Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0905302323380.2335@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>,
Cyberculture <cyberculture@zacha.org>
Subject: interesting on friends, scientology, bacteria below
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 23:24:00 -0400 (EDT)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 31 May 2009 02:08:43 -0000 From: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com Reply-To: No Reply <notify-dg-evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com> To: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com Subject: [evol-psych] Digest Number 6413 There are 25 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1.1. Re: The Plight of Women Soldiers From: Steve Moxon 2a. Re: Lifelong alimony From: Donald W. Zimmerman 2b. Re: Lifelong alimony From: Julienne 3. News: Your Body Is a Wonderland ... of Bacteria From: Robert Karl Stonjek 4. Half of your friends lost in seven years From: Orlando D����hring 5. Wikipedia blocks Scientology from altering entries From: Orlando D����hring 6. Better, faster... and no office politics: the company with the autis From: Orlando D����hring 7. It's academic: university women are beating men at almost everything From: Orlando D����hring 8. Longitude pioneer was not a 'lone genius' From: Orlando D����hring 9. Only in it for the biscuits From: Orlando D����hring 10. The Coming Superbrain From: Orlando D����hring 11. An Alternative History of China From: Orlando D����hring 12. For Teenagers, Hello Means �����How About a Hug?����� From: Orlando D����hring 13. Engineered DNA counts it out: Man-made gene network can tally a seri From: Orlando D����hring 14. Burying the Lead The New York Times runs a piece on Hispanic poverty From: Orlando D����hring 15. A Florida Epidemic: Female Teachers Sleeping with Their Students From: Orlando D����hring 16. Study: Videos Help Prepare for End-of-Life Care From: Orlando D����hring 17. Quacks, hacks and pressing problems with press releases From: Orlando D����hring 18. CO2 Warming Looks Real From: Orlando D����hring 19. Rebels to the Death: A definitive, updated history of West Germany�� From: Orlando D����hring 20. What�����s Needed Next: A Culture of Candor From: Orlando D����hring 21. The Media, Islam, and Political Correctness From: Orlando D����hring 22. How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy From: Orlando D����hring 23. Reason.tv: Red Eye's Greg Gutfeld on Media Bias, Intolerant Liberals From: Orlando D����hring 24. Should School Districts Drug-Test Teachers? From: Orlando D����hring Messages ________________________________________________________________________ 1.1. Re: The Plight of Women Soldiers Posted by: "Steve Moxon" stevemoxon3@talktalk.net spmox Date: Sat May 30, 2009 6:09 pm ((PDT)) Julian is right: dishonesty it is by Mullette. The distinction at issue is between drafting into armed services merely to be in support roles and drafting into sarmed services for actual combat in contact with the enemy. For the deepest of biological reasons, here as always, women are treated as 'genetic celebrities' whereas men generically are treated as disposable. No society claiming to be predicated on equality can sustain that claim in the face of this gross distinction betweeen the sexes, which is apparent at any interface between the sexes. It is the very expression of this deepest of prejudices that is the political pretense that not men but women are disadvantaged, And it is the yet further expression of this deepest of prejudices that there still remain ideo-dinosaur freaks who think that they can carry on wilfully not to see it. They have invested so much over time in their deluded worldview that it's too late for them to deal with the cognitive dissonance of facing reality. Steve Moxon (Author of The Woman Racket: The new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society. Extracts/info at www.imprint-academic.com/moxon ) ----- Original Message ----- From: O'Dea To: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, May 30, 2009 4:58 AM Subject: RE: [evol-psych] The Plight of Women Soldiers Julienne, you made a claim and you can't back it up. No country drafts women into combat. Please show a modicum of honesty. Julian From: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com [mailto:evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Julienne Sent: Saturday, 30 May 2009 10:41 AM To: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com Subject: RE: [evol-psych] The Plight of Women Soldiers At 06:04 PM 5/29/2009 +1000, O'Dea wrote: >Please tell me, Julienne, which country compulsorily drafts women into combat. Julian, Please do your own homework. I don't have time to do it for you. Further, I have already' sent some of this onformation to this List before. Currently, countries that draft women into military service are China, Cuba, Eritrea, Israel, Libya, Malaysia, North Korea, Peru, and Taiwan [14][15]. In 2002, Sweden's government asked its army to consider mandatory military service for women. During World War II, women were drafted into the armed forces of the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. The United States came close to drafting women into the Nurse Corps in preparation for a planned invasion of Japan.[16][17] In 1981 in the United States, several men filed lawsuit in the case Rostker v. Goldberg, alleging that the Military Selective Service Act violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment by requiring that men only and not also women register with the SSS. The Supreme Court eventually upheld the Act, stating that "the argument for registering women was based on considerations of equity, but Congress was entitled, in the exercise of its constitutional powers, to focus on the question of military need, rather than 'equity.'"[18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription Julienne Never underestimate an exponential - Carl Sagan Join us at Chaos-stars@yahoogroups.com for in depth discussion of world events Julienne's Blog: http://www.myspace.com/youandthecosmos Radio: "You and the Cosmos" Tuesdays, 4:30 pm EDST http://whrwfm.org/listenlive.php Messages in this topic (46) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 2a. Re: Lifelong alimony Posted by: "Donald W. Zimmerman" dwzimm@telus.net zimmerma2000 Date: Sat May 30, 2009 6:10 pm ((PDT)) --- In evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com, Edgar Owen <edgarowen@...> wrote: > Basically the woman who > stays at home as a housewife sends the kids to school in the morning > and lives a life of leisure with her friends while her husband > supports her for very minimal housework. Generally she has the entire > school day as free time in which she often spends the husband's money > for personal items for herself. Not only that she is given free room > and board and often pretty much control of the family as well! > > Essentially it's a life of pampered luxury in which she's assured a > never ending salary for almost no work. I find it hard to believe that that scenario applies in any large numbers to anyone other than the affluent and rich and even there only to a modest percentage. If it applied generally, the fact that so many women are eager for divorce and 50% of marriages break up would call for explanation. What about the poor where nobody has much leisure? What about families where both spouses have to work to make ends meet? The scenario may happen in middle class families, I suppose, but even there I would guess that a lot of those women are not as fortunate as it looks and are prone to psychological maladies that make their lives miserable at home while their husbands are out in the rat race. Best regards, Donald W. Zimmerman Vancouver, BC, Canada dwzimm@telus.net http://mypage.direct.ca/z/zimmerma/index.html Messages in this topic (7) ________________________________________________________________________ 2b. Re: Lifelong alimony Posted by: "Julienne" julienne@nep.net zjulienne Date: Sat May 30, 2009 6:11 pm ((PDT)) At 08:01 AM 5/30/2009 +0100, Steve Moxon wrote: >Absolutely false. >1. The woman was being paid by her husband or partner: the breadwinner for >the whole household. >2. Home-making and childcare of own children by women do not constitute >work by any definition used by economists. Would those be male economists? It would have to be. >It is consumption. >3. No household requires even significant part-time let alone full-time >housework in the wake of labour-saving devices and easy-clean materials. >[Research shows that most housework performed by women is 'make-work'; >that is, not necessary activity that is indulged in for its own sake. IOW, >it is not work but consumption.] > >If a case can be made for a woman to be allowed to extort payment from the >man after the partnership has dissolved, then equally a case can be made >for the man to be allowed to claim recompense for the money he paid to >support the woman throughout the partnership. You obciously paid no attention at all to what was forwarded to this List recently stating that a full time wife's work was worth about $145.000. It is the bitter, self-aggrandizing, privileged, attitude of men like yourself which is making the rate of women divorcing men, and of women refusing to get married, tank. Who on earth would want to be married to a man with your attitudes? Your value is all on a male - the woman in your mind is chucked out like spittle. You have absolutely no respect or understanding of women at all, and it is shameful that someone like you should consider himself an expert of any kind on women. "Labour-saving devices", my eye. Someone should put you on an island with 50 children - or even 5, including infants, by yourself, from which you could not emerge for 15 years. Problem is, the kids would suffer. Julienne Never underestimate an exponential - Carl Sagan Join us at Chaos-stars@yahoogroups.com for in depth discussion of world events Julienne's Blog: http://www.myspace.com/youandthecosmos Radio: "You and the Cosmos" Tuesdays, 4:30 pm EDST http://whrwfm.org/listenlive.php Messages in this topic (7) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 3. News: Your Body Is a Wonderland ... of Bacteria Posted by: "Robert Karl Stonjek" stonjek@ozemail.com.au r_karl_s Date: Sat May 30, 2009 6:19 pm ((PDT)) [Picture of bacteria] Microbial megalopolis. The underarm is home to a number of different types of bacteria. Credit: Veer; Inset image courtesy of Julie Segre Your Body Is a Wonderland ... of Bacteria By Stephanie Pappas ScienceNOW Daily News 28 May 2009 Where can you find your skin's most diverse community of bacteria? Not in a sweaty armpit or linty belly button. According to a new survey of the bacterial ecosystem that covers us, the diversity hot spot of the body's exterior is the forearm. And the surprises don't end there. Microbes that live in and on our bodies outnumber our own cells 10 to one, but researchers have only recently begun to catalog the residents on our skin. Traditionally, scientists identified human skin bacteria by swabbing volunteers and culturing the samples, but those results skewed toward microbes that grow well in the lab. Thanks to ever-evolving gene-sequencing technology, scientists can now use microbial RNA to identify organisms. With these techniques, researchers have found an unexpectedly wide variety of bacteria on human skin (Science <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5879/1001> , 23 May 2008, p. 1001). But no one had ever systematically compared bacterial colonies from different areas on the human body. To do so, scientists from the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, recruited 10 volunteers and asked them to wash with mild soap for 1 week. Then, after 24 hours without bathing, the volunteers arrived at the lab, where researchers swabbed and scraped their skin in 20 places--everywhere from the nostril to the navel to that bane of low-rise jeans aficionados, the gluteal crease. The team analyzed ribosomal RNA from the samples and classified the microbes based on their genomes. The researchers found about 1000 species total, which were fairly consistent from person to person; it turns out we all have similar tenants in our noses and on our backs. The number suggests that our skin is as variegated as our guts, which house anywhere from 500 to 1000 bacterial species. The team also found vast differences across the skin, according to the study published in tomorrow's issue of Science <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5931/1190> . Contrary to what acne-prone teenagers might expect, oily areas such as the forehead and scalp are actually less diverse than dry areas such as the forearm (though one is enough for grief: Propionibacterium acnes thrives in oily spots). The most barren region was behind the ear, with a median diversity of 15 species. In comparison, the forearm teemed with a median 44 species. A follow-up with five of the volunteers months later found that bacterial makeup changed little over time. Why some neighborhoods are more varied than others is unknown. It could be because of skin properties such as hair or oil, exposure to bacteria, or some combination. As for the forearm, geneticist and co-author Julia Segre speculates that exposed arms make a good landing pad for bacteria. Contrasted with how we clean our hands, we rarely lather up our forearms. Whatever the reason, the research shows that location matters. "This paper really highlights that the skin is an ecosystem and that the bacteria that live on our skin are not homogenous," says Segre. The research "could contribute to explaining why certain skin diseases appear at certain sites of the body and not others," says dermatologist Richard Gallo of the University of California, San Diego. "It's a straightforward description of something that needed to be described." The next step, Segre says, is to investigate the relationship between microbial ecosystems and diseases such as eczema and psoriasis. Source: Science http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/528/1?etoc <http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/528/1?etoc> Posted by Robert Karl Stonjek Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 4. Half of your friends lost in seven years Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:06 pm ((PDT)) Half of your friends lost in seven years May 28th, 2009 in Other Sciences / Social Sciences *Had a good chat with someone recently? Has a good friend just helped you to do up your home? Then you will be lucky if that person still does that in seven years time. Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst investigated how the context in which we meet people influences our social network. One of his conclusions: you lose about half of your close network members every seven years. * You are stuck with your family but you can choose your friends<http://www.physorg.com/tags/friends/>. Really? For years sociologists have argued to what extent personal networks are the result of your own preferences or the context in which you can meet someone. Would your best friend have been your best friend if you had not been in the same class for three years? And if you had not got to know your wife via mutual friends but in a dodgy bar then would she still have become and remained your wife? In order to answer such questions, Mollenhorst conducted a survey under 1007 people aged between 18 and 65 years. Seven years later the respondents were contacted once again and 604 people were reinterviewed. They answered questions such as: Who do you talk with, regarding important personal issues? Who helps you with DIY in your home? Who do you pop by to see? Where did you get to know that person? And where do you meet that person now? *Limited in your choices* Mollenhorst investigated, for example, whether the social context<http://www.physorg.com/tags/social+context/>in which contacts are made influences the degree of similarity between partners, friends and acquaintances. It was expected that the influence of social contexts on similarity in relationships would be stronger for weak relationships than for strong ones. After all, you are less fussy about your choice of acquaintances than your choice of partner. In relationships with partners, Mollenhorst indeed found more similarity than in relationships with friends. Yet interestingly, the influence of the social context on similarity did not differ between partners, friends and acquaintances. This reveals how strongly opportunities to meet influence the social composition of personal networks. With his research Mollenhorst has confirmed that personal networks are not formed solely on the basis of personal choices. These choices are limited by opportunities to meet. Another strong indication for this came from the fact that people often choose friends from a context in which they have previously chosen a friend. Moreover, the extent to which our friends know each other strongly depends on the context in which people meet each other. *Individualism* Many sociologists assume that our society is becoming increasingly individualistic. For example, it is held that we strictly separate work, clubs and friends. Mollenhorst established, however, that public contexts such as work or the neighbourhood and private contexts frequently overlap each other. Furthermore, Mollenhorst's research reveals that networks are not shrinking, whereas American research reveals such a decline. Over a period of seven years the average size of personal networks was found to be strikingly stable. However, during the course of seven years we replace many members of our network with other people. Only thirty percent of the discussion partners and practical helpers still held the same position seven years later. Only 48 percent were still part of the network. Therefore value the friends you have. As long as you have them that is. Gerald Mollenhorst's research is part of the project Where friends are made. Contexts, Contacts, Consequences, set up by Beate V����lker. She received a Vidi grant from NWO in 2001 and used this to set up her project. Source: Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, http://www.physorg.com/news162741216.