.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Diversion: Starlight

From Starlight, October 28, 2010 at xkcd.

Society: Reading Between the Battle Lines of the Constitution

Is the Air Force constitutional? To find out, click the "Notes" tab in Reading Between the Battle Lines of the Constitution: An Annotated Guide at New York Times.

Gender: Ogling by Men Subtracts from Women's Math Scores

Getting the once-over from a man causes women to score lower on a math test, a new study finds. Despite this drop in performance, women were more motivated to interact with men who ogled them ....

For more, see Ogling by Men Subtracts from Women's Math Scores by Stephanie Pappas, January 27, 2011 at Live Science.

Economics: Their Own Private Europe

The lesson of the Irish debacle .... doesn't say cut spending now, or bad things will happen; it says that balanced budgets won't protect you from crisis if you don't effectively regulate your banks — a point made in the newly released report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concludes that 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation helped create our own catastrophe.

For more, see Their Own Private Europe by Paul Krugman, January 27, 2011 at The New York Times.

Drugs: Portugal's Drug Experiment

Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal's elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs — from marijuana to heroin — but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation's criminal justice system and improving the people's overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime.
But nearly a decade later, there's evidence that Portugal's great drug experiment not only didn't blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon's troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized — indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.
Not everyone agrees with this analysis. The rate of people reporting drug use in Portugal is, in fact, increasing — and some say alarmingly so. Others argue that it's hard to draw lessons from Portugal's experiment because the nation increased access to treatment at the same time it decriminalized drugs. Many believe that Portugal's new focus on treatment — and prevention — may have had as much, if not more, to do with its success than its policy of decriminalization.

For more, see Drug Experiment by Keith O'Brien, January 16, 2011 at The Boston Globe.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Society: Economy Dominates Public's Agenda, Dims Hopes for the Future

For much more, see Economy Dominates Public's Agenda, Dims Hopes for the Future, January 20, 2011 at The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Education: Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen

Contributor John C writes ...

In the survey, The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010, involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as below average in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

To me it shows improving math apptitude! The number that can be "above average" is only 50%, so at 52% the current students are just being realistic and doing the math. The "64% in 1985" is kind of like the children of lake Woe-be-gone who are all above average!

For the story, see Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen by Tamar Lewin, January 26, 2011 at The New York Times.

Science: Boeing Invention Lets Planes Spot Dangerous Turbulence

A valuable, simple, novel idea ...

It's one of aviation's most dastardly problems: in a perfectly clear sky, an aircraft suddenly hits severe turbulence that gives it a terrifying shaking, or which makes the plane plummet as aerodynamic lift is lost in a low pressure air pocket.
Boeing suggests a startlingly simple answer: train a regular digital camera equipped with a telephoto lens on the horizon and make it snap pictures continually. Then an image processing computer compares image after image to see if air density and temperature changes due to clear air turbulence are causing telltale refraction of the horizon line.

For more, see Boeing Invention Lets Planes Spot Dangerous Turbulence by Paul Marks, January 21, 2011 at NewScientist.

Mind: Why First Impressions Are Difficult to Change: Study

Experts have discovered that new experiences that contradict a first impression become "bound" to the context in which they were made, whereas first impressions still dominate in other contexts.

"Imagine you have a new colleague at work and your impression of that person is not very favorable," said lead author Bertram Gawronski. "A few weeks later, you meet your colleague at a party and you realize he is actually a very nice guy. Although you know your first impression was wrong, your gut response to your new colleague will be influenced by your new experience only in contexts that are similar to the party. However, your first impression will still dominate in all other contexts."

For more, see Why First Impressions Are Difficult to Change: Study by Rick Nauert PH.D., January 19, 2011 at Live Science.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Politics: Daily Show: 24 Hour Nazi Party People

Was Megyn Kelly right that Fox News never says liberals are or act like Nazis?

From Daily Show: 24 Hour Nazi Party People by Jon Stewart, January 24, 2011 at The Daily Show.

