Diversion: Imagine Truth Is a Sphere

From Imagine Truth Is a Sphere by Zach Weiner, March 23, 2011 at SMBC.

Gender: War, Mating Linked in Men's Minds

A team of Hong Kong-based researchers led by psychologist Lei Chang of Chinese University conducted four experiments that suggest a link between the motivation to mate and a man's interest in, or support for, war.

The first featured 111 students (60 men) at a college in China. Each was shown 20 full-body color photographs of members of the opposite sex. Half viewed images of people who had been rated attractive; the other half saw pictures of people classified as unattractive.

Afterward, “participants responded to 39 questions about having wars or trade conflicts with three foreign countries that have had hostile relationships with China in recent history,” the researchers write. Twenty-one of the questions “tapped the willingness to go to war with the hostile country,” they noted, while 18 addressed “peaceful solutions to trade conflicts.”

The results duplicated those of a pilot study: Male participants answering the war-related questions “showed more militant attitudes” if they had viewed the photos of attractive women. This effect was absent in answers to the trade-related questions, nor was it found among women for either set of questions.

In another experiment, 23 young heterosexual males viewed one of two sets of 16 photos. One featured images of Chinese national flags; the other focused on female legs. They then performed a computer test to see how quickly they could respond to common, two-character Chinese words. Half of the words related to war, while the others related to farms.

If they were motivated by nationalism or patriotism, the young men would have presumably responded to the war words more rapidly after having viewed the flag. But in fact, the researchers write, they “responded faster to war words when primed by female legs.”

For more, see War, Mating Linked in Men's Minds by Tom Jacobs, March 28, 2011 at Miller-McCune.

Healthcare: As Health-Care Law Turns 1, Some Clarity on What It Does and How It Does It

The health-care reform law is, without a doubt, among the most consequential pieces of social policy passed since the Great Society. But it's also a lot more incremental than many people realize. More modest, by far, than the health-care overhauls proposed by Presidents Clinton, Nixon, Johnson and Truman.

In 2019, once the law has been fully implemented for five years, it is expected to cover about two-thirds of the uninsured, to cost about 4 percent of what the health-care system spends in any given year and to cut the federal deficit by less than 1 percent. If you obtain insurance from your employer, Medicare, Medicaid or the veterans system - and that describes most Americans - you probably won't notice the legislation at all.

Nevertheless, the Affordable Care Act, once it kicks in fully in 2014, is expected to do four things: provide coverage; remake a small slice of the private insurance market; pay for itself; and try to control costs.

For more, see As Health-Care Law Turns 1, Some Clarity on What It Does and How It Does It March 22, 2011 at The Washington Post.

Economics: Hopeful Message About the World's Poorest

In the not too distant past — 1980 — one of every six babies born in the West African nation of Liberia died in infancy. Overall life expectancy was a mere 48 years. The great majority of Liberians couldn't read in 1980. Most girls had never attended school.

Over the last 30 years, infant mortality has fallen sharply, and life expectancy has jumped to 58 years. Most Liberians today can read. More than 80 percent of girls attend school. Politically, the country is much freer than it was in 1980, the year of a deadly coup.

Economically, however, Liberia has been the world's single worst performer over the last 30 years. Per capita income has fallen an astounding 80 percent, according to official World Bank statistics, which makes the country an extreme example of Africa's long-running economic troubles. While people may debate the causes of those troubles — corrupt and autocratic governments, feckless foreign aid, postcolonial hangover — everyone seems to agree that Africa is a story of failure.

But is it?

In a new book called Getting Better, Charles Kenny — a British development economist based in Washington — argues that the answer is absolutely not. Life in much of Africa and in most of the impoverished world has improved at an unprecedented clip in recent decades, even if economic growth hasn't.

The biggest success of development, he writes, has not been making people richer but, rather, has been making the things that really matter — things like health and education — cheaper and more widely available. [Emphasis added].

African growth has accelerated over the last decade, and the acceleration followed improvements in education and other basics. It's true that Africa's growth is unimpressive compared with the Asian miracle, but the growth is still the most rapid in Africa's recorded history. Perhaps those investments in Africa's people needed time to produce returns.