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 5. Wikipedia blocks Scientology from altering entries Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:06 pm ((PDT)) Wikipedia blocks Scientology from altering entries May 30th, 2009 in Technology / Internet * Wikipedia has blocked the Church of Scientology from editing entries at the communally-crafted online encyclopedia due to an unrelenting battle over the group's image.* A "longstanding struggle" between admirers of Scientology and critics of the group prompted Wikipedia <http://www.physorg.com/tags/wikipedia/> on Thursday to bar online edits from computer addresses "owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates." An array of editors believed to have taken sides in a Scientology public-image war at Wikipedia have also been barred from tinkering with topics related to the church. "Each side wishes the articles within this topic to reflect their point of view and have resorted to battlefield editing tactics," senior Wikipedia editors said in arbitration committee findings backing the decision. "The worst casualties have been biographies of living people, where attempts have been repeatedly made to slant the article either towards or against the subject, depending on the point of view of the contributing editor." A church spokeswoman downplayed the development, saying the Wikipedia arbitration committee is part of a routine process for handling conflicts at the website. "Do Scientologists care what has been posted on Wikipedia? Of course," said Karin Pouw. "Some of it has been very hateful and erroneous. We hope all this will result in more accurate and useful articles on Wikipedia." The Wikipedia committee described the editing clash as "ongoing and corrosive" with "persistent point-of-view pushing." "The corrosive atmosphere has resulted in normally neutral editors adopting polarized positions in countless minor sub-feuds," the committee said in written findings. "Sockpuppetry is rife." Sockpuppetry refers to creating alternative accounts to perpetrate mischief or fraud at the website. Listed among aggravating factors were coordinated Wikipedia edits made from Scientology computers and critics of the church citing self-published material to back entries. "Many Scientology articles fail to reflect a neutral point of view and instead are either disparaging or complimentary," the committee concluded. "Neutral editors entering this topic are frequently attacked from both sides and stand little chance of making progress until the key players disengage." Wikipedia warns that Scientology-related entries are "a hostile editing environment." Wikipedia prides itself on allowing anyone with an Internet connection to contribute or edit content. Wikipedia is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet. "What is really important is Wikipedia has stopped those involved in biased editing for the purpose of antagonism instead of information," Pouw said. "It's good from our perspective." The Church of Scientology and six of its French leaders went on trial on Monday in Paris on charges of organized fraud that could lead to an outright ban on the organization in France. Known for its Hollywood celebrity followers Tom Cruise and John Travolta, the group is in the dock in Paris for the second time in six years. The court is hearing a complaint from two women, one of whom alleges she was manipulated into handing over 20,000 euros (28,000 dollars) for costly Scientology products, such as an "electrometer" to measure mental energy. The second complainant alleges she was forced by her Scientologist employer to undergo testing and enroll in courses in 1998. When she resisted, she was fired. The plaintiffs' lawyers argue that Scientology resorts to harassment and pressure to rein in victims who show signs of vulnerability. The Scientology Celebrity Centre in Paris, its director Alain Rosenberg and five other top officials are accused of preying on fragile followers "with the goal of seizing their fortune by exerting a psychological hold." The group's spokeswoman in France has rejected the accusations, insisting that Scientology was a legitimate religion being "hounded" in French courts because it advocated new ideas. Founded in the United States in 1954 by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, the Church of Scientology is officially recognized as a religion here for tax purposes. Politicians in some European countries including France, Germany, Greece and Russia have accused the movement of exploiting its members financially. The movement claims a worldwide membership of 12 million. Source: http://www.physorg.com/news162885743.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 6. Better, faster... and no office politics: the company with the autis Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:06 pm ((PDT)) Better, faster... and no office politics: the company with the autistic specialists A pioneering company in Denmark is giving people with autism the chance to apply their skills to jobs from IT to product testing. The result is a huge success that's about to be rolled out across Europe. Founder Thorkil Sonne tells Michael Booth how his workforce's superhuman recall and unflinching focus could teach the rest of us a thing or two *Sunday, 31 May 2009* <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/better-faster-and-no-office-politics-the-company-with-the-autistic-specialists-1693057.html?action=Popup> *Anders Birch * 'We know we all have that twist': Thomas Jacobsen, 27, says that working at Specialisterne has helped him learn how to deal with social situations - [image: Photos] More pictures <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/better-faster-and-no-office-politics-the-company-with-the-autistic-specialists-1693057.html?action=Popup> Thorkil Sonne and his wife already had two sons when their third, Lars, arrived in 1997, so they had plenty of experience of the behavioural quirks of growing youngsters. But as Lars entered kindergarten aged two-and-a-half, the couple began to notice a more troubling change. Lars wouldn�����t play with the other children, preferring to sit alone for hours on end. He began to talk less and less, until he was virtually unable to engage in any kind of dialogue at all. Something was clearly very wrong. �����We were patient,����� says Sonne. �����Our older boys had taught us that each child has their pace at which they climb the ladder, but Lars seemed to be stuck on a step.����� The Sonnes are Danes and, fortunately, the Danish education system is good at diagnosing childhood developmental problems. Unfortunately in Lars�����s case, the diagnosis was childhood autism. �����It was scary. The first phase was denial: �����I�����ve known my child for three years, you�����ve only met him for two months. Don�����t come and tell me he has an incurable, life-long disability!����� Then you have a bad conscience; you remember the situations where you�����ve tried to use traditional means of raising kids and they didn�����t work. But it didn�����t take long, reading the literature, to realise it was describing Lars to the letter and, after time, we realised that Lars was still our happy, caring boy; we just had to get to learn about his world.����� Most parents, upon learning their child has a condition like this, will read up on it, learn about the treatments, therapies and consequences and start planning for the future. Sonne went somewhat further. He became involved with his local autistic society, ending up as vice-chairman of a housing facility for people with Asperger�����s syndrome, a type of autism that affects social imagination, interaction and communication. Through the housing association, he got to know an 18-year-old Asperger�����s sufferer who was especially gifted with computers. �����He had retired on a state pension,����� says Sonne. �����But I thought that was so unfair as he had valuable IT skills that I could see would be useful for software- testing, support monitoring, programming and so on.����� So, in 2004, Sonne left his job of 15 years at the Danish communications company TDC, remortgaged his house, and founded a company, Specialisterne (The Specialists), to find employment for adults with autism and Asperger�����s as software and systems testers. The 18-year-old Sonne had met through the housing association was his first employee. Five years on, Specialisterne employs 60 people, has a turnover of almost ����2m, and works with Microsoft (it tested Windows XP Media Center) and CSC, among other major international companies, helping them to check information systems, databases and other highly demanding, often repetitive, number-crunching tasks. Specialisterne has won numerous business and industry awards, and now has two offices in Denmark. If current plans pan out, a new branch will open in Glasgow later this year. It is a shining model of how to turn a highly skilled yet misunderstood and underexploited element of the population ����� around one per cent have a diagnosis of autism, but other related �����invisible disabilities�����, such as ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) for instance, may account for as much as 3.5 per cent of the population ����� into productive and integrated members of the workforce. I am sitting with Sonne, a quietly spoken, rather studious man in his late forties, in his well-ordered office in a hi-tech industrial park on the outskirts of Copenhagen. As we talk about his son�����s condition, he plucks a piece of paper from a filing cabinet. It�����s a drawing his son made following a family holiday in southern Europe. I peer at the curious pyramidal temple of squares and numbers, trying to make sense of it. �����It�����s Europe!����� I realise after a few moments. �����But what are the numbers?����� Sonne produces a photocopy of the schematic contents page from his European road atlas, the atlas they used on the journey south. His son had reproduced it entirely from memory. �����I�����ve tried to find a single mistake, but I can�����t,����� Sonne says, still amazed by his son�����s memory. It�����s a powerful illustration of the incredible, verging on superhuman, attention to detail, recall and unflinching ����� focus many autistic people have, whether expressed in architectural terms (as in Stephen Wiltshire�����s work ����� he can draw a landscape after seeing it once); linguistic (autistic author Daniel Tammet is said to have learnt Icelandic in a week); or, as is the case with many of Sonne�����s employees, numerical. �����There are so many different types of phones and services to be tested,����� Sonne explains. �����And the work is very repetitive but requires full attention all the time. Most companies use students or outsource to India or wherever. The first couple of tests they�����ll do will be fine, but by the sixth, their attention wanes and it will always be the last test that�����s the most important.����� Aspergerians, on the other hand, relish the repetition, their focus doesn�����t waver and their numerical skills are superlative. �����My staff are motivated all the time. Our fault rate was 0.5 per cent, compared with five per cent from other testers. That�����s an improvement by a factor of 10, which is why we can charge market rates. This is not cheap labour and it�����s not occupational therapy. We simply do a better job.����� From the start, Sonne was clear that the company would operate under market conditions, and turn a profit, which made it virtually impossible to apply for government or EU support (�����They just want people who will spend their money�����). But, oblivious to the economic downturn, Specialisterne continues to pick up new clients largely by word of mouth. Organisations in more than 50 countries have approached Sonne to explore the idea of starting similar projects, with Norway and Switzerland likely to follow soon. �����I knew that the autistic people I met had dreams and ambitions, personalities and motivation,����� he continues. �����The trick was to create an environment that supported them. If you think of a high wire, suspended between two buildings, you aren�����t going to take a chance and walk across it, even with a net. But if the wire was just a metre off the ground, you might try. It�����s the same with our company. We created stable ground for autistic people to walk on and I see them develop self confidence and open up to new things as a result.����� Leading UK software-testing consultant Stephen Allott of ElectroMind has been acting as an unpaid adviser to Specialisterne as the company prepares to enter the UK market where, currently, only about six per cent of people with autism are in full-time employment. He is very clear on the advantages of using them: �����Simply, they are better, faster and do higher-quality work than the people we can currently get from the labour market in the UK or India,����� he says. �����One of their guys can read a technical document the size of a book and spot inconsistencies between something on page three and page 37, which is incredibly useful. I already have clients in the UK who are interested in what they have to offer. The only thing we need to be careful about is their working environment. I know lots of companies with noisy, chaotic, open-plan offices, where the work is like fire-fighting most of the time, and people from Specialisterne wouldn�����t be able to work there. That said, the environment they need is the kind of environment we should all be working in anyway.����� Remarkably, about 70 per cent of Specialisterne�����s employees are stationed in client premises. I asked Sonne how easy it is for them to fit in with other working environments. �����We create virtual Specialisterne environments in our clients����� offices. Everyone who will be in contact with our consultants is briefed about the conditions they require. They have to be nice to our people, avoid stressing them. In Denmark, we use a lot of irony and sarcasm, but people with autism can�����t decode that. We make sure that the clients know how important it is to be direct, to outline tasks precisely and to stick to routines, particularly if any queries arise.����� �����That�����s how you avoid an �����I only fly with Qantas����� freak-out?����� I blurt. �����Yes,����� says Sonne. �����We�����ve never had a �����freak-out�����. In fact, saying what you mean, meaning what you say, being nice, avoiding stress are all good things in general for companies to take on board. Many have said to us that having one of our consultants has softened the atmosphere.����� It must actually be a relief to work with colleagues for whom office politics, backbiting and bitchiness are anathema. �����Yes, they are a happy and loyal group, no one ever talks badly about anyone else. It�����s nice to work with people who are honest, without filters. In fact I am working on a new management technique based on our experience with working conditions that are more open and direct.����� This doesn�����t mean there aren�����t misunderstandings from time to time. �����One of our consultants was working in an office where they introduced a free fruit basket. He went straight up and took a whole bunch of bananas back to his desk. Someone had to explain that it was expected to take perhaps one or two pieces of fruit a day, and then he got it.����� It also doesn�����t mean that Specialisterne�����s workforce ����� 90 per cent of whom are male ����� are somehow robotic and unfeeling. �����Oh no, in fact we have two employees who met at the company and are now engaged. Many socialise at the weekends and go out in Copenhagen together.����� Sonne introduced me to one of his colleagues, Thomas Jacobsen, 27. Jacobsen�����s autism wasn�����t diagnosed until he was in his twenties and, meeting him, you can understand why. There is a slight social awkwardness (though probably little more than you would experience with anyone confronted by an inquisitive journalist), and nothing to alert you to the fact he has endured lengthy periods of depression in his life. �����I wouldn�����t say it was a relief, but it was nice to have a name for it, for my problem,����� he told me of his diagnosis. �����Actually, I don�����t call it a problem, I call it a twist. Before, I felt I was different because I wasn�����t very social, I preferred being on my own and had lots of special interests: earthquakes, tsunamis, geography, GNPs...����� GNPs? �����Yes, you know, the gross national product of different countries. Since I started work here, I have learnt to cope better with social interaction, I haven�����t had a depression in two-and-a-half years. I am getting more involved in bringing new ideas to the company and am part of shaping the Specialisterne Foundation [responsible for rolling out the concept to other countries]. You do have to have the right environment for people with Asperger�����s to function ����� there needs to be an acceptance that I am special, that I might not work regular hours, that I might have down periods ����� but if you have that in place, we can do any job.����� Most Specialisterne employees tend to work 20- to 25-hour weeks, but Jacobsen has brought his hours up to 35. �����You really blossom here. I see it with so many Aspergerians who join the company and get proper training. I have a lot of friends at the company now, and we socialise and go out together in town. We know we all have that twist.