Economics: Bad Asset Purchase Program Turning a Profit

The Treasury Department's equity investment in bad mortgage assets — a federal program that combined capital from the government and private asset managers — has grown 27 percent since it was created in 2009, according to new data released Monday.
At the time, critics questioned the wisdom of turning the federal government into a vulture investor. The Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz called the program a robbery of the American people.

Now the new data from the Treasury Department shows that investors have drawn $5.2 billion in equity from the department for their purchase of bad mortgage assets. That money has produced $1.1 billion in unrealized gains, bringing the government's investment to roughly $6.3 billion.

When you include $314 million in equity gains already doled out to the Treasury Department, the government's return jumps to $1.4 billion, a 27 percent increase.

For more, see Bad Asset Purchase Program Turning a Profit by Ben Protess, January 24, 2011 at NYTimes.com's Dealb%k.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Science: Clever Amoebas Farm Their Favorite Food: Bacteria

The amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, is also known as a slime mould, but scientists who work with it sometimes use the more affectionate name of Dicty. Dicty spends most of its time as a single cell, oozing through the undergrowth in search of bacteria to eat. When they run out of prey, the amoebas unite to form a many-celled mobile slug. When the slug finds a good spot, it stretches upwards to form a ball at the end of a stalk. The ball is loaded with spores, which eventually blow free on the wind. When they land, they hatch into new amoebae and the life cycle begins again.

Scientists pieced together Dicty's life cycle decades ago, but it still carries surprises. Debra Brock from Rice University captured 35 wild amoebas from Virginia and Minnesota and found that a third of them carried bacteria in their slugs and spores. The bacteria hail from a number of different species, and half of these are found on Dicty's menu. When the spores land in new locations, their bacterial cargo start to multiply, which provides the amoebae with food.

For more, see Clever Amoebas Farm Their Favorite Food: Bacteria by Ed Yong, January 19, 2011 at Discover Magazine blogs.

Society: Union Membership Continues Decline

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says unions lost 612,000 members in 2010. That drops the unionized share of the work force to 11.9 percent from 12.3 percent in 2009.

Union membership in the private sector fell from 7.2 percent to 6.9 percent, a low point not seen since the infancy of the labor movement in the 1930s. The steepest decline was among construction workers.

From Union Membership Continues Decline by Sam Hananel, January 21, 2011 at Time.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Economics: Why So Many Rich People Don't Feel Very Rich

The line gets much steeper because at the very top of the income scale, the monetary divisions between percentiles grow much greater. Those in the middle earn a little less than people a few percentiles up from them, whereas those at the top earn a lot less than their counterparts in nearby, higher percentiles.

For example, those who aspire to hop from the 30th percentile to the 35th percentile would need to increase their cash income by $4,000 annually (or by about 17 percent); those who aspire to hop from the 91st percentile to the 96th percentile would require an increase of $324,900 (or 171 percent).

From Why So Many Rich People Don't Feel Very Rich by Catherine Rampell, Januaryalarmat 11, 2011 at Economix Blog, New York Times.

Mind: Firmness of Touch May Evoke Gender Stereotyping

Holding a hard or soft ball can influence a person's perception of how masculine or feminine others are.
In their study, Slepian and his colleagues had subjects clench either a hard ball or a squishy ball in their hands while looking at pictures of faces that had been altered to appear gender-neutral. They then were asked to categorize the faces as either male or female.

When touching the hard ball, volunteers were about 10 percent more likely to categorize a face as male; for those clutching the soft ball, the results were slanted toward females.

In another experiment, a different set of volunteers viewed these faces and were told to either press down hard or press lightly while circling "male" or "female." The researchers reported the same effect: Those told to write hard were more likely to see the faces as male, and the others were more likely to see them as female.

For more, see Firmness of Touch May Evoke Gender Stereotyping by Jennifer Welsh, January 12, 2011 at Live Science.

