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Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Fox News:  Stewart Says Politifact Says Fox Lies

It includes 2009's "lie of the year" (death panels) and 2010's "lie of the year" (government takeover of healthcare).

From Jon Stewart Trumpets False Fox News Statements Fact-Checked by Politifact (Video) by Katla Mcglynn, June 22, 2011 at The Huffington Post.

Economics:  Fiscal Contraction Hurts Economic Expansion -- Except ...

The general presumption is that fiscal contraction — cutting spending or raising taxes, or both — will immediately slow the economy relative to the growth it would have had otherwise.
Under four conditions, fiscal contractions can be expansionary. But none of these conditions is likely to apply in the United States today.

First, if there is high perceived sovereign default risk, fiscal contraction can potentially lower long-term interest rates.

Second, it is highly unlikely that short-term spending cuts would directly increase confidence among households or companies, particularly with employment still around 5% below its precrisis level.
Third, if monetary policy becomes more expansionary while fiscal policy contracts, this can offset to some degree the negative short-run effects of spending cuts on the economy.
Fourth, tighter fiscal policy and easier monetary policy can, in small, open economies with flexible exchange rates, push down (that is, depreciate) the relative value of the currency — thus increasing exports and making it easier for domestic producers to compete against imports.

For more, see Fiscal Contraction Hurts Economic Expansion by Simon Johnson, June 23, 2011 at Economix.

Law:  Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children

Ugh ...

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down on First Amendment grounds a California law that barred the sale of violent video games to children.
The California law would have imposed $1,000 fines on stores that sold violent video games to people under 18. It defined violent games as those in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being in a way that was patently offensive, appeals to minors' deviant or morbid interests and lacked serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Those definitions tracked language from court decisions upholding laws regulating sexual content. In 1968, in Ginsberg v. New York, the court allowed limits on the distribution to minors of sexual materials like what it called girlie magazines that fell well short of obscenity, which is unprotected by the First Amendment.

For more, see Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children by Adam Liptak, June 27, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Politics:  100 Days

There is no way that America can remain a great country if the opportunities for meaningful reform are reduced to either market- or and climate-induced crises and 100 working days [after the President is sworn in] every four years. We need a full-time government, and instead we've created a Congress that is a full-time fund-raising enterprise that occasionally legislates and a White House that, save for 100 days, has to be in perpetual campaign mode.

To get elected today, politicians increasingly have to play to their bases and promise things that they cannot possibly deliver (5% annual growth for a decade) or solutions to our problems that will be painless for their constituencies (we'll just raise taxes on the rich or we'll just cut taxes even more) or to keep things just as they are even though we know they can't possibly stay that way without bankrupting the country (Social Security and Medicare benefits).

The truth is, we need to do four things at once if we have any hope of maintaining American greatness: We need more stimulus to keep the economy from slipping back into recession. But we need to combine that stimulus with a credible, legislated, long-term plan for cutting spending and getting the deficit under control — e.g., the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan. And we need to raise new revenues in order to reinvest in the sources of our strength: education, infrastructure and government-funded research to push out the boundaries of knowledge.

For more, see 100 Days by Thomas L. Friedman, June 21, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Healthcare:  Romney vs. Pawlenty on Health Care

Call me old-fashioned, but I've always believed that doing healthcare reform the right way had something to do with covering the uninsured. And in this GOP field, Romney is the clear leader on that:

For more, see Romney vs. Pawlenty on Health Care by Ezra Klein, June 16, 2011 at Ezra Klein.

Great Recession:  Paul Allen, Ex-Mortgage CEO, Sentenced to Prison for $3B Fraud

They got one of them ...

The CEO of what had been one of the nation's largest privately held mortgage lenders was sentenced Tuesday to more than three years in prison for his role in a $3 billion scheme that officials called one of the biggest corporate frauds in U.S. history.

The 40-month sentence for Paul R. Allen, 55, of Oakton, Va., is slightly less than the six-year term sought by federal prosecutors.

For more, see Paul Allen, Ex-Mortgage CEO, Sentenced to Prison for $3B Fraud by Matthew Barakat, June 21, 2011 at The Huffington Post.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Economics:  Incredible Shrinking Workers' Income

Workers' share of U.S, national income is collapsing.

From Incredible Shrinking Workers' Income by David Frum, June 12, 2011 at FrumForum.

Ethics:  Political Philosopher a Star in China

[Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political philosopher is] a rock star in Asia, and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him.
Sandel's popularity in Asia reflects the intersection of three trends. One is the growth of online education, where students anywhere now can gain access to the best professors from everywhere. Another is the craving in Asia for a more creative, discussion-based style of teaching in order to produce more creative, innovative students. And the last is the hunger of young people to engage in moral reasoning and debates, rather than having their education confined to the dry technical aspects of economics, business or engineering.