����� I begin to wonder about all those other, less number-oriented skills that about 30 per cent of higher-achieving Asperger�����s sufferers display (to the extent that I rather wince to use the word �����sufferer�����). With a little lateral thinking, where else might fulfilling, productive roles be found for them in society? �����Well, I would be very confident to know there were autistic people running air-traffic control towers,����� says Sonne. �����In any company, at least one to five per cent of all tasks would fit well with the skills of people with autism. This could apply to recognition patterns in the medical industry, to accounting, to banks? Of course, some experts have identified autistic traits in people such as Mozart, Da Vinci, Newton, Einstein. If they were alive today, perhaps they would be recognised as having Asperger�����s, and look at what they achieved. Unfortunately, there is such an emphasis on being a team player and social skills in the workplace that there is still this resistance. But why do we all have to be like that? There should be room for other kinds of behaviour. �����My company is a showcase, but my end game is to get one million specialist people into meaningful work by providing a management model for large corporations to become attractive to people with special needs, so they know that they will be understood and supported. You know, in the UK you spend ����12bn a year on the half-a-million Brits with autism. Why not get them earning that for the economy instead?����� Sonne�����s hopes for his son must have changed radically from that first diagnosis, nine years ago. �����Well, he can work here, but only if he wants to. He�����s approaching some interesting times now as a teenager, but he is the nicest, most gentle and caring child you could imagine. It�����s a pity to think he might be bullied in society because of his way of being.����� Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/better-faster-and-no-office-politics-the-company-with-the-autistic-specialists-1693057.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 7. It's academic: university women are beating men at almost everything Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:06 pm ((PDT)) It's academic: university women are beating men at almost everything There are more of them studying, they are less likely to drop out, and they will probably end up with a better degree ����� but less money By Richard Garner, Education Editor *Sunday, 31 May 2009* <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/its-academic-university-women-are-beating-men-at-almost-everything-1693493.html?action=Popup> *alamy* Women outnumber men at every university bar Oxbridge and are more likely to get a good degree, but are drawn to the less well paid professions - [image: Photos] enlarge<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/its-academic-university-women-are-beating-men-at-almost-everything-1693493.html?action=Popup&gallery=no> Women outperform men in almost every single aspect of higher education, according to research published today. The number of women at university began to exceed the number of men for the first time 16 years ago. However, for years there were still academics claiming that men had "more where it mattered", ie at elite Russell Group universities ����� the group which represents 20 of the UK's leading research institutions including Oxford and Cambridge. One study published in 2005, Class Rifts Eclipsed by Sex Divide, said: "Many women are studying in lower-status universities... the university continues to be a space where class privilege is maintained and women's participation is limited to the bottom of a hierarchical continuum." Now a new study by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), the independent university think-tank, debunks that finding as a myth. It finds that not only do women outnumber men overall at university, they also outnumber them at every type of university. They are also more likely to get a good degree pass (a 2:1 or a first) and are less likely to drop out. For good measure, the Government's attempts to widen university participation among disadvantaged groups also appear to have struck more of a chord with women than men. There are more girls who were entitled to free meals at school going on to higher education than boys. In virtually every ethnic group, too, including Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities, where religion or culture may have led to some families downplaying the importance of education to women, more women than men go to university. Figures cited by HEPI show 49.2 per cent of women now opt for higher education ����� compared with only 37.2 per cent of men. Women are further ahead in representation at post-1992 universities (the former polytechnics) ����� 23.8 per cent of women attend one, compared with 18 per cent of men. However, the report goes on to find that eight per cent of women attending a Russell Group university compared with 6.5 per cent of men. At older established universities women generally outnumber men ����� 11.3 per cent of them enrolling compared with 8.6 per cent of men. Only at Oxford and Cambridge is there any equality of representation ����� 0.7 per cent of each sex attend Oxbridge. When it comes to degree passes, 63.9 per cent of women graduates obtain a "good" degree (first or upper second) compared with 59.9 per cent of men. The percentage of women obtaining a first (13 per cent) is lower than that of men (13. 9per cent), but because their overall numbers are so much greater, this still means that more women than men are now leaving university with a first. The report also shows that women outnumber men on most courses ����� including law and medicine courses ����� which ultimately lead to high paid employment. Only in technology, physical science, architecture, maths, computer sciences, and engineering are women outnumbered by men. Despite this, women are still likely to earn a lower wage than men on leaving university. One of the reasons the report cites for this is their greater number on courses leading to jobs in teaching or the creative arts. Women were more altruistic and valued their job environment more, the report found. They were less career driven or financially motivated. Researchers asked whether the growing gender gap mattered, and cited evidence from the Government to the Commons select committee monitoring education which stated: "We are increasingly concerned about male participation." However, it added that while recognising "sex inequality is clearly an issue" it did not want its remarks to imply a policy to reduce the number of women enrolling for higher education courses. Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/its-academic-university-women-are-beating-men-at-almost-everything-1693493.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 8. Longitude pioneer was not a 'lone genius' Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:06 pm ((PDT)) Longitude pioneer was not a 'lone genius' Experts believe that master clockmaker John Harrison must have had highly skilled help in creating his revolutionary sea clock By Andrew Johnson *Sunday, 31 May 2009* <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/longitude-pioneer-was-not-a-lone-genius-1693503.html?action=Popup> *Timothy Allen* Jonathan Betts with the 1713 timepiece made by John Harrison - [image: Photos] enlarge<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/longitude-pioneer-was-not-a-lone-genius-1693503.html?action=Popup&gallery=no> He was the lone genius who spent years locked away fiddling with tiny springs and coils to create the world's first global positioning instrument, and so revolutionised world travel. At least that's the official history of longitude, made famous by Dava Sobel's best-selling story of the master clockmaker John Harrison. Now research from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich ����� the home of the meridian line from which longitude is measured ����� has cast doubt on that version of events. The story of Harrison, as told by Sobel, captured the world's imagination when it was published in 1995. The book became a science-history best-seller, spawning a television adaptation in 2000 starring Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons. It told how the world's sailing powers were hindered by their inability to gauge how far east or west they were. In 1714 the British government put up a reward of ����20,000 to whomever could solve the problem of how to accurately work out longitude. Harrison's solution was simple. If a sailor could tell when it was noon where he was at sea by observing the sun, and also know the time in London, the time difference would tell him how far east or west he was. The only problem was that accurate watches did not exist, and pendulums did not cope well with the swaying motion of a ship. Harrison eventually came up with a watch-type device in the 1750s after going through various prototypes which, it had been believed, he made entirely on his own, even to the extent of learning how to work brass. Those prototypes are now at the Royal Observatory, and the first, called H1, made in 1735 and still working, was recently dismantled by senior horologist Jonathan Betts to replace a broken part. He said that after examining the intricate brass parts it became obvious that Harrison could not have made them without the help of a master brass-smith. "I'm a dedicated Harrison fan," he said. "But the idea that he was a lone genius needs re-examining. Dava Sobel's wonderful book has left some readers with the impression that Harrison worked entirely alone. This is not the case. He had helpers. "It has always been thought that he taught himself how to work brass, and he did to a degree. But he couldn't have obtained that level of skill without help. The people or person who made those parts had to be extremely skilled in their own right and it would have taken such a long time to complete. "We're trying to revise the view that he worked alone by saying that's not the whole story. We're not saying he wasn't a genius." It is the first time the clock has been dismantled since 1961 when it was refurbished after being neglected during the war. Then, however, it was worked on by clockmakers, rather than historians. Sobel said she welcomed Mr Betts's research, but it didn't alter her view that Harrison was a "lone genius". "It was Harrison who conceived the sea clocks," she said. "If he farmed out parts of the timekeepers' construction, that takes nothing away from the beauty of his conception, or the secretive style in which he worked." Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/longitude-pioneer-was-not-a-lone-genius-1693503.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 9. Only in it for the biscuits Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:06 pm ((PDT)) Only in it for the biscuits So cats weren't tamed by humans after all. We have to lower our expectations when it comes to pets - - Paul MacInnes <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/paulmacinnes> - guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>, Friday 29 May 2009 18.30 BST - Article history<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/29/cats#history-byline> Changes are afoot in the field of cat studies or, to use the technical term, apaw. New research into quite how cats went from being wild to apparently domesticated has shed greater light on the loving gaze shared each morning by pet and owner over a bowl of reconstituted meat. An article in the latest Scientific American looks again at the history of feline domestication<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-taming-of-the-cat>. It has long been held that cats were first tamed in ancient Egypt some 3,600 years ago. Thanks, however, to the discovery of a cat-shaped corpse buried some 9,500 years ago alongside their human associate in a shallow grave in Cyprus, the game has been changed. The new thinking is that wildcats of the type *Felis silvestris lybica* began to dwell alongside humans as farming developed in the fertile crescent of the Levant. Wildcats were tempted into human settlements by the prospects of scraps and, crucially, a ready supply of *Mus musculus domesticus*, aka the house mouse, an ancient Jerry to their pre-classical Tom. In other words, we didn't domesticate cats, they domesticated themselves. The animal was not tamed by the human, it looked the human up and down, liked what it saw and decided it would put on its cutest expression and pretend to be friends ����� a small price to pay for a high-mouse diet. Cat owners reading, this, perhaps with Tango or Whiskey (or both) sitting nonchalantly on top of their paper, may not be overly surprised to learn of these zoological developments. Unlike obliging, loving, slavering dogs, cats can often give the distinct impression of only being in it for the tuna-flavoured biscuits. The fact that this might be a habit established over millennia only proves the consistency of their interests. That said, the postulations of the academics ought to give those same owners pause for thought. For every moment of insistent miaowing for meat, there is also the soft purring your cat emits while it submits willingly to your caress, seemingly because it likes it. It is all too easy for humans to imagine a sophisticated relationship between themselves and their familiar. As opposed, say, to it being just an extended period of transactions designed to guarantee the continued delivery of Whiskas. Anthropomorphism is sometimes decried by ecologists who would prefer it if attempts to preserve endangered species were more evenly spread, rather than concentrated on creatures who look like they'd make nice company at a dinner party. Polar bears are perceived as cute and friendly, despite their penchant for bloody destruction<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2009/apr/12/animals-germany?picture=345847068>\, while snakes are devious and ruthless despite donating upwards of 30% of their income to charity (or so I was told by a snake oil salesman). This tendency applies tenfold to our domestic animals, despite the fact that we have not even the slightest clue as to their actual thoughts and feelings. It seems that now might be the time to revise downwards our expectations of cats. To continue to imagine, as I have done myself, that a cat actually loves you may only lead to heartbreak when the next study comes out revealing that, far from having an emotional bond with his human host, Felix has in fact conducted due diligence on his owner before deigning to move in. The other extreme, of refusing to countenance any bond with your beast, would also prove unproductive I suspect. Why take an animal into your home if you're intent on spending half the time trying to get it to pay for its dinner? Instead, I think, the model for our cats should be roughly the same as for our MPs: acknowledge that we need them, but let our trust in them be a wary one. And, as it seems to be the rage, make them subject to potential recall, with their effectiveness judged at the ballot box under the AV-plus system. Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/29/cats Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 10. The Coming Superbrain Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) May 24, 2009 The Coming Superbrain By JOHN MARKOFF<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_markoff/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Mountain View, Calif. ����� It�����s summertime and the Terminator is back. A sci-fi movie thrill ride, �����Terminator Salvation�����<http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/movies/21term.html>comes complete with a malevolent artificial intelligence dubbed Skynet, a military R.&D. project that gained self-awareness and concluded that humans were an irritant ����� perhaps a bit like athlete�����s foot ����� to be dispatched forthwith. The notion that a self-aware computing system would emerge spontaneously from the interconnections of billions of computers and computer networks goes back in science fiction at least as far as Arthur C. Clarke<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/arthur_c_clarke/index.html?inline=nyt-per>�����s �����Dial F for Frankenstein.����� A prescient short story that appeared in 1961, it foretold an ever-more-interconnected telephone network that spontaneously acts like a newborn baby and leads to global chaos as it takes over financial, transportation and military systems. Today, artificial intelligence, once the preserve of science fiction writers and eccentric computer prodigies, is back in fashion and getting serious attention from NASA<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_aeronautics_and_space_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org>and from Silicon Valley companies like Google<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/google_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>as well as a new round of start-ups that are designing everything from next-generation search engines to machines that listen or that are capable of walking around in the world. A.I.�����s new respectability is turning the spotlight back on the question of where the technology might be heading and, more ominously, perhaps, whether computer intelligence will surpass our own, and how quickly. The concept of ultrasmart computers ����� machines with �����greater than human intelligence����� ����� was dubbed �����The Singularity����� in a 1993 paper<http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html>by the computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. He argued that the acceleration of technological progress had led to �����the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.