Society: America Not as Politically Conservative as You Think

The reason why so few conservatives turn out to be solid right-wingers is that the word conservative has different meanings for different people, according to political scientists Christopher Ellis of Bucknell and James A. Stimson of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who describe their findings in a new working paper, Pathways to Ideology in American Politics: The Operational-Symbolic ‘Paradox' Revisited

According to their research, some people genuinely know what it means to be a conservative in the current political debate and indeed express matching preferences across all issues. But these constrained conservatives (as Ellis and Stimson call them) account for only 26 percent of all self-identified conservatives.

More common are the moral conservatives (34 percent), who think of themselves as conservative in terms of their own personal values, be they social or religious. And they are indeed right-leaning on social, cultural and religious issues. But they also like government spending on a variety of programs and generally approve of government interventions in the marketplace, hardly making them true conservatives.

And still others, conflicted conservatives (30 percent), are not conservative at all on the issues. But they like identifying themselves as conservatives. To them, it somehow sounds better. They like the word, explained Ellis. Or at least, they like it better then their other choices in the traditional self-identification questionnaire: moderate and liberal.

Finally, a smaller group of self-identified conservatives (10 percent) could be classified as libertarian — conservative on economic issues, liberal on social issues.

Self-identified liberals, on the other hand, are consistently liberal on all the issues, according to Ellis and Stimson. Two-thirds of liberals fit into the category of constrained liberals, who pick the label because it actually describes their worldview.

[Emphasis added].
This is a longstanding phenomenon. In another paper, Ellis and Stimson have shown going back to at least 1937 — the heart of the New Deal — that the American public, on average, has been operationally liberal and symbolically conservative. That is, that when asked about specific liberal government programs — be they spending on education, environmental protections, regulation of business — the majority of voters consistently say they approve.

For more, see America Not as Politically Conservative as You Think by Lee Drutman, January 14, 2011 at Miller-McCune.

Healthcare: Government Finds up to Half of Americans Under 65 Have Preexisting Conditions

As many as 129 million Americans under age 65 have medical problems that are red flags for health insurers, according to an analysis that marks the government's first attempt to quantify the number of people at risk of being rejected by insurance companies or paying more for coverage.
The study found that one-fifth to one-half of non-elderly people in the United States have ailments that trigger rejection or higher prices in the individual insurance market. They range from cancer to chronic illnesses such as heart disease, asthma and high blood pressure.
Most of the Americans included in the figures, Zirkelbach said, currently have insurance. They would be at risk, he said, only if they needed to change coverage and buy it on their own.

For more, see Government Finds up to Half of Americans Under 65 Have Preexisting Conditions by Amy Goldstein, January 18, 2011 at The Washington Post.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Education: For Higher Earnings and Lower Unemployment

Every statistic tells the same story: If you want to earn more, learn more. Between 1973 and 2007, real wages fell 15 percent for non high-school grads; stayed flat for high school grads and workers with "some college"; and rose 18 percent for both college grads and advanced degree grads. Upshot: Just as the cost of college has become prohibitive for many families, the benefits of college have only increased.

For more, see Did Bankers Rob the Middle Class? by Derek Thompson, January 10, 2011 at The Atlantic.

Climate: Record Ocean Temperatures

Australian floods now cover an area the size of France and Germany combined. Yesterday, their government's Bureau of Meteorology released its Annual Australian Climate Statement 2010, which helps explain why — record sea surface temperatures:

For more, see Coal Prices Soar as Warmest SEA Surface Temperatures on Record Fuel ‘Biblical' Australian Floods by Joe, January 6, 2011 at Climate Progress.

Economics: Fed Transfers $78.4 Billion to Treasury

The U.S. Federal Reserve's 2010 net income grew to $80.9 billion largely due to a boost in earnings from securities it acquired during the financial crisis, according to preliminary unaudited results the central bank announced Monday.

The income surge — a significant jump from its record-breaking $53.4 billion in earnings in 2009 — makes way for the Fed to transfer about $78.4 billion to the Treasury Department.

For more, see Fed Transfers $78.4 Billion to Treasury by Maya Jackson Randall, January 10, 2011 at The Wall Street Journal.