For more, see Hopeful Message About the World's Poorest by David Leonhardt, March 22, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Drugs: States Rethink Drug Laws

A growing number of states are renouncing some of the long prison sentences that have been a hallmark of the war on drugs and instead focusing on treatment, which once-skeptical lawmakers now say is proven to be less expensive and more effective.

While the changes are part of broader belt-tightening efforts, they also reflect a growing belief among state lawmakers that prosecuting drug offenders aggressively often fails to treat their underlying addiction problems and can result in offenders cycling in and out of prisons for years—a critique long voiced by groups that advocate in favor of defendants' rights.

"If you just throw everyone in jail, it's terribly expensive and they get out and they are in the same boat," said Tom Jensen, a Republican state senator in Kentucky who voted in favor of the law.

He said he had long "bought into the tough-on-crime concept" and adapting to a more rehabilitative model has been "an education process."

Lawmakers, Mr. Jensen said, had access to data indicating that drug offenders are less likely to reoffend if they receive intensive community treatment in lieu of prison.

But others argue such changes send the wrong message.

"You need to have serious consequences or repercussions in place if people use heroin, Oxycontin" and other drugs, said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association.

For more, see States Rethink Drug Laws by Nathan Koppel, March 5, 2011 at WSJ.com.

Economics: The Struggles of Men

The red line is the usual picture of median earnings for full-time men. The problem with this line is that the percentage of men working over time has been declining over time. This attrition or dropping out of the labor force is not random, though, as the decline in full-time work it is disproportionately concentrated among low-skill men. This means that the red line is being propped up by the fact that it is increasingly comprised of higher skilled men.

One sensible correction for this is to calculate the median wage for all men (not just the full-time workers). This is the blue line in the below graph.

Why is this important? The full-time sample (red line) suggests that median wages have been stagnant since 1969.

For more, see The Struggles of Men by David Leonhardt, March 4, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Health: Can Exercise Keep You Young?

... in heartening new research published last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, exercise reduced or eliminated almost every detrimental effect of aging in mice that had been genetically programmed to grow old at an accelerated pace.

Half of the mice were allowed to run on a wheel for 45 minutes three times a week, beginning at 3 months. These rodent runners were required to maintain a fairly brisk pace, Dr. Tarnopolsky said: It was about like a person running a 50- or 55-minute 10K. (A 10K race is 6.2 miles.) The mice continued this regimen for five months.

At 8 months, when their sedentary lab mates were bald, frail and dying, the running rats remained youthful. They had full pelts of dark fur, no salt-and-pepper shadings. They also had maintained almost all of their muscle mass and brain volume. Their gonads were normal, as were their hearts. They could balance on narrow rods, the showoffs.

But perhaps most remarkable, although they still harbored the mutation that should have affected mitochondrial repair, they had more mitochondria over all and far fewer with mutations than the sedentary mice had. At 1 year, none of the exercising mice had died of natural causes.

For more, see Can Exercise Keep You Young? by Gretchen Reynolds, March 2, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Health: Radiation Dose Chart

From Radiation Dose Chart by Randall Munroe, March, 2011 at XKCD.com.

Economics: Wealth Inequality: Living Beyond Your Means

Wealth inequality is important ...

In a recent survey of Americans, my colleague Dan Ariely and I found that Americans drastically underestimated the level of wealth inequality in the United States. While recent data indicates that the richest 20 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all wealth, people estimated that this group owned just 59 percent — believing that total wealth in this country is far more evenly divided among poorer Americans.

What's more, when we asked them how they thought wealth should be distributed, they told us they wanted an even more equitable distribution, with the richest 20 percent owning just 32 percent of the wealth. This was true of Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor — all groups we surveyed approved of some inequality, but their ideal was far more equal than the current level.

From Living Beyond Your Means by Michael I. Norton, March 22, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Economics: Wealth Inequality: Keeping Envy Local

Wealth inequality is unimportant ...

First, a lot of Americans live very well, even if they don't enjoy all of the benefits of the lifestyles of the very wealthy. It is quite possible that a person in the upper middle class is happier than a billionaire. Even the middle class has access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet, and cable TV, not to mention a heart bypass operation, if needed.