����� This thesis has long struck a chord here in Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds. The idea is not just the province of science fiction authors; a generation of computer hackers, engineers and programmers have come to believe deeply in the idea of exponential technological change as explained by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of the chip maker Intel<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/intel_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>. In 1965, Dr. Moore first described the repeated doubling of the number transistors on silicon chips with each new technology generation, which led to an acceleration in the power of computing. Since then �����Moore�����s Law����� ����� which is not a law of physics, but rather a description of the rate of industrial change ����� has come to personify an industry that lives on Internet time, where the Next Big Thing is always just around the corner. Several years ago the artificial-intelligence pioneer Raymond Kurzweil took the idea one step further in his 2005 book, �����The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.�����<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/books/03masl.html>He sought to expand Moore�����s Law to encompass more than just processing power and to simultaneously predict with great precision the arrival of post-human evolution, which he said would occur in 2045. In Dr. Kurzweil�����s telling, rapidly increasing computing power in concert with cyborg humans would then reach a point when machine intelligence not only surpassed human intelligence but took over the process of technological invention, with unpredictable consequences. Profiled in the documentary �����Transcendent Man,�����<http://transcendentman.com/>which had its premier last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, and with his own Singularity movie due later this year, Dr. Kurzweil has become a one-man marketing machine for the concept of post-humanism. He is the co-founder of Singularity University <http://singularityu.org/>, a school supported by Google that will open in June with a grand goal ����� to �����assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity�����s grand challenges.����� Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions �����uploading,����� or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible ����� within his lifetime. That has led to no shortage of raised eyebrows among hard-nosed technologists in the engineering culture here, some of whom describe the Kurzweilian romance with supermachines as a new form of religion. The science fiction author Ken MacLeod described the idea of the singularity as �����the Rapture of the nerds.����� Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine, notes, �����People who predict a very utopian future always predict that it is going to happen before they die.����� However, Mr. Kelly himself has not refrained from speculating on where communications and computing technology is heading. He is at work on his own book, �����The Technium,����� forecasting the emergence of a global brain ����� the idea that the planet�����s interconnected computers might someday act in a coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence. He just isn�����t certain about how soon an intelligent global brain will arrive. Others who have observed the increasing power of computing technology are even less sanguine about the future outcome. The computer designer and venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in Wired <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html> in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent machines. Mr. Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/sun_microsystems_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, still believes that. �����I wasn�����t saying we would be supplanted by something,����� he said. �����I think a catastrophe is more likely.����� Moreover, there is a hot debate here over whether such machines might be the �����machines of loving grace,����� of the Richard Brautigan poem, or something far darker, of the �����Terminator����� ilk. �����I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects as becoming the dominant political question of the century,����� said Hugo de Garis, an Australian artificial-intelligence researcher, who has written a book, �����The Artilect War,����� that argues that the debate is likely to end in global war. Concerned about the same potential outcome, the A.I. researcher Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, an employee of the Singularity Institute, has proposed the idea of �����friendly artificial intelligence,����� an engineering discipline that would seek to ensure that future machines would remain our servants or equals rather than our masters. Nevertheless, this generation of humans, at least, is perhaps unlikely to need to rush to the barricades. The artificial-intelligence industry has advanced in fits and starts over the past half-century, since the term �����artificial intelligence����� was coined by the Stanford University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/stanford_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. In 1964, when Mr. McCarthy established the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the researchers informed their Pentagon backers that the construction of an artificially intelligent machine would take about a decade. Two decades later, in 1984, that original optimism hit a rough patch, leading to the collapse of a crop of A.I. start-up companies in Silicon Valley, a time known as �����the A.I. winter.����� Such reversals have led the veteran Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo to proclaim: �����never mistake a clear view for a short distance.����� Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland�����s deeply held consensus about exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley�����s digerati would be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the singularity. �����Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the �����great dawn,����� ����� said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. �����Life�����s not fair.����� Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/weekinreview/24markoff.html?_r=1 Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 11. An Alternative History of China Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) *An Alternative History of China* By Jianli Yang Posted May 2009 The memoirs of Zhao Ziyang provide insight into what China would be like today if the 1989 democracy movement had prevailed. W*e must establish that [the] final goal of political reform is the realization of this advanced political system. If we don't move towards this goal, it will be impossible to resolve the abnormal conditions in China's market economy." * * * **One of the most sincere advocates for an "advanced political system" in China -- a system that included an independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and the right of citizens to organize (in a word, democracy) -- was not a disenchanted dissident or an armchair academic. Writing at the most unlikely of times, the man was Zhao Ziyang, secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Zhao was toppled in 1989 after trying to peacefully negotiate with student demonstrators -- like myself -- in Tiananmen Square. His fall paved the way for hard-liners, under the leadership of CCP official Deng Xiaoping, to crush the demonstrations with soldiers and tanks on the morning of June 4, 1989. In one bold, violent stroke, the one-party regime, teetering on the verge of collapse, found reprieve. Zhao's vision of a more moderate democratic future, one meticulously documented in his recently released memoirs, vanished from the scene, its author put under house arrest. There could hardly be a better time for *Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang* to be published, as the memoirs will be in both English and Chinese this week. Early June marks the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square -- a memory that will certainly remind China of the democratic ideals left behind in tragedy. Reading Zhao's account, I -- and no doubt other readers -- cannot help but imagine what China would be like today if Zhao had prevailed in June 1989. What if the dissenters who stood firmly before the government in Tiananmen Square had gained Zhao has a powerful ally to their cause? Would China have devolved into political chaos? Or would it be a robust democracy, steeped in cultural freedoms, social justice, and economic vibrancy? In seeking to answer that question about the past, we can learn much about the present: a China that in terms of its political system and tendency toward authoritarianism has evolved little since 1989, and yet has become both the United States' second-largest trading partner and its most significant competitor. Looking back at the crucial moment in 1989, it is first important to keep in mind how easily things might have turned in a different direction. China's movement toward democracy in 1989 was not as far-fetched as it might seem today. In fact, support for the democratic movement was so great that it caused an unprecedented split within the CCP leadership. A quarter or even a third of the officials in Beijing joined the protesters. Most of the rest were sympathetic toward the students. The degree of dissatisfaction within the party was very high, and many agreed with the protesters that the CCP had lost any pretense of being a "people's" party and had become a self-serving elite. That disillusionment came from a series of market-oriented reforms begun a decade earlier, in 1978. Although the changes produced rapid economic growth, they also led to contradictions: opening the economy negated the moral authority of the Communist revolution and unleashed unbridled corruption in its place. The 1989 democracy movement had two slogans. One was "Freedom and democracy," and the other was "No official business dealings, no corruption." After Tiananmen Square protesters were quashed and their government sympathizers, like Zhao, sidelined, corruption blossomed just as much as China's GDP (the fastest-growing among developed states over the last 25 years) has. It didn't have to be this way. If the democracy movement had succeeded, the CCP would likely still be the ruling party. But its policies and goals would have evolved more democratically under Zhao's leadership. In the last chapter of his memoirs, the former general-secretary of CCP praises the Western system of parliamentary democracy and says it is the only way for China to address corruption and inequality. He would no doubt have led the country down this path. Zhao's reforms, one might imagine, would have proceeded at a purposeful but amenable pace, beginning with an opening of partial freedoms of assembly and demonstration. Student organizations would have become lawful, eventually precipitating a lift on the ban on political parties. The press would likewise feel a weight lifted, and the country's National People's Congress would have become more than a rubber-stamp assembly. Public participation would have followed, with public debate emerging on difficult questions from ethnic relations, to foreign affairs, to government corruption, to HIV/AIDS and the environment. In other words, China would have embarked on a peaceful transition to democracy. A democratic China -- one that followed Zhao's model -- would have prospered economically, too. Instead, today China feels the consequences of rejecting this path of reform. The same corruption that motivated the opposition 20 years ago is today an open sore on the face of Chinese society. Eighty percent of China's wealth is thought to be controlled by the top 10 percent of party officials. And it's visible. Corruption distorts every aspect of Chinese society, from the shoddy workmanship of the elementary schools that collapsed during last year's earthquake (while the homes of party officials stood firm) to the summary displacement of more than 300,000 Beijing citizens in the name of "beautification" to prepare for the 2008 Olympics. No wonder, then, that corruption is still the largest source of alienation between the CCP and the population. Endemic corruption is the grievance cited in an estimated 100,000 major protests each year in China. To the outside world, Chinese society has prospered. But internally, it has atrophied morally and socially. China maintains its competitive edge through a base exploitation of its workers, who labor without rights or avenues of recourse. Even the most advanced free market economies find it hard to compete. The Chinese government becomes rich, but ordinary people do not. The average Chinese citizen contributes less to the country's GDP today than he or she did in 1988. One of the most famous slogans for China's reforms has been to "cross the river by feeling stones." Surely, Deng Xiaoping meant to infer a gradual notion of change. Instead, the metaphor today mockingly describes a society at odds with itself, lacking direction to support its ever-looming one party structure. The contradiction will not easily go away -- and will likely flare again, just as it did two decades ago. Zhao Ziyang foresaw this perpetual confrontation years ago, arguing that unless the Chinese government moved toward real democratic reform "it will be impossible to resolve the abnormal conditions in China's market economy." They were prophetic words, indeed. Today, even as China's leadership has moved further from Zhao's vision, the Tiananmen ideals never left the political dialogue. More than at any time in the last two decades, people might just be willing to protest to bring those ideals back again. Until then, we are left to confront the equally predictive words of the Soviet-era dissident, Andrei Sakharov: "The world community cannot rely on a government that does not rely on its own people." Source: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4951 Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 12. For Teenagers, Hello Means �����How About a Hug?����� Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) May 28, 2009 For Teenagers, Hello Means �����How About a Hug?����� By SARAH KERSHAW<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/sarah_kershaw/index.html?inline=nyt-per> There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type: There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out. There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace. There�����s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple ����� any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once. �����We�����re not afraid, we just get in and hug,����� said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. �����The guy friends, we don�����t care. You just get right in there and jump in.����� There are romantic hugs, too, but that is not what these teenagers are talking about. Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other ����� the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about �����one hour����� and �����six hour����� hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer. A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching ����� or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class ����� have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule. Parents, who grew up in a generation more likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the high-five, are often baffled by the close physical contact. �����It�����s a wordless custom, from what I�����ve observed,����� wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting columnist for The Associated Press, in a new book, �����13 Is the New 18.����� �����And there doesn�����t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge knowing each other,����� she continued, describing the scene at her older son�����s school in Manhattan. �����No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five ����� just the hug. Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language.����� For teenagers, though, hugging is hip. And not hugging? �����If somebody were to not hug someone, to never hug anybody, people might be just a little wary of them and think they are weird or peculiar,����� said Gabrielle Brown, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in Manhattan. Comforting as the hug may be, principals across the country have clamped down. �����Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory,����� said Noreen Hajinlian, the principal of George G. White School, a junior high school in Hillsdale, N.J., who banned hugging two years ago. �����It was needless hugging ����� they are in the hallways before they go to class. It wasn�����t a greeting. It was happening all day.����� Schools that have limited hugging invoked longstanding rules against public displays of affection, meant to maintain an atmosphere of academic seriousness and prevent unwanted touching, or even groping. But pro-hugging students say it is not a romantic or sexual gesture, simply the �����hello����� of their generation. �����We like to get cozy,����� said Katie Dea, an eighth grader at Claire Lilienthal Alternative School in San Francisco. �����The high-five is, like, boring.����� Some sociologists said that teenagers who grew up in an era of organized play dates and close parental supervision are more cooperative with one another than previous generations ����� less cynical and individualistic and more loyal to the group. But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said the teenage embrace is more a reflection of the overall evolution of the American greeting, which has become less formal since the 1970s. �����Without question, the boundaries of touch have changed in American culture,����� she said. �����We display bodies more readily, there are fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more permissible access to other people�����s bodies.