Taxes: A Brief Visual History of U.S. Taxes

Observation 3: The Rising Share of Employment Taxes. While marginal tax rates on earned income have fallen over the last three decades, employment taxes on wages split between employer and employee have only gone up. As a result, employment taxes now account for 40 percent of total federal revenue -- basically the same as individual income taxes. Revenue from corporate income, on the other hand, has fallen from more than 30 percent in 1950 to about 7 percent in 2010.

Other good graphs are at A Brief Visual History of U.S. Taxes by Derek Thompson, January 11, 2011 at The Atlantic.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Economics: Politics Most Blatant

Affordable housing goals and the Community Reinvestment Act did not cause the Great Recession ...

The relative market share of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dropped fairly dramatically during the 2000s bubble, from a high of 57 percent of all new mortgage originations in 2003, down to 37 percent at the height of the bubble in 2005 and 2006. Notably, this decline occurred contemporaneously with the unsupported rise in housing prices and the deterioration in underwriting standards that virtually all observers blame for the collapse of the housing markets.
Mortgages originated for private securitization defaulted at much higher rates than those originated for Fannie and Freddie securitization, even when controlling for all other factors (such as the fact that Fannie and Freddie securitized virtually no subprime loans). Overall, private securitization mortgages defaulted at more than six times the rate of those originated for Fannie and Freddie securitization.
Or consider that a virtually identical bubble occurred in the U.S. commercial real estate mortgage market. There is no government policy FCIC Republicans can point to that encouraged lenders to loosen underwriting standards for malls or office buildings.
Even after Fannie and Freddie plunged into the market for these mortgage-backed securities, they never accounted for more than a fraction of the demand for these securities. (see graph)

For more, see Politics Most Blatant by David M. Abromowitz, David Min, December 21, 2010 at Center for American Progress.

Security: The Best of (Wikileaks) Cablegate

250,000 documents leaked and these are what made it all worthwhile?

1. Dancing Boy Scandal Alleges Child Prostitution, Possible Drug Use among U.S. Private Contractors ...
2. Pfizer Allegedly Sought to Blackmail Nigerian Regulator to Stop Lawsuit Against Drug Trials on Children ...
3. U.S. Failed to Bully Spain Into Adopting Untested Anti-P2P bill ...
4. U.S. to Uganda: Let Us Know If You Want to Use Our Intelligence for War Crimes ...
5. U.S. Haggling over Guantánamo Detainees ...
From The Best of Cablegate: Instances Where Public Discourse Benefited from the Leaks by Rainey Reitman, January 7, 2011 at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Economics: California Budget Balancer

It's simple. Just increase gasoline taxes.

Try your hand at eliminating the red ink in California's budget.

...

We've provided a wide range of options — spending cuts and tax increases — that cover most of the proposals made by Democratic or Republican lawmakers. It's not easy, but it can be done.

Try it at California Budget Balancer by Anthony Pesce, Shane Goldmacher, Evan Halper and Maloy Moore, January 10, 2011 at Los Angeles Times.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Diversion: Curveballs: When What You See Isn't What You Get

There's an amazing optical illusion in Curveballs: When What You See Isn't What You Get by NPR Staff, October 24, 2010 at National Public Radio.

Economics: More Bank Reforms Needed, Economists Say

Global financial reforms that have drawn howls from bankers aren't nearly enough to avert another disaster, said academic economists gathered here for the annual meeting of the American Economic Association.
Over the past few days ... economists here offered a litany of reasons why the reforms fall short. Among their concerns: The new capital requirements aren't tough or simple enough, there is too much uncertainty about how governments will deal with distress at the biggest lenders, and little has been done to prevent the kind of crisis that could occur if trouble broke out at many smaller institutions, such as hedge funds.

"I just don't think we're doing what we need to do," said Anat Admati, a finance professor at Stanford University. "We've allowed bankers to confuse us into keeping things pretty much the same."

For more, see More Bank Reforms Needed, Economists Say by Mark Whitehouse, January 9, 2011 at The Wall Street Journal.

Security: The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

The beginning of an interesting article ...