Bill Gates, of course, has a lot more than that, but a lot of Americans don't feel they deserve a private jet, a private charitable foundation, or an invitation to Davos and they may not even want it. In terms of income, the gap between rich and middle class is growing, but in terms of happiness it is relatively low by broader historical standards.

Second, a lot of envy is local. People worry about how they are doing compared to their neighbors, their friends, their relatives, their co-workers, and the people they went to high school with. They don't compare themselves to Michael Bloomberg, unless of course they are also billionaires. When the guy down the hall gets a bigger raise, perhaps by courting the boss, that's what really bothers us. In other words, envy and resentment are not going away and they also do not stem fundamentally from the contrast between ordinary lives and the lives of the very wealthy.

Third, many Americans draw an important distinction between earned wealth and unearned wealth. If someone has become a billionaire, but he worked hard for it and supplied a good or service of real value (say Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook), for the most part Americans will respect and admire that person.

A lot of wealth today hasn't been earned fairly, but still a lot of it has been the result of hard work and creativity, even if mixed in with good luck. The United States is still a society of business and a lot of businessmen provide great value to our economy. The weight has not swung to the point where there is more unearned wealth than earned wealth and so Americans identify with business and a business ethic, especially compared to attitudes in Europe.

From Keeping Envy Local by Tyler Cowen, March 22, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Law: Corporations Are Not Entirely Persons

The Supreme Court decided today that AT&T can't keep embarrassing corporate information that it submits to the government out of public view; personal privacy rights do not apply to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally concluded the ruling.

AT&T insisted that this personal privacy exemption applied even to corporations—after all, corporations are considered legal persons in the US. AT&T won this argument at a federal appeals court, convincing judges there that its submissions to the government should remain private.

But the Supreme Court was having none of it, with every justice except Elena Kagan (she recused herself) agreeing that FOIA was not written simply to prevent corporate embarrassment. After lengthy discussions of grammar, including commentary about the relationship between nouns and adjectives, the court concluded that personal in this case referred to individuals and to private life, not to corporate dealings and business decisions.

For more, see Supreme Court: At&T Can't Keep Bad Behavior a Secret by Nate Anderson, March 2, 2011 at ars technica.

Crime: Criminal Minds Are Different from Yours, Brain Scans Reveal

In one recent study, scientists examined 21 people with antisocial personality disorder — a condition that characterizes many convicted criminals. Those with the disorder "typically have no regard for right and wrong. They may often violate the law and the rights of others," according to the Mayo Clinic.

Brain scans of the antisocial people, compared with a control group of individuals without any mental disorders, showed on average an 18-percent reduction in the volume of the brain's middle frontal gyrus, and a 9 percent reduction in the volume of the orbital frontal gyrus — two sections in the brain's frontal lobe.

Another brain study, published in the September 2009 Archives of General Psychiatry, compared 27 psychopaths — people with severe antisocial personality disorder — to 32 non-psychopaths. In the psychopaths, the researchers observed deformations in another part of the brain called the amygdala, with the psychopaths showing a thinning of the outer layer of that region called the cortex and, on average, an 18-percent volume reduction in this part of brain.

"The amygdala is the seat of emotion. Psychopaths lack emotion. They lack empathy, remorse, guilt," said research team member Adrian Raine, chair of the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., last month.

For more, see Criminal Minds Are Different from Yours, Brain Scans Reveal by Clara Moskowitz, March 4, 2011 at LiveScience.

Healthcare: As Health Costs Soar, G.O.P. And Insurers Differ on Cause

The new federal health care law may eventually bend the cost curve downward, as proponents argue. But for now, at many workplaces here, the rising cost of health care is prompting insurance premiums to skyrocket while coverage is shrinking.

As Congress continues to debate the new health care law, health insurance costs are still rising, particularly for small businesses. Republicans are seizing on the trend as evidence that the new law includes expensive features that are driving up premiums. But the insurance industry says premiums are rising primarily because of the underlying cost of care and a growing demand for it.

Across the country, premiums have more than doubled in the last decade, with smaller companies particularly hard hit in recent years, federal officials say.