����� Hugging appears to be a grass-roots phenomenon and not an imitation of a character or custom on TV or in movies. The prevalence of boys����� nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/mtv_networks/index.html?inline=nyt-org>show �����Bromance,����� which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends. But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word �����dap����� to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth. �����It�����s something you grow up doing,����� said Mazi Chiles, a junior at South Gwinnett High School in Snellville, Ga., who is black. �����But you don�����t come up to a dude and hug, you start out with a handshake.����� Some parents find it paradoxical that a generation so steeped in hands-off virtual communication would be so eager to hug. �����Maybe it�����s because all these kids do is text and go on Facebook<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>so they don�����t even have human contact anymore,����� said Dona Eichner, the mother of freshman and junior girls at the high school in Montvale. She added: �����I hug people I�����m close to. But now you�����re hugging people you don�����t even know. Hugging used to mean something.����� There are, too, some young critics of hugging. Amy Heaton, a freshman at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Md., said casual social hugging seemed disingenuous to her. �����Hugging is more common in my opinion in people who act like friends,����� she said. �����It�����s like air-kissing. It�����s really superficial.����� But Carrie Osbourne, a sixth-grade teacher at Claire Lilienthal Alternative School, said hugging was a powerful and positive sign that children are inclined to nurture one another, breaking down barriers. �����And it gets to that core that every person wants to feel cared for, regardless of your age or how cool you are or how cool you think you are,����� she said. As much as hugging is a physical gesture, it has migrated online as well. Facebook applications allowing friends to send hugs have tens of thousands of fans. Katie Dea, the San Francisco eighth grader, as well as Olivia Brown, 11, who lives in Manhattan and is the younger sister of Gabrielle, the LaGuardia High freshman, have a new sign-off for their text and e-mail messages: *hug.* Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/style/28hugs.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 13. Engineered DNA counts it out: Man-made gene network can tally a seri Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) *Engineered DNA counts it out * *Man-made gene network can tally a series of three* * *By Laura Sanders<http://www.sciencenews.org/view/authored/id/98/name/Laura_Sanders> Web edition : Thursday, May 28th, 2009 [image: font_down] <http://www.sciencenews.org/index/generic> [image: font_up] <http://www.sciencenews.org/index/generic> Text Size Graceful waltzers can count to three, and now stretches of man-made DNA can do it too. Researchers have built a series of genes and put them into bacterial cells, enabling the cells to tally events. The new counters may endow engineered cells with previously impossible functions, the team reports in the May 29 *Science.* The engineered counters may be used to monitor toxins in the environment or keep track of the number of times a cell divides. The system can even be programmed to destroy the cell that holds it after a certain number of events. �����This is the first example of a synthetic counter in the field,����� says Christina Smolke, a bioengineer at Stanford University and the author of a commentary published in the same issue of *Science*. Although these new counters are simple, �����the first step is building the framework. The next step is, how do we start tailoring these to respond to something relevant? There are a lot of places to take this.����� The new research adds a tool to the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, in which scientists engineer biological systems such as DNA to create new capabilities. DNA molecules are designed to direct certain activities in a cell, and so can respond to specific signals and start and terminate protein production. Since the field emerged in the late 1970s, scientists have been creating artificial cellular �����parts����� that could be used to modify a living organism or even build a synthetic simple one from scratch. Assembling the right parts in the right order could, for example, allow engineered bacteria to produce biofuels or eat toxins in polluted areas in the environment. A strong motivator for developing a system that can count, says study coauthor James Collins, was worry over the presence of genetically modified organisms in the environment. �����This came from growing concern that programmed cells could pose a danger to the environment or human bodies. You�����d be worried about how long these things were going to stick around,����� says Collins, of Boston University. Organisms endowed with counting abilities could be programmed to commit suicide after a certain number of cell divisions or day-and-night cycles, he says. This built-in kill switch may offer a greater level of control over the spread of introduced genes into wild organisms. These counters rely on the novel assembly of simpler genetic tools. Collins and his team created �����multiple numbers of switches cascaded behind one another to create more complex circuits,����� says Kaustubh Bhalerao, a biological engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Collins and his colleagues built two systems that count in different ways but are both based on the same basic idea. �����Each of the counters is what you call daisy chain cascades: You have to do the first event before you do the next event,����� Collins says. This is what endows the systems with the counting ability. One of the team�����s systems counts by starting and stopping the production of certain proteins. In the experiments, the first bit of a strip of modified DNA acts as a detector. When it detects a pulse of the sugar arabinose, it responds by triggering the production of a specific protein. When the DNA detects a second pulse of the sugar, the first protein helps produce a second protein. After a final pulse of the sugar, the second protein helps make green fluorescent protein as an output. When the cells glow green under ultraviolet light, the researchers know that the cells have counted exactly three pulses of sugar. The team could easily make the counting region of the modified DNA longer, allowing for higher counting. The second counting system relies on enzymes that chop out and invert specific pieces of DNA. When the DNA strip detects the first signal, it causes one of these enzymes to be made. The enzyme then chops its own DNA sequence out of the modified strand of DNA, flips it and reinserts it backward, rendering it unreadable and useless. A second signal leads to the production of another enzyme, which chops another bit of DNA further along on the strand. At the end of the process, an output protein is produced. The second system can be programmed to respond to different signals at each step of the process. By putting outputs between counts, researchers could track exactly when each step in a series happens. The first system is better for counting relatively quick events, those that happen every 30 minutes or so. The second system is more useful for counting longer events that unfold over days, because the enzymes need more time to do their cutting and flipping. Tinkering with the detector and the output, and leaving the basic process intact, may make for innumerable functions, Bhalerao says. Already, some bacteria have DNA that respond to light, arsenic, temperature, nutrients and some metals. In the new counting system, swapping out the signal, such as sugar, to be detected is trivial, says Bhalerao. �����It�����s like switching brands of mouse on your computer����� but leaving the processor alone. At the other end of the process, the proteins produced after counting can accomplish a wide variety of functions, Collins says. Proteins could �����explode the cell, make the cell long, short, fat.����� Researchers could even tailor the artificial network to produce different signals ����� like fluorescent proteins ����� at different counts. Cells could glow yellow after the first event, red after the second, green after the third and so on. This would allow researchers to monitor every step of complex processes, such as the development and growth of a cell. The mix-and-match capabilities offer many possibilities, Bhalerao says, but �����there is still a long way to go. These things don�����t work all the time, and that�����s because you�����re making the cells do things they don�����t want to do.����� Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/44251/title/Engineered_DNA_counts_it_out Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 14. Burying the Lead The New York Times runs a piece on Hispanic poverty Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) Kay S. Hymowitz *Burying the Lead* *The New York Times runs a piece on Hispanic poverty dressed up in happy talk.* 29 May 2009 Like most people I know, I am an avid reader of the *New York Times*. But I do follow several cautionary rules when I gulp down my morning paper of record. One is what I call the two-thirds rule: the most important news, assuming the *Times* prints it at all, comes about two-thirds of the way through an article. Today�����s piece <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/29hispanic.html> by Sam Roberts offers a stunning example. His article concerns a new Pew Center study on Hispanic immigration over the past generation, and it leads with the announcement that the name Jose is declining in popularity. This �����profound change,����� we�����re told, reflects the fact that more�����52 percent of the nation�����s 16 million Hispanic children�����are American-born. Yes, many are the children of illegal immigrants (as are two out of three of the country�����s foreign-born Hispanic kids.) But they�����re born in the U.S. and, Roberts continues, are learning English at the same rate as Asian immigrant children. The subtext is clear: Hispanics are assimilating to American life much like previous generations of newcomers and as successfully as the so-called �����model����� Asian immigrants. Hence, Hispanics����� growing preference for American-sounding names. This is excellent news. Just make sure you don�����t read what comes next. Most immigrants start off rather poor and over generations move up the socioeconomic ladder. Hispanics fit that pattern at first. Forty-seven percent of first-generation Latino children are poor; that rate falls to 26 percent by the second generation. So far, so good. But the third generation shows a disturbing lack of progress. Its poverty rate has barely budged, with 24 percent of its kids poor. Though the article doesn�����t make the connection, one cause is clear: the large proportion of Latino children being raised by a single parent. According to the Pew study�����noted by Roberts somewhere in the forgotten mid-section of his article�����the proportion of such children rises over time and is actually higher in the third generation than in the first and second. This is very bad news. To be fair, Roberts�����s article is not a perfect application of the two-thirds rule�����he actually reaches the news about child poverty and family breakdown at the halfway point of his article. But he does hold important data about his subject for the end: it seems that the name Jose is now the tenth most popular name in California, compared with second a decade ago, while in Los Angeles County it is now thirteenth as compared with number one in 1998. If I had a more suspicious nature, I would guess that *Times* editors and writers have research showing that harried New Yorkers tend to read the first paragraphs of an article, skim the middle, and read the last. This is what the headline for an article on the Pew study should have been: �����A Generational Shift: More Single-Mother Homes, More Poor Kids?����� Thanks to the Times, at least we know a lot of those kids will go by the name Dave. *Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal and the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book is *Marriage and Caste in America <http://www.manhattan-institute.org/marriage_and_caste/>. Source: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0529kh.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 15. A Florida Epidemic: Female Teachers Sleeping with Their Students Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) Saturday, May. 30, 2009 A Florida Epidemic: Female Teachers Sleeping with Their Students By Tim Padgett / Miami If you're the parent of a teen-aged boy in Florida, you probably muttered "not again" while reading your morning newspaper this week. There on the front page was yet another case of an adult female teacher being arrested for admitting to having had sex with an underage male student. This time the alleged perp was Maria Guzman Hernandez, a 32-year-old instructor at the private Our Lady of Charity school in Hialeah; her victim was 15. But she just as well could have been the 34-year-old Jacksonville public-school science teacher arrested last month for allegedly having sex with a 14-year-old student, once in her SUV; or the 32-year-old St. Petersburg teacher collared in March for allegedly "sexting" nude pictures of herself to an 8th-grade boy; or the 45-year-old teacher at a private Christian academy in South Daytona arrested days before for allegedly having sex with a boy from her class in various Daytona Beach hotels. Other female teachers in Florida have been booked for the same crime this year ����� and scores of others have also been arrested or disciplined in the past few years for sexual misconduct with students, according to a recent investigation by the Orlando *Sentinel*, which noted the problem is rising in the state "among female educators in particular." Florida, of course, is hardly the only state where female teachers have been nabbed for preying on boys <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1179374,00.html>. And nationwide, male teachers still commit far more sexual misconduct than females. A 2004 Education Department study found that about 10% of the nation's 50 million public-school students had experienced some kind of improper sexual attention from teachers and other school employees; and a 2007 Associated Press report indicated that men were involved almost 90% of the time. What's more, even in Florida those offenders are a small fraction of the state's more than 200,000 public and private school teachers. (View the Top 10 Crime Stories of 2008<http://www.time.com/time/specials/2008/top10/article/0,30583,1855948_1862222,00.html>.) But parents and prosecutors alike are nonetheless asking why the female version of pedagogue perversion seems more common on their peninsula compared to other places. "It certainly seems more prevalent, although we can't say for sure if it's worse than other large states," says Michael Sinacore, the Hillsborough County assistant state attorney who, in 2005, prosecuted one of Florida's most high-profile cases, that of Tampa middle-school teacher Debra Lafave, a blond siren who pleaded guilty to lewd and lascivious behavior after being charged with having sex with a 14-year-old boy. (In a controversial decision, a judge did not make her serve prison time.) "None of us can really say why at this point." Whatever the reason, the crime appears to be getting more cavalier in the Sunshine State. According to police in Hialeah, a mostly Cuban-American enclave adjoining Miami, Hernandez had been having sex with the 15-year-old boy since March, often right in the apartment he shared with his mother (who herself is now under investigation for allowing the abuse to occur). After the principal at Our Lady of Charity (a private Catholic school that is not formally affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church) began hearing of the illicit relationship last week, she reported it to the state's Department of Children and Family Services. Police questioned Hernandez last weekend ����� after she returned from a trip to Disney World with the boy ����� and she made a taped confession, they say. She was charged with sexual battery on a minor, akin to statutory rape, but has not yet been arraigned. One theory for the growing number of cases like these, says Sinacore, is what he calls "the more relaxed if not blurred boundary lines between teachers and students as teachers try to communicate with kids in this day and age." Those kids, as the media have often reported recently, are far less shy about innocent physical contact, like hugging, than their parents were as teens. That can be exploited by any male pervert overseeing a classroom. But it can also embolden predatory female teachers, who experts say are often in emotionally needy states. "The trend with female offenders, more than males, is that they have emotional turmoil going on in their lives," says Sinacore. Lafave's pregnant sister, for example, had been killed by a drunk driver before she began hitting on a student; Hernandez is estranged from her husband. Such problems certainly aren't excuses for pedophilia; but they can compel women like Lafave to seek out emotional comfort ����� or a feeling of control that they might not experience in relationships with adult men. (Read about the notorious Mary K. Letourneau teacher-student affair case<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988276,00.html>.) It doesn't help that society already brings a double standard to these cases, the notion that somehow it isn't as harmful for a boy to be seduced by a woman as it is for a girl to have sex with a man. In fact, it's not uncommon in the wake of news