On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million documents that he had handed over to The Guardian just three months earlier. The encounter was one among many twists and turns in the collaboration between WikiLeaks—a four-year-old nonprofit that accepts anonymous submissions of previously secret material and publishes them on its Web site—and some of the world's most respected newspapers. The collaboration was unprecedented, and brought global attention to a cache of confidential documents—embarrassing when not disturbing—about American military and diplomatic activity around the world. But the partnership was also troubled from the start.

For much more, see The Man Who Spilled the Secrets by Sarah Ellison, February, 2011 at Vanity Fair.

Government: Illinois Faces Steep Tax Increases to Meet Fiscal Crisis

After years of papering over severe budget shortfalls, Illinois lawmakers Friday were closing in on a plan to raise the state income tax by 75 percent and refinance roughly $8.5 billion in debt in an effort to stabilize the state's finances.

The deal, still being hashed out between Gov. Pat Quinn (D) and Democratic legislative leaders, also would raise the state's corporate income tax and increase the cigarette tax by $1 a pack.

Lawmakers also are discussing reviving a proposal to sell more than $3.75 billion in bonds to plug part of the gaping hole in the state's pension fund.

That leaders would contemplate raising the income tax rate from 3 percent to 5.25 percent and simultaneously take on new debt speaks to an increasingly desperate financial situation. But while experts call Illinois's plight the worst in the nation, a similar scenario is playing out in many states that are grappling with the perils of air-brushing structural budget problems rather than implementing difficult tax increases or service cuts.

The state's fiscal problems have mounted even as its tax burden has remained relatively modest. Its income tax rate is among the lowest in the nation at a flat 3 percent. Its sales tax extends to only a small sliver of services. Yet the red ink has flowed for years, allowing the state to function even as its budget problems mounted.

For more, see Illinois Faces Steep Tax Increases to Meet Fiscal Crisis by Michael A. Fletcher, January 8, 2011 at The Washington Post.

Science: Mouth War

From an interesting article ...

... most kinds of viruses that invade our bodies aren't interested in us. They attack the bacteria inside us instead.

There are probably 100 trillion microbes inside each of us, such that our bodies are ten microbes for every one human cell. Those tenants probably belong to several thousand species, with a collection of genes that's perhaps a 100 times bigger than the human genome. These microbes live in our guts, lungs, mouths, noses, skin, and many other nooks and crannies. Far from making us sick, they help us in many ways, making food for us, defending us from invaders, and nurturing our immune systems.

These bacteria are also hosts to viruses.

For more, see Mouth War by Carl Zimmer, January 3, 2011 at Discover Magazine blogs.

Government: The Achievement Test

Which is more important: good government or small government?

National destinies are not shaped by what percentage of G.D.P. federal spending consumes. They are shaped by the character and behavior of citizens. The crucial issue is not whether the federal government takes up 19 percent or 23 percent of national income. The crucial question is: How does government influence how people live?
Over the past few decades, Americans have waged political war as if all that matters is the amount of money going into federal coffers. The fights have been about cutting government or raising revenue. But amid this season of distraction the entire society suffered a loss of values and almost nobody noticed until it was too late. Both business and government started favoring consumption and short-term comfort and neglecting investment and long-term growth.

This hasn't been a case of government corrupting capitalism or vice versa. The two have worked hand-in-hand. The government has erected a welfare state that, as Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, spends vast amounts on consumption (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt) and much less on investment (education, research, infrastructure), while pushing the costs on future generations. Meanwhile, the private sector has encouraged a huge increase in personal debt to fuel a consumption bubble. The geniuses flock to finance, not industry.

For more, see The Achievement Test by David Brooks, January 3, 2011 at The New York Times.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Diversion: Montana Thunderstorm

A supercell thunderstorm rolls across the Montana prairie at sunset.

From Montana Thunderstorm by Sean Heavey, November, 2010 at National Geographic.

Health: Study Linking Vaccine to Autism Was Fraud

Children have died because parents didn't vaccinate them due to this fraudulent report ...

The first study to link a childhood vaccine to autism was based on doctored information about the children involved, according to a new report on the widely discredited research.