Some insurance industry lobbyists say the new federal health care law is driving up premiums. But Vincent Capozzi, senior vice president for sales and customer service at Harvard Pilgrim, said that only one percentage point of the increases here was attributable to the federal law, mainly its requirement for free coverage of preventive services.

For more, see As Health Costs Soar, G.O.P. And Insurers Differ on Cause by Robert Pear, March 4, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Climate: Why Find the Facts?

The IPCC is the leading international scientific body studying climate change. Despite criticism — much of it manufactured by climate-change deniers — the panel has for more than a decade provided rigorous and balanced information to policy makers to help guide their efforts to prevent and mitigate the potentially disastrous effects of global warming.

Regrettably, politics trumps science among House Republicans, who recently voted to zero out this country's extremely modest $2.3 million annual commitment to the IPCC. The bill also slashes spending on a half-dozen domestic programs that study the causes and effects of climate change.

For more, see On Climate, Who Needs the Facts? Editorial, March 4, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Poll: Budget-Cuts Dilemma

Less than a quarter of Americans support making significant cuts to Social Security or Medicare to tackle the country's mounting deficit, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, illustrating the challenge facing lawmakers who want voter buy-in to alter entitlement programs.

In the poll, Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was "unacceptable'' to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security "unacceptable."

For more, see Poll Shows Budget-Cuts Dilemma by Neil King JR. And Scott Greenberg, March 3, 2011 at WSJ.com.

Health: Study Finds Needless Prostate Biopsies

The researchers, writing in the March 16 issue of The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, concluded that using P.S.A. velocity for prostate cancer detection is ineffective, that it leads to unnecessary biopsies and that references to it should be removed from professional guidelines and policy statements.

But at this point, he is firmly against biopsies on the basis of velocity alone. If your P.S.A. is in the normal range, you shouldn't get a biopsy, he said. Changes or spikes in P.S.A. are not something to worry about if your P.S.A. is still normal.

For more, see Study Finds Needless Prostate Biopsies by Nicholas Bakalar, February 27, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Poll: Tea Party's Hard Line on Spending Divides GOP

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For more, see Tea Party's Hard Line on Spending Divides GOP, February 11, 2011 at Pew Research Center.

Poll: Fewer Want Spending to Grow, but Most Cuts Remain Unpopular

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For more, see Fewer Want Spending to Grow, but Most Cuts Remain Unpopular, February 10, 2011 at Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Environment: China Issues Warning on Climate and Growth

China's environment minister on Monday issued an unusually stark warning about the effects of unbridled development on the country's air, water and soil, saying the nation's current path could stifle long-term economic growth and feed social instability

Mr. Zhou's vow to weigh factors like climate change when approving new factories would be significant given that such policies were largely the domain of China's top economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, which had been reluctant to sacrifice economic growth for environmental protection.

With its increasing fixation on social stability, the Communist Party may have come to realize the benefits of balancing economic growth with the public's demands for uncontaminated food and water. In recent weeks, there has been a cascade of damaging news about the environment, from dangerously high smog levels in the capital to a study that found 10 percent of domestically grown rice contaminated with heavy metals.

Official vows to rein in environmental abuse are frequently announced, but many laws and policies are ultimately circumvented or ignored at the local level, in large part because of a system that encourages officials to pursue economic growth over environmental sustainability.

Still, the governing Communist Party has demonstrated its ability to make significant changes. Last summer, Mr. Wen vowed to use an iron hand to improve his country's energy efficiency. By the fall, more than 2,000 steel mills, cement plants and other energy-hogging factories had been closed.

For more, see China Issues Warning on Climate and Growth by Andrew Jacobs, February 28, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Politics: Huckabee Claims Barack Obama Grew up in Kenya

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told a New York radio station on Monday that Mr Obama's youth led him to resent the West, which he said explains why Mr Obama's foreign policy differs so greatly from that of his predecessors.

"One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, (is) very different than the average American," Mr Huckabee said, pointing to Mr Obama's decision in 2009 to return a bust of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

He failed to note that the bust was on loan from former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who offered it to President George W. Bush in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a symbol of trans-Atlantic solidarity. Mr Huckabee also did not mention that Mr Obama replaced the Oval Office fixture with a bust of one of his American heroes, President Abraham Lincoln.

