers to be dropped from airplanes at high altitude, and soar up to 120 miles in total silence and without being detected by radar.
Once the user is above their target landing spot, they deploy a parachute.
As RawFeed notes, “It’s only a matter of time before illegal immigrants discover these.”
Why are Americans so fat? It’s the corn.
In Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, he uses an analysis of four conventional meals to explore the origins of fundamental components of the American diet: how food is grown via industrial farming, what organic food is about, and what it’s like to grow, and hunt, your own food. He focuses especially on the ominpresence of corn in the American diet, directly and indirectly (dairy from corn-fed cattle and eggs produced by corn-fed chickens). From a New York Times review of Pollan’s book:
Big agribusiness has Washington in its pocket. The reason its titans want to keep corn cheap and plentiful, Pollan explains, is that they value it, above all, as a remarkably inexpensive industrial raw material. Not only does it fatten up a beef steer more quickly than pasture does (though at a cost to ourselves and cattle, which haven’t evolved to digest corn, and are therefore pre-emptively fed antibiotics to offset the stresses caused by their unnatural diet); once milled, refined and recompounded, corn can become any number of things, from ethanol for the gas tank to dozens of edible, if not nutritious, products, like the thickener in a milkshake, the hydrogenated oil in margarine, the modified cornstarch that binds the pulverized meat in a McNugget and, most disastrously, the ubiquitous sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Though it didn’t reach the American market until 1980, HFCS has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the larder — in Pollan’s McDonald’s meal, there’s HFCS not only in his 32-ounce soda, but in the ketchup and the bun of his cheeseburger — and Pollan fingers it as the prime culprit in the nation’s obesity epidemic.
“If you’re interested in making clean fuels, this microbe makes an excellent starting point.”
Isolated from a hot spring on the Russian volcanic island of Kunashir, this microbe lives almost entirely on carbon monoxide. While consuming this normally poisonous gas, the microbe mixes it with water, producing hydrogen gas as waste.
“C. hydrogenoformans is one of the fastest-growing microbes that can convert water and carbon monoxide to hydrogen,” remarks TIGR evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, senior author of the PLoS Genetics study.
It may be shocking, but over 90 percent of the cells in your body are not yours. They are various kinds of bacteria that live in symbiosis with your body.
Only a small number of bacteria in our bodies are harmful; most of them get something from our bodies and deliver useful tricks in return – such as enzymes needed for digesting the food and which cannot be synthesized by our own bodies. Now, for the first time, scientists have studied the genetics of the world inside our gut, or colon.
They have found up to 100 trillion microbes,
representing more than 1,000 species.
They help us digest much of what we eat, including some vitamins, sugars, and fiber. This colon “microbiome”, to sum of all these microbes, includes more than 60,000 genes – twice as many as found in the human genome. Because some of these microbial genes code for enzymes that humans need to digest food, scientists think they co-evolved with their human host, to mutual benefit.
“We’re entirely dependent on this microbial population for our well-being…”
For the first time, scientists describe the busy microbial world inside
via Feed Biology
It appears that many people are still living in the world of the old debate between “the free market” and “socialism”.
…all societies have always had market economies.
The question is: what SORT of market economy?
The modern market economy with which we are familiar, and for which many argue so hysterically, did not come into existence because of the magical thing called “the free market”.
Rather, the kind of free market with which we are familiar and which we admire so much arose in Reformation countries (as distinct from market economies in other times and places, in which markets simply reinforced entirely unjust hierarchical social relations).
Why did the sort of “market economies” arise in Reformation countries and not in other societies?
Because Reformation countries forefronted the rule of law (in other words, treated the rulers as well as the ruled as equal before the law), because they had a view of individuals as neither autonomous nor subject to society but related to and responsible for society, because they had a high view of ethics and diversity and work and living within one’s means, and so on.
In other words, it is not “free markets” that provided for prosperity, peace and freedom, it was a spiritual revolution (the Reformation) that created the environment within which markets of the right sort could be built over time.
There are specific brain regions that are dedicated to processing threatening facial expressions.
By comparing how quickly human facial expressions of different types are detected in a crowd of neutral faces, researchers have demonstrated that male angry faces are a priority for visual processing – particularly for male observers.
In addition, men find angry faces of both genders faster than women, whereas women find socially relevant expressions (for example, happy or sad) more rapidly. The work suggests that although males are biased toward detecting threatening faces, and females are more attuned to socially relevant expressions, both sexes prioritize the detection of angry male faces … via Softpedia.
Youth with bipolar disorder (previously known as manic depression) misread facial expressions as hostile and show heightened neural reactions when they focus on emotional aspects of neutral faces, … read more >