The conclusions of the 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children's parents.
In an accompanying editorial, BMJ editor Fiona Godlee and colleagues called Wakefield's study "an elaborate fraud." They said Wakefield's work in other journals should be examined to see if it should be retracted.

Last May, Wakefield was stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain. Many other published studies have shown no connection between the MMR vaccination and autism.

For more, see Study Linking Vaccine to Autism Was Fraud, Journal Reports by The Associated Press, January 5, 2011 at The New York Times.

Science: Light Can Generate Lift

With the right design, a uniform stream of light has pushed tiny objects in much the same way that an airplane wing hoists a 747 off the ground.

Researchers have known for a long time that blasting an object with light can push the object away. That's the idea behind solar sails, which harness radiation for propulsion in space, for instance. ...

Light's new trick is fancier than a boring push: It created the more complicated force called lift, evident when a flow in one direction moves an object perpendicularly.

Optical lift is different from the aerodynamic lift created by an airfoil. A plane flies because air flowing more slowly under its wing exerts more pressure than the faster-moving air flowing above. But in a lightfoil, the lift is created inside the object as the beam shines through. The shape of the transparent lightfoil causes light to be refracted differently depending on where it goes through, which causes a corresponding bending of the beam's momentum that creates lift. [Emphasis added].

For more, see Light Can Generate Lift by Laura Sanders, January 1, 2011 at ScienceNews.

Healthcare: Giving Alzheimer's Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate

For a very good article, see Giving Alzheimer's Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate by Pam Belluck, December 31, 2010 at The New York Times. Thank you, Martha.

Economics: Private Markets Make up the Core of Obamanomics

What is Obamanomics?

When I asked participants and observers that question, they all started with the same premise: The administration didn't have time for philosophy. It had to put out fires - and fast. But faced with the greatest economic crisis in generations, a crisis that spread across many sectors, their response, in retrospect, was remarkably consistent.

Isolate the eight key economic decisions of the Obama presidency: The intervention in the financial sector, the intervention in the auto sector, the intervention in the housing sector, the stimulus package, the health-care bill, financial regulation, and the tax deal. The financial and auto interventions, it should be noted, were begun under George W. Bush but carried out and expanded under Obama.

In each case, the Obama administration sought to support or improve private markets. It refused to leave the market to sort itself out, as some on the right would have preferred, and resisted entreaties to take it over, as some on the left advocated.

For more, see Private Markets Make up the Core of Obamanomics by Ezra Klein, December 30, 2010 at The Washington Post.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Security: Why Wikileaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers

In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg decided to make available to the New York Times (and then to other newspapers) 43 volumes of the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret study prepared for the Department of Defense examining how and why the United States had become embroiled in the Vietnam conflict. But he made another critical decision as well. That was to keep confidential the remaining four volumes of the study describing the diplomatic efforts of the United States to resolve the war.

Not at all coincidentally, those were the volumes that the government most feared would be disclosed. In a secret brief filed with the Supreme Court, the U.S. government described the diplomatic volumes as including information about negotiations secretly conducted on its behalf by foreign nations including Canada, Poland, Italy and Norway. Included as well, according to the government, were "derogatory comments about the perfidiousness of specific persons involved, and statements which might be offensive to nations or governments."

The diplomatic volumes were not published, even in part, for another dozen years. Mr. Ellsberg later explained his decision to keep them secret, according to Sanford Ungar's 1972 book "The Papers & The Papers," by saying, "I didn't want to get in the way of the diplomacy."

Julian Assange sure does. Can anyone doubt that he would have made those four volumes public on WikiLeaks regardless of their sensitivity? Or that he would have paid not even the slightest heed to the possibility that they might seriously compromise efforts to bring a speedier end to the war?

Mr. Ellsberg himself has recently denounced the "myth" of the "good" Pentagon Papers as opposed to the "bad" WikiLeaks. But the real myth is that the two disclosures are the same.

The Pentagon Papers revelations dealt with a discrete topic, the ever-increasing level of duplicity of our leaders over a score of years in increasing the nation's involvement in Vietnam while denying it. It revealed official wrongdoing or, at the least, a pervasive lack of candor by the government to its people.