like Hernandez's arrest to hear morning radio jocks in Florida declare congratulatory high-fives for the boys. "This isn't an 'affair,' it's abuse, and we have to shift that paradigm," says Terri Miller, president of Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation (SESAME) in Nevada. "We say, 'Bully for the boy and his conquest of the geometry teacher,' but that makes it harder for boys to vocalize their victimization." Indeed, studies by psychologists like Julie Hislop, author of the 2001 book *Female Sex Offenders: What Therapists, Law Enforcement and Child Protective Services Need to Know*, note that boys who are sexually abused by women often develop alcoholism, depression and their own sexual dysfunctions, including rape, as men. But why should Florida seem to be experiencing an especially high number of such cases? Are those women, and for that matter the hormonally charged boys they target, somehow egged on by the state's more sexually relaxed atmosphere, with its sultry climate and scantily clad beach culture? (California also has a high rate of teacher sexual misconduct.) Or are Floridians simply reporting more cases like Hernandez's? It is a crime in Florida, as in most states, not to; but perhaps the tabloid publicity of the Lafave case has prodded Sunshine State denizens to be more vigilant, to no longer be in denial about cases like these or take them so lightly. And yet paradoxically, says Sinacore, it might also be engendering more cases. As potential female predators see more and more headlines about teachers like themselves bedding boys, it can seem more acceptable behavior in their eyes ����� especially when they see that offenders like Lafave get relatively light sentences. (That might be changing, however: a Florida judge recently slapped a two-year prison term on a 28-year-old female teacher in Pensacola convicted of unlawful sexual activity with a 15-year-old male student.) Activists like Miller are calling for stricter hiring processes for teachers ����� the kind of psychological and polygraph testing, for example, that police are subject to ����� and they complain that school boards and teachers unions have blocked legislative efforts to more effectively ferret out potential or actual abusers. But Mark Pudlow, spokesman for the Florida Teachers Association, the state's major teachers union, insists the group is doing its part to attack the problem and raise teacher awareness. At the same time, he points out, unions also have an obligation to help teachers who are themselves victims of bogus accusations, also a problem. "There needs to be an understanding," says Pudlow, "that even when a false accusation hits the newspapers, it can ruin a teaching career." True enough. But for the moment, Florida seems more concerned with the growing number of valid complaints. (Jacksonville alone saw two female teachers arrested last month.) So it's no surprise that a Florida congressman, U.S. Representative Adam Putnam, recently co-introduced a bill, the Student Protection Act, to set up a scholastic version of the national sex offender database and prevent teachers like Lafave from getting classroom jobs in other districts or states. Whether or not the legislation passes, it's a sign of the emotional turmoil that women like her have wrought in their communities. Source: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1901762,00.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 16. Study: Videos Help Prepare for End-of-Life Care Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) Friday, May. 29, 2009 Study: Videos Help Prepare for End-of-Life Care By Eben Harrell The debilitating effects of advanced dementia ����� how it destroys communication, basic muscle control, even the ability to swallow ����� are difficult to describe in words. Often, it's not until the condition is witnessed up close that it can really be understood. That is the theory behind a new study by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Boston University and Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions in which aging participants were asked to decide what kind of end-of-life care they would choose should they develop advanced dementia. The study, published Thursday in the *British Medical Journal,* involved 200 healthy 65-year-olds, who were divided into two groups: one was given a verbal description of the symptoms of advanced dementia; the other listened to the same description but also watched a two-minute video of an elderly woman with the condition being cared for in a nursing home by her two daughters. "Tell us, Ma, how many daughters do you have?" the children ask. "One? Two? You don't know?" (The entire video can be seen here<http://www.bmj.com/video/care_preferences_dementia.dtl> .) The patients were given three options for the type of care they would prefer if they were to develop advanced dementia ����� a progressive, fatal, neurological condition that often follows years of Alzheimer's disease or a series of strokes, and kills patients three to six years on average after the onset of symptoms. Typical options for end-of-life care include prolonging life at all cost, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and mechanical ventilation; limited care, including admission into the hospital and the use of antibiotics, but not resuscitation; and comfort care, including treatment only to relieve symptoms, but not prolong life. Among the patients who received only the verbal narrative, 64% chose comfort care, 19% chose limited care and 14% chose life prolonging care (3% were uncertain). Among the patients who also saw the video, 86% chose comfort care, 9% chose limited care, 4% chose life prolonging care, and 1% was uncertain. Perhaps more crucially, says the study's lead author Angelo Volandes of Massachusetts General Hospital, when participants were contacted six weeks later, only 6% of patients who saw the video had changed their preference for care, compared with 29% of those who did not see the video. People who saw the video also scored higher on health literacy tests, given by the researchers to judge knowledge of advanced dementia. "The results suggest that patients who watched the video had a better understanding of the disease and felt more secure in their decision. We felt those results were promising, as the goal for end-of-life decisions is to make sure [the patients] are informed," Volandes says. Volandes believes that using images and videos of advanced dementia could be particularly helpful for educating populations that have traditionally low levels of health literacy in the U.S., including African Americans and the elderly. Previous studies have suggested that minorities typically opt for more aggressive end-of-life care than their Caucasian counterparts ����� "but what we've found in this study is that health literacy is the driving force in this discrepancy, not culture," says Volandes. Projections indicate that more than 13 million patients in the U.S. will develop dementia by 2050. Elizabeth Gould, director of quality care programs at the Alzheimer's Association said that early detection of mental decline and advance planning for end-of-life care is crucial for dementia patients because of the disease's degenerative nature. The organization, which provided funding for the new study, "finds the results of the study interesting and hopes to learn more about the role multimedia can play through future studies," she said. Volandes points out that even though many people have seen portrayals of dementia in movies and TV shows, those images tend to be airbrushed versions of the truth. The video used in the study ����� which shows two daughters talking to and then feeding their mother ����� was meant to provide a reality check. Even so, he says, the full "clinical reality" of the condition ����� such as bladder and bowel incontinence ����� was withheld. "We wanted it to be honest but not overly emotive or visceral," he says. Volandes's team has also prepared videos of patients suffering from heart failure, late-stage cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ����� other leading causes of death in America. These will be used in a series of future studies: "We want to show what real disease looks like. We want to make sure we are on the same page when we use words like "CPR" and "dementia" with patients. End-of-life conversations are important, but so is making sure they are communicated in a clear and meaningful way." Source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1901734,00.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 17. Quacks, hacks and pressing problems with press releases Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) Quacks, hacks and pressing problems with press releases - The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian>, Saturday 30 May 2009 - Article history<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/30/bad-science-goldacre-medical-research#history-byline> Obviously we distrust the media on science: they rewrite commercial press releases from dodgy organisations as if they were health news, they lionise mavericks with poor evidence. But journalists will often say: what about those scientists with their press releases? Surely we should do something about them confusing us with their wild ideas? Now you may be inclined to think that a journalist should be capable of doing more than simply reading, and then rewriting, a press release; but we must accept that these are troubled times. Through our purchasing behaviour, we have communicated to newspapers that we want them to be large and cheap more than we want them to be adequately researched. So in this imperfect world it would be useful to know what's in academic press releases, since these are the people of whom we are entitled to have the highest expectations. A paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month shows we have been failed. Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire took one year's worth of press releases from 10 medical research<http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/medical-research>centres, a mixture of the most eminent universities and the most humble, as measured by their US News & World Report ranking. These centres each put out around one press release a week, so 200 were selected at random and analysed in detail. Half of them covered research done in humans, and as an early clue to their quality, 23% didn't bother to mention the number of participants ����� it's hard to imagine anything more basic - and 34% failed to quantify their results. But what kinds of study were covered? In medical research we talk about the "hierarchies of evidence", ranked by quality and type. Systematic reviews of randomised trials are the most reliable: because they ensure that conclusions are based on all of the information, rather than just some of it; and because ����� when conducted properly ����� they are the least vulnerable to bias. After these, there are observational studies ("people who choose to eat vegetables live longer") which are more prone to bias, but may be easier to do. Then there are individual case reports. And finally, there is "expert opinion". In the Dartmouth study, among the press releases covering human research, only 17% involved randomised trials while 40% were on the most limited studies: ones without a control group, small samples of fewer than 30 participants. That's not necessarily a problem. Research is always a matter of compromise: to randomise every single patient would be quite a piece of work. So people conduct imperfect research, knowing that it is the best we can do with the resources available, knowing that the results must be interpreted with caution and caveats. This isn't "bad science" ����� the errors come at the level of interpretation, where people fail to acknowledge the limitations of the evidence. That failure is a crime, but is it limited to quacks and hacks? No, and that is the key finding of this new paper, which found 58% of all press releases from its sample of academic institutions lacked relevant cautions and caveats about the methods used and the results reported. Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/30/bad-science-goldacre-medical-research Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 18. CO2 Warming Looks Real Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) CO2 Warming Looks Real<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/co2-warming-looks-real.html> By Robin Hanson <http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/robin-hanson/> ���� May 30, 2009 6:00 pm ���� Comments (8)<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/co2-warming-looks-real.html#comments> Many have bent my ear over the last few months about global warming skepticism. So I�����ve just done some moderate digging, and conclude: 1. In the last half billion years, CO2 has at times<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/25/global-warming-of-7c-could-kill-billions-this-century/>been 15 times denser, but not more than 10C warmer. So that is about as bad as warming could get. 2. In the last million years, CO2 usually rises<http://backseatdriving.blogspot.com/2007/04/climate-skeptics-guest-post-why-david.html>after warming; clearly warming often causes CO2 increases. 3. CO2 is clearly way up (~30%) over 150 years, and rising fast, mainly due to human emissions. CO2 is denser<http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1124-climate.html>than its been for a half million years. 4. The direct warming effect of CO2 on warming is mild and saturating; the effects of concern are indirect, e.g., water vapor and clouds, but the magnitude and sign of these indirect effects are far from clear. 5. Climate model builders make indirect effect assumptions, but most observers are skeptical they�����ve got them right. 6. This uncertainty alone justifies substantial CO2 mitigation (emission cuts or geoengineering), *if* we are risk-averse enough *and* if mitigation risks are weaker. 7. Standard warming records show a real and accelerating rise, roughly matching the CO2 rise. 8. Such warming episodes seem<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/22/limitations-on-anthropogenic-global-warming/>common in recent history. 9. The match between recent warming and CO2 rise details is surprisingly close, substantially raising confidence that CO2 is the main cause of recent warming. (See this<http://www.ifir.edu.ar/%7Eredes/ps/PhysRevLett_99_048501.pdf>great analysis by Pablo Verdes.) This adds support for mitigation. 10. Among the few bets<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy#Betting>on global warming, the consensus is for more warming. 11. Geoengineering looks<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/artificial-volc.html>far more likely to be feasible and acceptable mitigation than emissions cuts. 12. Some doubt standard warming<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record> records <http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html>, saying they are biased by urban measuring sites and arbitrary satellite record corrections. Temperature proxies like tree rings diverge<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/11/making-holocene-spaghetti-sauce-by-proxy/>from standard records in the last fifty years. I don�����t have time to dig into these disputes, so for now I defer to the usual authorities. It was mostly skeptics bending my ear, and skeptical arguments are easier to find on the web. But for now, the other side has convinced me. Source: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/co2-warming-looks-real.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 19. Rebels to the Death: A definitive, updated history of West Germany�� Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) If you want to watch a movie instead: *Rebels to the Death A definitive, updated history of West Germany�����s depraved Baader-Meinhof terrorists*: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765432/ Jacob Laksin *Rebels to the Death* *A definitive, updated history of West Germany�����s depraved Baader-Meinhof terrorists* 29 May 2009 *Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.*<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195372751/manhattaninstitu/>, by Stefan Aust (Oxford University Press, 480 pp., $29.95) The Weather Underground, a leftist terrorist group from the 1970s, played a bit role in last fall�����s presidential election through the association of unrepentant former Weatherman Bill Ayers with his fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama. That kind of connection would have come as no surprise in Germany, where the Weather Underground�����s far more deadly counterpart, the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, continues to cast a shadow over the country�����s politics. In 1985, German journalist Stefan Aust published the definitive book on the RAF, *The Baader-Meinhof Complex*. His book has since been turned into a successful feature film of the same name, which was nominated last year for a foreign-language Oscar and is slated for U.S. release this summer. Aust, a former editor of *Der Spiegel*, has now reissued his earlier work, changing the title to *Baader-Meinhof* and updating it with information that has come to light since the end of the RAF�����s reign of terror in West Germany 30 years ago. The new edition deserves attention, and not just because Anthea Bell�����s deft translation preserves the dynamic, detail-rich prose that made Aust�����s original read like a real-life thriller. Dense with insights into the psychology of terrorism, this history of West Germany�����s struggle against RAF radicals also serves as a cautionary tale for the West in its war against the modern threat of jihadist terror. From the day of its founding in 1970, the Baader-Meinhof gang wasn�����t what it appeared to be. Though Andreas Baader was the group�����s leader (along with his lover-cum-comrade Gudrun Ensslin), the leftist journalist Ulrike Meinhof was always a secondary figure. Indeed, the RAF was something of a personality cult built around the volatile Baader. More sociopath than socialist, the speed- and LSD-addled Baader parlayed a troubled youth as a car thief and street hooligan into a career as the RAF�����s �����general,����� leading the guerilla group on everything from combat training missions in Jordan under the tutelage of Palestinian terrorists to bombing raids on German department stores and police stations and U.S. military bases in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. An RAF slogan�������Madmen to arms!