At Tsinghua and Fudan, Sandel challenged students with a series of cases about justice and markets: Is it fair to raise the price of snow shovels after a snowstorm? What about auctioning university admissions to the highest bidder? “Free-market sentiment ran surprisingly high,” Sandel said, “but some students argued that unfettered markets create inequality and social discord.”

Sandel is touching something deep in both Boston and Beijing. “Students everywhere are hungry for discussion of the big ethical questions we confront in our everyday lives,” Sandel argues. “In recent years, seemingly technical economic questions have crowded out questions of justice and the common good. I think there is a growing sense, in many societies, that G.D.P. and market values do not by themselves produce happiness, or a good society. My dream is to create a video-linked global classroom, connecting students across cultures and national boundaries — to think through these hard moral questions together, to see what we can learn from one another.”

For more, see Justice Goes Global by Thomas L. Friedman, June 14, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Energy:  A Better Kind of Lightbulb?

This week, the lighting start-up company vu1 is beginning to ship a new type of lightbulb that could displace compact fluorescents and LED lamps as the energy-saving bulb of choice. The technology, known as cathodoluminescence or electron-stimulated luminescence (ESL), offers similar energy savings, but provides a more natural quality of light.

A comparison of efficient lightbulb technologies is at A Better Kind of Lightbulb? by George Musser, March 21, 2011 at Scientific American.

Gender:  Whether It's a Peacock or a Porsche, Men like to Show off

... scientific study carried out by researchers at three respected universities ... looked into the age-old question of whether a man with a Porsche is more attractive to women than a man with — say — a Honda Civic ....
The bottom line? If you're looking for a good time, buy the Porsche. If you're looking for a mate, go for the Civic.

For more, see Whether It's a Peacock or a Porsche, Men like to Show off, Study Finds by John Roberts, June 16, 2011 at Fox News.

Healthcare:  Medicare Saves Money

Medicare actually saves money — a lot of money — compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs.

The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn't Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400% from 1969 to 2009.

But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700% over the same period. So while it's true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we'll be forcing them to get private insurance — if they can — that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.

By the way, we have direct evidence about the higher costs of private insurance via the Medicare Advantage program, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their coverage through the private sector.

For more, see Medicare Saves Money by Paul Krugman, June 12, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Crime:  70% of Arms Seized, Traced in Mexico Came from US

About 70% of the guns seized in Mexico and submitted to a U.S. gun-tracing program came from the United States, according to a report released by three U.S. senators Monday.
The ATF said the remainder of the weapons total — 8,780 arms — were of undetermined origin due to insufficient information provided.
Evidence that U.S. weapons trafficking has been fueling a bloody drug war that has cost more than 35,000 lives in Mexico since late 2006 has angered many Mexicans.
I accuse the U.S. weapons industry of (responsibility for) the deaths of thousands of people that are occurring in Mexico, Calderon said. It is for profit, for the profits that it makes for the weapons industry.

The report, issued by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and two other senators, recommended background checks for sales at gun shows, a ban on the import of nonsporting weapons and the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban in force in the United States until 2004.

Calderon endorsed calls for reinstating the ban on domestic sales of assault rifles, saying its expiration in 2004 may have played a roll in the increase of drug violence in Mexico.

You can clearly see how the violence began to grow in 2005, and of course it has gone on an upward spiral in the last six years, Calderon said.

For more, see Us Report: 70% of Arms Seized, Traced in Mexico Came from Us, June 13, 2011 at The Washington Post.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Climate:  Is This Tornado Season the Worst Ever?

... because of the looseness of the reporting record, it is hard to say April 2011 was the worst tornado month ever, or even the worst in recent memory. For starters, due to increases in population density, there are more people to report tornadoes. Most storms today are caught on camera and many are uploaded to the Internet within minutes. However, in the years before everyone owned a convenient camera or settled in particular locales, many tornadoes simply went unreported in rural areas. Therefore, bigger outbreaks may have happened in the past, but we will never know.
The rash of storms also brought another suspect into the public discussion: climate change. While this makes for interesting discussion, scientists are not yet sure of the fate of tornado frequency in the future. Global climate models indicate that some of the ingredients necessary for tornado-producing storms, such as instability, will increase. But others, like wind shear, may decrease.

For more, see Is This Tornado Season the Worst Ever? by Victor Gensini, May 22, 2011 at Popular Mechanics.

Media:  FCC Report on Media Warns of Decline in Quality Local News

A new report from the Federal Communications Commission warned that the "independent watchdog function that the founding fathers envisioned for journalism" is at risk in local communities across the country.

... a 475-page report ... said there is a "shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting" that could lead to "more government waste, more local corruption," "less effective schools" and other problems.