WikiLeaks is different. It revels in the revelation of "secrets" simply because they are secret. It assaults the very notion of diplomacy that is not presented live on C-Span. It has sometimes served the public by its revelations but it also offers, at considerable potential price, a vast amount of material that discloses no abuses of power at all.

For more, see Why Wikileaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers by Floyd Abrams, December 29, 2010 at The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Abrams represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case.

Economics: How an FCIC Commissioner Invented "Evidence" About Fannie and Freddie's Downfall

How was Peter Wallison able to assert that the majority of loans originated by Fannie Mae fit into high-risk categories? It was simple. He lied. One of the more vocal members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission fabricated "evidence" to support his bogus narrative about the mortgage crisis.

More than two years ago, Wallison collaborated with another fraudster, Charles Calomiris of Columbia University, to produce a sham report, "The Last Trillion-Dollar Commitment: The Destruction of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." It reveals all you need to know about Wallison's deceitful agenda, which was expressed, in a more sanitized form, in the GOP version of the FCIC report.

For the explaination, see How an FCIC Commissioner Invented "Evidence" About Fannie and Freddie's Downfall by David Fiderer, December 29, 2010 at The Huffington Post.

Mind: Supersized Amygdalas Linked to Sprawling Social Circles

Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues sought to find out whether size matters in the amygdala, and according to their study in Nature Neuroscience, there is a connection between people having big amygdalas and having big, complex social networks.
The researchers measured two social network factors in 58 adults. First, they calculated the size of a participant's network, which is simply the total number of people that are in regular contact with the participant. Second, they measured the network's complexity, based on how many different groups a participant's contacts can be divided into. … Linear regression revealed a positive correlation in amygdala size with both social network size and complexity. [Ars Technica]
...
People who have large amygdalas may have the raw material needed to maintain larger and more complex social networks, said Barrett. That said, the brain is a use it or lose it organ. It may be that when people interact more their amygdalas get larger. That would be my guess. [The Guardian]

For more, see Supersized Amygdalas Linked to Sprawling Social Circles by Andrew Moseman, December 27, 2010 at Discover Magazine blogs.

Security: Watch the North-South Sudan Border Online

One cause of war is fear of what the opposition may be doing. This is an interesting attempt to eliminate that, as well as to provide motivation to avoid fighting.

A group founded by American actor George Clooney said Tuesday it has teamed up with Google, a U.N. agency and anti-genocide organizations to launch satellite surveillance of the border between north and south Sudan to try to prevent a new civil war after the south votes in a secession referendum next month.

Clooney's Not On Our Watch is funding the start-up phase Satellite Sentinel Project that will collect real-time satellite imagery and combine it with field analysis from the Enough Project and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, organizers said.

The data will point out movements of troops, civilians and other signs of impending conflict. The U.N. Operational Satellite Applications Program and Google will then publish the findings online. [Emphasis added].

The data is here.

For more, see Clooney, Google, UN Team up to Watch Sudan Border by Matthew Lee, December 28, 2010 at The Huffington Post.

Society: Walking Santa, Talking Christ

Two in five Americans say they regularly attend religious services. Upward of 90 percent of all Americans believe in God, pollsters report, and more than 70 percent have absolutely no doubt that God exists. The patron saint of Christmas, Americans insist, is the emaciated hero on the Cross, not the obese fellow in the overstuffed costume.

There is only one conclusion to draw from these numbers: Americans are significantly more religious than the citizens of other industrialized nations.

Except they are not.

Beyond the polls, social scientists have conducted more rigorous analyses of religious behavior. Rather than ask people how often they attend church, the better studies measure what people actually do. The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.

Religion in America seems tied up with questions of identity in ways that are not the case in other industrialized countries. When you ask Americans about their religious beliefs, it's like asking them whether they are good people, or asking whether they are patriots.

For more, see Walking Santa, Talking Christ by Shankar Vedantamposted, December 22, 2010 at Slate.