�������was as apt a description as any of Baader�����s modus operandi. The contrast with Meinhof was striking. Ten years Baader�����s senior, the cerebral Meinhof hailed from a respectable middle-class family famous for producing Protestant theologians. She joined the RAF after her increasingly militant writings in the left-wing journal *konkret* led her to practice what she preached. But Meinhof was never fully accepted into the RAF�����s senior command; Baader especially tormented her with accusations that she was a would-be class enemy and a �����knife in the back����� of the RAF. The abuse had its effect. In one of the RAF�����s routine exercises in �����self-criticism�������a Maoist practice in which members were expected to engage�����Meinhof denounced herself as a �����hypocritical bourgeois bitch.����� Meinhof remained the RAF�����s main ideologist, producing most of its political writings, but there was never any doubt about who was in charge. Like its supposed dual leadership, the RAF�����s revolutionary political agenda was something of a chimera. In theory at least, the group had come together to oppose the Vietnam War abroad and what it decried as the nascent police-state of West Germany at home. (This as opposed to the actual police state of communist East Germany, whose much-feared Stasi secret police aided and abetted the RAF.) The RAF�����s solution was communist revolution, and the group peppered its aggressively unintelligible political manifestos with Marxist clich����s about the evils of capitalism, �����American imperialism,����� and the �����state oppression����� of West Germany. Yet, as Aust clearly shows, for Baader in particular and for the RAF generally, revolutionary politics were soon subordinated to the thrill of direct action. Whether it was stealing cars, committing countless bank robberies, or merely the adrenaline rush of being on the lam, the RAF found liberation in lawlessness. Even the group�����s favored euphemisms�����a bank heist became an �����expropriation action�������could not disguise its criminality, which became an end in itself. It was no oversight that the RAF�����s chief political manifesto, *The Urban Guerilla Concept*, had more to say about the urgency of fighting one�����s enemies than what one should be fighting for. The RAF were rebels without a cause. For many on the Left, that did not seem to matter. Thus the Nobel Prize-winning author Heinrich B����ll defended the group as �����desperate theoreticians����� driven into a �����corner����� by the German authorities, and famously romanticized what he called the war of �����six against 60 million����� West Germans. Absurd on its face�����it was the RAF that was terrorizing the West German state, not the other way around�����this David-vs.-Goliath storyline was enthusiastically embraced by the young and politically na����ve. In a famous 1971 poll, one in four West Germans under 30 admitted to �����a certain sympathy����� for the RAF. Germans of an older generation had fewer illusions. Nevertheless, guilt-ridden about Germany�����s Nazi past, they were reluctant to condemn a group that styled itself, however improbably, as a resistance movement fighting the Third Reich�����s political heir. Ironically, the RAF had its most devastating impact only after it had been defeated. In 1972, the core leadership�����including Baader, Ensslin, and Meinhof�����was arrested in rapid succession. Imprisoned in Stuttgart�����s Stammheim prison, they became instant symbols of resistance, inspiring followers in a way that their reader-proof political tracts never could. At the time of their arrest, the group reportedly had a few dozen members. By 1974, when the RAF existed only in prison, police were searching for some 10,000 RAF sympathizers. It was this �����second generation����� of the RAF that was responsible for the worst period of violence in Germany�����s postwar history: the so-called �����German Autumn����� of 1977, a 44-day terror spree that saw the kidnapping and subsequent murder of German Employers Association president Hans Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of a 91-passenger Lufthansa airliner by RAF-linked Palestinian terrorists. Aust reconstructs the events in vivid detail. For Germany, he writes, the fall of 1977 was the equivalent of the September 11 attacks. In these parallels to today�����s terrorism, Aust�����s book seems as timely as when it was fist published. Over 30 years ago, West Germany anticipated many of the challenges facing democratic states as they confront terrorists who spurn the rules of war and exploit legal restraint for lethal ends. Long before American policymakers debated the merits of wireless wiretapping and coercive interrogations, German politicians deliberated whether it was going too far to bug the RAF in their prison cells and whether solitary confinement was a form of torture. West Germany�����s experience offers some valuable lessons. One is that, too often, excessive caution proved counterproductive. Kidnap victim Schleyer, for instance, might have been saved had police been allowed to search the Cologne apartment where he was being kept. For 11 days, police had suspected Apartment 104 as Schleyer�����s likely location; one investigator even rang the doorbell. Bureaucratic timidity prevailed, however, and the required search warrant was never issued. Several weeks later, Schleyer�����s lifeless body would turn up in France in the trunk of an abandoned Audi. More assertive measures yielded results, especially the counter-terror program devised by Horst Herold, the unacknowledged hero of Aust�����s book. Herold was a former public prosecutor from Nuremberg who became the chief of the Bundeskriminalamt, the German equivalent of the FBI, and almost singlehandedly brought down the RAF. His major contribution was to design a COMPSTAT-like computer program that recorded data on all aspects of RAF terrorism�����names, dates, targets, escape routes, methods, car registrations, residences�����and distributed it to regional police departments, ultimately allowing them to close in on the group. Alas, Herold received little thanks for his efforts. Derided for creating a �����Big Brother����� monitoring system, he was forced into early retirement in 1981. Allegations that he presided over the creation of a �����surveillance state����� were overwrought even then, but they continue to be repeated today. Aust himself, in an unfortunate departure from his carefully objective approach, echoes the repellent claim that there was some moral equivalence between the RAF�����s indiscriminate terrorism and the security services����� precisely targeted response to it. This is a rare lapse, however. Aust is anything but an admirer of the RAF�����not least because the group targeted him for assassination after he helped return Meinhof�����s children to her estranged husband. She had previously arranged for them to be raised in a Palestinian refugee camp. The RAF died as violently as it began. On October 18, 1977, an elite German counter-terrorism unit stormed the hijacked Lufthansa airliner, freeing the passengers and ending any chance that Baader and his cohorts may have had of being released in exchange for the hostages. Later that day, what remained of the RAF leadership (Meinhof had earlier hanged herself in her cell) killed themselves in a prearranged suicide pact. It was a grimly fitting conclusion: a senseless act of destruction that foretold the tactics of the RAF�����s Islamist successors. Three decades hence, no one has told that story better than Stefan Aust. *Jacob Laksin is a senior editor at Front Page Magazine. He is co-author, with David Horowitz, of *One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America�����s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307452557/manhattaninstitu/> . Source: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/bc0529jl.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 20. What�����s Needed Next: A Culture of Candor Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:07 pm ((PDT)) What�����s Needed Next: A Culture of Candorby James O�����Toole<http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/search/James+O%E2%80%99Toole/0/author>and Warren Bennis <http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/search/Warren+Bennis/0/author> We won�����t be able to rebuild trust in institutions until leaders learn how to communicate honestly�����and create organizations where that�����s the norm. Until recently, the yardstick used to evaluate the performance of American corporate leaders was relatively simple: *the extent to which they created wealth for investors*. But that was then. Now the forces of globalization and technology have conspired to complicate the competitive arena, creating a need for leaders who can manage rapid innovation. Expectations about the corporation�����s role in social issues such as environmental degradation, domestic job creation, and even poverty in the developing world have risen sharply as well. And the expedient, short-term thinking that Wall Street rewarded only yesterday has fallen out of fashion in the wake of the latest round of business busts and scandals. It�����s clear we need a better way to evaluate business leaders. Moving forward, it appears that the new metric of corporate leadership will be closer to this: *the extent to which executives create organizations that are economically, ethically, and socially sustainable*. How can leaders accomplish such an ambitious task? Their action plans will vary, of course, depending on the nature of their industries, the peculiarities of their companies, and the unique challenges they face. But whatever their strategies and tactics, we believe prudent leaders will see that increased transparency is a fundamental first step. When we speak of �����transparency,����� we mean much more than the standard business definition<http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/transparency.html>of the term�����full disclosure of financial information to investors. While such honesty is obviously necessary, that narrow interpretation produces an unhealthy focus on legal compliance to the exclusion of equally important ethical concerns, and on the needs of shareholders to the exclusion of the needs of other constituencies. Worse, it�����s predicated on the blinkered assumption that a company can be transparent to shareholders without first being transparent to the people who work inside it. Because no organization can be honest with the public if it�����s not honest with itself, we define transparency broadly, as the degree to which information flows freely within an organization, among managers and employees, and outward to stakeholders. Companies can�����t innovate, respond to changing stakeholder needs, or function efficiently unless people have access to relevant, timely, and valid information. It�����s thus the leader�����s job to create systems and norms that lead to a culture of candor. How Candor Improves Performance Admittedly, the relationship between organizational candor and performance is complex, but it�����s worth examining from a number of angles: whether people who need to communicate upward are able to do so honestly; whether teams are able to challenge their own assumptions openly; and whether boards of directors are able to communicate important messages to the company�����s leadership. We�����ll tackle upward communication first. Consider the results of an intriguing, relatively obscure study from the 1980s, in which organizational theorists Robert Blake and Jane Mouton examined NASA�����s findings on the human factors involved in airline accidents. NASA researchers had placed existing cockpit crews�����pilot, copilot, navigator�����in flight simulators and tested them to see how they would respond during the crucial 30 to 45 seconds between the first sign of a potential accident and the moment it would occur. The stereotypical take-charge �����flyboy����� pilots, who acted immediately on their gut instincts, made the wrong decisions far more often than the more open, inclusive pilots who said to their crews, in effect, �����We�����ve got a problem. How do you read it?����� before choosing a course of action. At one level, the lesson of the NASA findings is simple: Leaders are far likelier to make mistakes when they act on too little information than when they wait to learn more. But Blake and Mouton went deeper, demonstrating that the pilots����� habitual style of interacting with their crews determined whether crew members would provide them with essential information during an in-air crisis. The pilots who�����d made the right choices routinely had open exchanges with their crew members. The study also showed that crew members who had regularly worked with the �����decisive����� pilots were unwilling to intervene�����even when they had information that might save the plane. Source: http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/06/a-culture-of-candor/ar/1 Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 21. The Media, Islam, and Political Correctness Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:08 pm ((PDT)) The Media, Islam, and Political CorrectnessIs it a right-wing scare tactic to use the phrase Islamic extremism? Cathy Young <http://reason.com/contrib/show/140.html> | May 29, 2009 Last week's arrest of four men in the Bronx, New York on charges of plotting to bomb two synagogues and shoot down a military aircraft with a missile has revived an ongoing debate about the connection between Islam and terrorism and the twin pitfalls of religious bigotry and willfully blind political correctness. *The New York Times* has been assailed by conservative critics such as *Dallas Morning News* columnist and blogger Rod Dreher<http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/05/bronx-synagogue-bombers-and-po.html>for downplaying a troubling aspect of the case: all the suspects are Muslims. (They had converted to Islam while in prison for drug offenses, theft, and other crimes.) The first *Times* report<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/nyregion/21arrests.html?hp>on May 20 mentioned this fact only in passing�����despite a statement<http://www.nypost.com/seven/05212009/news/regionalnews/chilling_terror_plot_thwarted_170280.htm?page=0>by New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly at a press conference that the four had talked frankly about wanting to "commit jihad." The next day, the *Times* ran a story<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/nyregion/22plot.html?sq=synagogue%20bomb%20muslim&st=cse&scp=5&pagewanted=all>on the secret FBI recordings in which the men discussed their hatred of Jews and their intent to kill U.S. soldiers in retaliation for killings of "Muslim brothers and sisters in Muslim countries." The article's lead paragraph focused on the men's criminal backgrounds; not until the fourth paragraph was there a reference to their jihadist motivation (they shouted "Allah Akbar!" as they brought their newly acquired stash of weapons to their warehouse). In a particularly odd passage, the article noted that "law enforcement officials initially said the four men were Muslims, but their religious backgrounds remained uncertain Thursday" and that three had previously identified as Christian in prison records. This, despite ample evidence in the same article that the plot, set in motion with the help of an FBI informant, was motivated by Islamic fanaticism. By contrast, the opening line of the *New York Post* story on the arrests<http://www.nypost.com/seven/05212009/news/regionalnews/chilling_terror_plot_thwarted_170280.htm?page=0>referred to "four homegrown Muslim terrorists on a mission from hell"�����inflammatory, to be sure, but arguably far more accurate. Is the suspects' religion relevant? Given that they were driven by religion-based extremism and hate, common sense certainly suggests that it is. To some on the left, any mention of Islamic extremism is a bigoted right-wing scare tactic. On his blog, *Nation* magazine columnist Robert Dreyfuss<http://www.alternet.org/world/140209/fbi_blows_it:_supposed_terror_plot_against_ny_synagogues_is_bogus>dismisses the New York terror plot as "bogus" and asserts that every alleged plot by Muslim terrorists on U.S. soil after the World Trade Center attack has been "nonsense" cooked up by the FBI: "Since 9/11 not a single American has even been punched in the nose by an angry Muslim, as far as I can tell." (Tell that to the victims of Mohammed Taheri-azar, who plowed a Jeep into a crowd of students at the University of North Carolina in 2006 and later told authorities that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and "avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world.") And while most of the plots uncovered by the authorities seem to have been the work of inept losers, one does not have to be a genius to inflict a lot of damage. If the September 11 hijackers had been caught, how many people would have scoffed at the plot to fly hijacked planes into buildings as absurdly improbable? Yet anti-Muslim hysteria on the right is no myth, either. In February 2007, when a teenager named Sulejmen Talovic went on a shooting rampage at a Salt Lake City, Utah shopping mall, killing five people, some right-wing<http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2721> websites <http://newsbusters.org/node/10842> excoriated the media<http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=40215>for ignoring the "Muslim connection"�����the shooter's background as a Bosnian Muslim immigrant. Never mind that there was nothing to suggest that Talovic was a Muslim zealot or that religion had anything to do with his actions. (Shooting sprees by troubled young men of other religious backgrounds are not exactly unknown.) And in 2005, a posse of conservative bloggers led by columnist Michelle Malkin relentlessly flogged the notion<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/24/when_blog_hysteria_does_real_harm/>that the suicide of a disturbed young man who blew himself up with a homemade bomb on the Oklahoma University campus was actually a botched terrorist act by a Muslim convert. Their "evidence" included the fact that he had a Pakistani roommate and lived close to a mosque. The "Muslims under the bed" rhetoric promotes hatred and paranoia. The vast majority of American Muslims are not radicals. But, leaving aside debates about whether there is something in the Muslim religion that inherently and uniquely lends itself to a violent, extremist interpretation, the reality is that an extremist and violent strain is present in modern-day Islam to a far greater extent than in other major religions. A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center<http://people-press.org/report/?reportid=329>two years ago found that about 13% of American Muslims�����and a quarter of those under 30�����felt that suicide bombings in defense of Islam were justified in at least some cases. The poll also found that in some ways, native-born African-American Muslims are more radicalized than immigrants. Radical Islamism may be an attractive ideology for those who feel disenfranchised. To ignore or downplay these alarming facts is myopic. If the mainstream media continue to do so out of misguided sensitivity, it will only undermine their credibility when it comes to battling real bigotry. *Cathy Young is a contributing editor at *Reason* magazine. This article originally appeared<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/28/the_media_islam__political_correctness_96711.html>at RealClearPolitics.com. * Source: http://reason.com/news/show/133771.