"The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British," Mr Huckabee said. "But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather. He probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."

Mr Obama's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was detained in a 1952 uprising against British colonial rule in Kenya. Mr Huckabee said childhood stories of the Mau Mau rebellion would lead President Obama to want to return the bust of Churchill, who ordered a crackdown against that uprising.

Mr Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 to a mother from Kansas, and a father from Kenya whom he would barely know. He spent the first five years of his life in Hawaii and then moved with his since-divorced mother and her new husband to Indonesia. At the age of 10, he returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents on Oahu until he started his undergraduate degree in Los Angeles and completed it in New York City.

"The first time I came to Kenya was in 1987," Mr Obama said at the University of Nairobi in 2006. "I had just finished three years of work as a community organiser in low-income neighbourhoods of Chicago, and was about to enrol in law school. My sister, Auma, was teaching that year at this university, and so I came to stay with her for a month."

And yet ...

Mr Huckabee himself has called these [birther] suggestions fringe theories that distract from the serious policy disagreements with Mr Obama. During appearances for his book tour, he dismissed the so-called "birther" ideas.

And on Monday, just a few moments after he asserted Mr Obama's Kenyan upbringing, Mr Huckabee returned to what had been his standard rhetoric on the question of his birth certificate.

For more, see Leading Republican Claims Barack Obama Grew up in Kenya, March 2, 2011 at The Telegraph.

Health: Most Plastics Leach Hormone-like Chemicals

Most plastic products, from sippy cups to food wraps, can release chemicals that act like the sex hormone estrogen, according to a study in Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study found these chemicals even in products that didn't contain BPA, a compound in certain plastics that's been widely criticized because it mimics estrogen.

The testing showed that more than 70 percent of the products released chemicals that acted like estrogen. And that was before they exposed the stuff to real-world conditions: simulated sunlight, dishwashing and microwaving, Bittner says.

"Then, you greatly increase the probability that you're going to get chemicals having estrogenic activity released," he says, adding that more than 95 percent of the products tested positive after undergoing this sort of stress.

For more, see Study: Most Plastics Leach Hormone-like Chemicals by Jon Hamilton, March 2, 2011 at NPR.

Technology: Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out, said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don't.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Mr. Herr, the former chemical company lawyer, used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company's lawyers did in the 1980s and '90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found.

Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss, he said.

For more, see Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software by John Markoff, March 4, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Government: Following the Money a Year After Citizens United

Last January, critics of the controversial Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision — which knocked down long-running restrictions on corporate campaign money in elections — envisioned an ominous scene. Anonymous corporate millions would flood into closely contested elections, elbowing out the influence of average voters, warned many (including the president).

Now, at the decision's one-year anniversary, hard data is beginning to bear out the grave forecasts, contradicting even some of the Supreme Court's own predictions. In the wake of Citizens United, outside groups in last year's election spent more than four times what they'd funneled into the previous midterm cycle, in 2006, according to a new Public Citizen report. And voters will never know where much of it came from.

Groups that didn't disclose to the FEC any information about the sources of their money spent a combined $135.6 million (or 46 percent of the total).

Nearly half of the total, $138.5 million, came from just 10 groups. And seven of those organizations — including the ambiguously named American Action Network, American Future Fund and Americans for Job Security — provided no donor information.

For more, see Following the Money a Year After Citizens United by Emily Badger, January 19, 2011 at Miller-McCune.

Diversion: Visualizing the Size and Scale of Our World

To see a larger version of the following image, click it to open a pop-up and click it's vertical scrollbar ...

From Visualizing the Size and Scale of Our World, August 3, 2011 at All That Is Interesting.

Government: Egypt, Democracy and Islam

One of several interesting images ...

For much more, see Egypt, Democracy and Islam by Richard Auxier, January 31, 2011 at Pew Research Center.

Economics: Unions' Favorability Still Low, But Mirrors Business Rating

For more, see Labor Unions Seen as Good for Workers, Not U.S. Competitiveness, February 17, 2011 at Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.