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 22. How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:08 pm ((PDT)) How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economyby Robert I. Sutton<http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/search/Robert+I.+Sutton/0/author> *Watch video with Bob Sutton<http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Talent/Good_boss_bad_times_2365>talking about being a good boss in a bad economy at McKinseyQuarterly.com. * These are tough times for every boss I know. Fear and paranoia are running wild, not just in financial markets but in workplaces, too. A few weeks back a weary executive at a professional services firm told me how painful it had been to lay off 10% of his people and how he was struggling to comfort and inspire those who remained. When I asked a mutual friend, the CEO of a manufacturing firm, to �����show some love����� to this distressed executive, he jumped in to help�����but admitted that he was wrestling with his own demons, having just implemented a 20% workforce reduction. It was not a coincidence to find two friends in such similar straits; few organizations seem to have avoided them. Even in businesses renowned for having heart, bosses have been forced to wield the ax. NetApp, declared number one in *Fortune*�����s �����100 Best Companies to Work For<http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/>����� for 2009, announced it was cutting loose 6% of its employees less than a month after the ranking appeared. Google, top-rated by *Fortune* in 2008, has shed hundreds of full-time employees. And layoffs aren�����t the only reason it�����s a miserable time to be the boss. Where cuts haven�����t occurred, people suspect they will, and the lingering dread creates its own challenges. One technology sector CEO I�����ve worked with for years felt compelled to inform his people in writing that not only were no layoffs planned but the company would be hiring a lot more people in the coming year. Yet, he said, �����no matter how much I share about how safe we are, people still ask, When are the layoffs coming?����� Even where jobs are demonstrably safe, lesser but real disappointments occur: Salaries are cut, budgets are pared, projects are back-burnered. As a result, most bosses�����like you, perhaps�����are operating in difficult and sometimes unfamiliar territory. Equipped with skills and approaches honed over long years of business growth, they now find their roles defined by an unexpected question: How should people be managed when fear is in the air, confidence is slipping, and it looks as if the road ahead will remain rough for many miles? This isn�����t the job most executives and managers signed on for, and not everyone will rise to the occasion. This article is designed to help those who want to do so�����first by clarifying why it�����s so hard to be a good boss, and then by sharing the essence of what the best bosses do during tough times. The Toxic Tandem Let�����s be clear: It�����s never easy to be a great boss, even in good economic times. It�����s challenging in part because of an unfortunate dynamic that naturally arises in relationships of unequal power. Research confirms what many of us have long suspected: People who gain authority over others tend to become more self-centered and less mindful of what others need, do, and say. That would be bad enough, but the problem is compounded because a boss�����s self-absorbed words and deeds are scrutinized so closely by his or her followers. Combined, these tendencies make for a toxic tandem that deserves closer study. To appreciate the first half of the dynamic�����that bosses tend to be oblivious to their followers����� perspectives�����consider the �����cookie experiment<http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/110/2/265/>����� reported by the psychologists Dacher Keltner, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson in 2003. In this study, teams of three students each were instructed to produce a short policy paper. Two members of each team were randomly assigned to write the paper. The third member evaluated it and determined how much the other two would be paid, in effect making them subordinates. About 30 minutes into the meeting, the experimenter brought in a plate of five cookies�����a welcome break that was in fact the focus of the experiment. No one was expected to reach for the last cookie on the plate, and no one did. Basic manners dictate such restraint. But what of the fourth cookie�����the extra one that could be taken without negotiation or an awkward moment? It turns out that a little taste of power has a substantial effect. The �����bosses����� not only tended to take the fourth cookie but also displayed signs of �����disinhibited����� eating, chewing with their mouths open and scattering crumbs widely. It�����s a cute little experiment, but it beautifully illustrates a finding consistent across many studies. When people�����independent of personality�����wield power, their ability to lord it over others causes them to (1) become more focused on their own needs and wants; (2) become less focused on others����� needs, wants, and actions; and (3) act as if written and unwritten rules that others are expected to follow don�����t apply to them. To make matters worse, many bosses suffer a related form of power poisoning: They believe that they are aware of every important development in the organization (even when they are remarkably ignorant of key facts). This affliction is called �����the fallacy of centrality�������the assumption that because one holds a central position, one automatically knows everything necessary to exercise effective leadership. Now let�����s look at the other half of the dynamic�����that followers devote immense energy to watching, interpreting, and worrying about even the smallest and most innocent moves their superiors make. This is something we�����ve long known about animals; studies of baboon troops show that the typical member glances at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds to see what he is doing. And although people don�����t check what their boss is doing two or three times a minute, this tendency is well documented in human groups, too. As the psychologist Susan Fiske puts it, �����Attention is directed up the hierarchy. Secretaries know more about their bosses than vice versa; graduate students know more about their advisors than vice versa.����� Fiske explains: �����People pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power.����� Further, people tend to interpret what they see the boss do in a negative light. Keltner and his colleagues report that when the top dog makes an ambiguous move (one that isn�����t clearly good or bad for followers), followers are most likely to construe it as a sign that something bad is going to happen to them. Related studies also show that when people down the pecking order feel threatened by their superiors, they become distracted from their work. They redirect their efforts to trying to figure out what is going on and to coping with their fear and anxiety�����perhaps searching the web for insight or huddling with their peers to gossip, complain, and exchange emotional support. As a result, performance suffers. Source: http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/06/how-to-be-a-good-boss-in-a-bad-economy/ar/1 Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 23. Reason.tv: Red Eye's Greg Gutfeld on Media Bias, Intolerant Liberals Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:08 pm ((PDT)) Reason.tv: Red Eye's Greg Gutfeld on Media Bias, Intolerant Liberals, The Stupidity of Bill Maher, And Why Drugs Really, Really, Really Need to Be Legal May 18, 2009, 3:00pm Before he became the host of Fox News Channel's rollicking late-night show Red Eye <http://www.foxnews.com/redeye/> in January 2007, Greg Gutfeld had worked at magazines as varied as *The American Spectator*, *Prevention*, *Men's Health*, *Stuff*, and *Maxim UK*. And, as the fortysomething California native once told Reason.tv <http://reason.tv/video/show/281.html>, he applied for-and was rejected with extreme indifference-a job at *Reason*. Gutfeld appeared recently at Reason Weekend<http://reason.org/events/show/5.html>, the annual event held by the nonprofit <http://reason.org/> that publishes this website, where he was interviewed by *Reason* Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on topics ranging from media bias to intolerant liberals to the health benefits of smoking to the reason why the drug war is the dumbest thing imaginable. Next to Bill Maher, that is. Approximately 30 minutes. Warning for viewers prone to high-blood pressure, heart palpitations, and sour-puss syndrome: Gutfeld mixes humor, outrage and language salty enough to cure a side of bacon. Proceed at your own caution. Source: http://reason.com/blog/show/133554.html Messages in this topic (1) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 24. Should School Districts Drug-Test Teachers? Posted by: "Orlando D����hring" odoehring@googlemail.com orl_potsdam Date: Sat May 30, 2009 7:08 pm ((PDT)) Should School Districts Drug-Test Teachers? By John Cloud One could argue that some jobs ����� painting, writing, being a rock star ����� are better performed under the influence. But other jobs should clearly be given only to the perpetually sober: we don't want our railroad operators or nuclear-plant employees to be smoking up on the job. So it seems appropriate that U.S. employees in those high-risk positions are routinely subjected to random drug-testing. But what about people who work in less perilous, if equally unpredictable, environments ����� say, with children in public schools? Should teachers be randomly drug-tested too? Yes, says Linda Lingle, the Republican governor of Hawaii, where the teachers' union agreed in 2007 to negotiate terms of a new drug-testing program in exchange for higher wages. Now some Hawaii teachers are resisting<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/20/AR2008122001864.html>. (So far, no drug tests have been administered.) The contentious issue of teacher testing has also become the subject of recent court cases in North Carolina and West Virginia<http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-01-18-randomteachertests_N.htm>, where educators argue that the cost and time taken by random tests would be better spent in the classroom. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution.<http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1838306_1759869,00.html> ) But one important question hasn't been addressed so far in the legal proceedings: Does random drug-testing actually reduce drug use? Probably not. No studies I found have looked at the specific issue of whether random drug tests affect substance use among teachers. But several studies have examined the impact of random testing in another school population ����� students. In the most comprehensive study on the subject to date, a 2003 University of Michigan study<http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?id=14273>involving 894 middle and high schools found that random student drug-testing tends to reduce marijuana use slightly (about 5%) but actually *increase*the use of other drugs (about 3%). The authors theorize that drug-using kids may think that prescription and other drugs are harder to detect by urinalysis, so they switch from pot to something else. (This assumption is usually incorrect ����� most drug tests capture everything from heroin to Valium ����� although certain lesser-used drugs like the anesthetic ketamine aren't detected by the usual tests.) Even after the University of Michigan authors controlled for socioeconomic differences among students and schools, they found no statistically meaningful difference in drug-use rates among students who attended schools that randomly drug-tested and those who didn't. In short, kids weren't deterred from using drugs even when they knew they might be surprised one day with an order to pee into a cup. Still, the behavior of high school kids doesn't neatly correspond to that of their teachers ����� they may well change their behavior in response to random tests. Which leads to a more fundamental question: If we are serious about drug enforcement, why not require every American, or at least every American who comes into contact with children, to be tested randomly? (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.<http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1698621,00.html> ) One answer is cost. In the West Virginia drug-testing case, which is currently working its way through the federal court system, Judge Joseph Goodwin of the U.S. District Court noted that it costs about $44 a pop to do urine tests, which would cost the West Virginia school district in question about $37,000 a year. (Here's a PDF of Goodwin's preliminary injunction against drug-testing<http://www.wvsd.uscourts.gov/district/opinions/pdf/PUBLISH%20MEM%20OPINION-%20grant%20prelim%20injunction.pdf>.) That same $37,000 could easily pay for a full-time teacher, meaning that drug-testing would have to be sufficiently valuable to displace an entire teaching position. But the evidence suggests that drug use among teachers is not exactly a pressing problem. In 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services published a major study <http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/work2k7/work.pdf> showing that people who work in education rank 18th out of 19 listed professions in the use of illicit drugs. (Those who work in food service, arts, retail and "information" services ����� like, um, journalists ����� were among the major offenders.) Only 4% of educators reported use of illegal drugs in the previous month, compared with 14% of construction workers, who work in a much more dangerous environment. The 4% figure for teachers is still too many, but it doesn't indicate an epidemic of intoxicated teachers that would justify a huge expenditure to curb. What no one argues against ����� even attorney Michael Simpson of the National Education Association ����� is that teachers who are behaving erratically should be tested when their bosses suspect drug use. "If an administrator has a reason to believe a person is under the influence, the school should have the right to test," says Simpson. "But our members feel it's demeaning and unprofessional to make a teacher without suspicion go into a bathroom." The matter won't be resolved without further studies on whether random drug-testing actually reduces drug use, and we may get them under an Administration less ideologically opposed to drug reform than President Bush's <http://www.slate.com/id/2138399/>. But the data so far suggest that random drug-testing is a costly, ineffective solution to a non-problem. Source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1876840,00.html Messages in this topic (1) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/ <*> Your email settings: Digest Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:evolutionary-psychology-normal@yahoogroups.com mailto:evolutionary-psychology-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: evolutionary-psychology-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------