Local TV is singled out in the report for not covering important issues enough. Although the number of hours of local news has increased over the last few years, too few stations "are investing in more reporting on critical local issues," the report said. Furthermore, the report said that although stations may be adding newscasts, they are doing it with fewer reporters.

Even with the additional newscasts, the stories often focus on crime and the reason for that has more to do with how cheap it is to cover crime stories than it does viewer demand.

For more, see FCC Report on Media Warns of Decline in Quality Local News by Joe Flint, June 9, 2011 at Company Town.

Security:  Talking Truth to NATO

Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke bluntly to America's NATO allies on Friday. They needed to hear it.
Libya, a mission much more directly linked to the security of Europe than of the United States, strikingly illustrates the consequences.

Fewer than half of NATO's 28 members are taking part in the military mission. Fewer than a third are participating in the all-important airstrikes. British and French aircraft carry the main burden. Canada, Belgium, Norway and Denmark, despite limited resources, have made outsized contributions. Turkey, with the alliance's second-largest military, has remained largely on the sidelines. Germany, NATO's biggest historic beneficiary, has done nothing at all.

Even fully participating members have failed to train enough targeting specialists to keep all of their planes flying sorties or to buy enough munitions to sustain a bombing campaign much beyond the present 11 weeks.

That should frighten every defense ministry in Europe. What if they had to fight a more formidable enemy than Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's fractured dictatorship?

For more, see Talking Truth to NATO by Editorial, June 10, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Technology:  ISP Performance Comparison

As Measured by Netflix ...

For more, see Netflix Performance on Top ISP Networks by Ken Florance, May 31, 2011 at The Netflix "Tech" Blog.

Politics:  Then & Now: The Changing Rhetoric in the Debt-Limit Debate

How politicized is the vote over the debt ceiling?

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib may have captured it most succinctly, when he signaled that, since 2002, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) voted for each debt limit increase asked for by President Bush and against each request from President Obama.

Grassley's long-time Iowa colleague, Democrat Tom Harkin? The exact opposite.

For more, see Then & Now: The Changing Rhetoric in the Debt-Limit Debate by Bernie Becker, June 11, 2011 at On The Money.

Race:  Does the Minimum Wage Help or Hurt Blacks?

... Walter Williams of George Mason University. Williams, who is black, says "there's a huge segment of the black population for whom upward mobility is elusive, and it's because of the welfare state -- because of government."

Williams elaborates in a new book, "Race and Economics." A chief culprit, he insists, is the minimum wage. "Let's not look at the intentions behind minimum wage," he said. "We have to ask, what are the effects? Put yourself in the place of an employer who must pay $7.25 no matter whom you hire. Will that employer hire a person who can only add $3 or $4 of value per hour?"

He will not. And so fewer young people get hired and "get their feet on the bottom rung of the economic ladder." This hurts all young people, but black teens most, he says, because "many of them get a fraudulent education in the public school system. So a law that discriminates against low-skill people has a doubly negative effect on black teenagers. The unemployment rate among black teens today is unprecedented in U.S. history. In the '40s, black teenage unemployment was less than white teenage unemployment."

And yet a Pew survey says 83% of Americans support raising the minimum wage.

"People have the misguided notion that the minimum wage is an anti-poverty tool."

Economists understand the truth. A survey of the American Economic Association found that 90% of economists say the minimum wage increases unemployment.

For more, see Is Government Aid Helping or Hurting Blacks? by John Stossel, June 2, 2011 at Fox News.

Fox News:  Fox's Media Bias and Climate Change

Now, a new study from Media Matters (h/t Kate Sheppard) provides some numbers about the kind of biased coverage that produces [misinformed viewers].

Media Matters didn't look directly at scientific statements—instead they looked at the number of guests, across TV news, who were either for or against EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.

Drilling down on Fox in particular:

81% of Fox guests and 83% of Fox Business guests opposed [greenhouse gas] regulation. Fox News hosted 52 guests who criticized the EPA's decision to regulate greenhouse gases. In that same period they featured only 10 supporters and two guests who took a neutral stance. Fox Business hosted opponents 65 times, compared to seven appearances by supporters. MSNBC hosted four times more supporters of EPA's action than opponents, but had far fewer guests commenting on the issue than did Fox.

For more, see Fox's Media Bias and Climate Change by Chris Mooney, June 7, 2011 at The Intersection.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Education:  Are College Grads In Jobs That Require College Degrees?

While the median earnings of college grads in high-skilled jobs have risen in the last 10 years, the median earnings of college grads in lower-skilled jobs fell ...

For more, see A Decade Makes All the Difference by Catherine Rampell, June 1, 2011 at Economix.

Mind:  Willpower Depletion and the Poor

Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, "After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task."

In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one's personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.

Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, "almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It's distracting, it's depleting ... and it leads to error." The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, "on anything above a muffin."

Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of experiments that each revealed how "poverty appears to have made economic decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for richer people." In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to purchase body soap. As Spears found, "Choosing first was depleting only for the poorer participants." Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost.

All of this suggests that we need to rethink our approaches to poverty reduction. Many of our current anti-poverty efforts focus on access to health, educational, agricultural, and financial services. Now, it seems, we need to start treating willpower as a scarce and important resource as well.

Some promising approaches have already been tried. Starting in 2002, economists Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, and Wesley Yin created and analyzed a unique type of savings account at a small rural bank on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The Green Bank of Caraga's SEED accounts (Save, Earn, Enjoy Deposits) let clients place restrictions on when they could access their money. SEED clients could set either a date before which or a minimum savings amount below which they couldn't access their own funds. Twenty-eight percent of existing bank clients who were offered the accounts enrolled in them, and, after one year, the economists found, customers saved over 300% more with SEED accounts than they would have without them. The accounts offered an opportunity to circumvent self-control failure, in the same way Ulysses bound himself to the mast to resist the Sirens' call.

For more, see New Republic: Let Them Eat Cake or Don't Bake at All by Jamie Holmes, June 6, 2011 at NPR.

Economics:  For the Jobless, Little U.S. Help on Foreclosure

The Obama administration's main program to keep distressed homeowners from falling into foreclosure has been aimed at those who took out subprime loans or other risky mortgages during the heady days of the housing boom. But these days, the primary cause of foreclosures is unemployment.
The administration's housing effort does include programs to help unemployed homeowners, but they have been plagued by delays, dubious benefits and abysmal participation. For example, a Treasury Department effort started in early 2010 allows the jobless to postpone mortgage payments for three months, but the average length of unemployment is now nine months. As of March 31, there were only 7,397 participants.
As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given $46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the agency has spent about $1.85 billion.

Morris A. Davis, a former Federal Reserve economist, estimates that as many as a million homeowners slipped into foreclosure because of insufficient help for the unemployed.

The money was there and they didn't spend it, said Mr. Davis, an associate real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin. I don't mean to sound outraged, but I am pretty outraged.

Administration officials said their programs have had a positive impact, albeit not as large as they had hoped. But they say that the problems of unemployment and negative equity on homes are not easily solved. They also say programs to curb foreclosure are voluntary, so they are limited in how far they can push mortgage servicers and investors, who often make more from foreclosures than from offering aid.

We are trying to be careful in designing programs that at the end of the day aren't just about spending money but getting people back on their feet, said James Parrott, a senior adviser at the White House's National Economic Council.

The debate is playing out on the sidelines of partisan Washington politics, since Republican lawmakers have made clear they would like to get rid of anti-foreclosure programs altogether, and would block any new programs.

For more, see For the Jobless, Little U.S. Help on Foreclosure by Andrew Martin, June 4, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Fox News:  The Fox News "Effect": A Few References

Clearly, there's much concern about Fox coverage. But many critics of the network seem unaware of what may be their best argument: the existence of several public opinion studies showing a correlation between watching Fox and being misinformed about one or more public policy issues.

These studies tend to take the same basic form. First, they survey Americans to determine their views about some matter of controversy. Inevitably, some significant percentage of citizens are found to be misinformed about the core facts of the issue--but not just that. The surveys also find that those who watch Fox, or watch it frequently, are more likely to be misinformed.

Here are five such studies—and note that this list may be incomplete. This is just what I've come across so far:

1. Iraq War ....
2. Global Warming ....
3. Health Care ....
4. Ground Zero Mosque ....
5. 2010 Election ....

For details about the studies, see The Fox News "Effect": A Few References by Chris Mooney's, May 18, 2011 at DeSmogBlog.com.

Lib/Con:  Political Ideology Linked to Food Choices

The way you vote may reflect the way you eat. Liberals prefer thin-crust pizza, hard to pronounce pastas, such as gnocchi and fusilli, and a glass of wine with dinner, while conservatives enjoy deep-dish pizza, McDonald's French fries and a can of coke with their meal.

A new study by Hunch.com — a site that makes recommendations based on preferences, ranging from which car you should drive to which vacation or college choice is best for you — suggests your political views say a lot about the food choices a person makes.

However, the web-based survey is not as scientific as truly objective polls because, among other limitations, it was not based on a representative sample of the population.

Some other findings from the survey include:
  • Liberals are 28% more likely than conservatives to eat fresh fruit daily, and 17% more likely to eat toast or a bagel in the morning, while conservatives are 20% more likely to skip breakfast.
  • Ten percent of liberals surveyed indicated they are vegetarians, compared with 3% of conservatives.
  • Liberals are 28% more likely than conservatives to enjoy beer, with 60% of liberals indicating they like beer.

For more, see Political Ideology Linked to Food Choices by Samantha Murphy, May 24, 2011 at LiveScience.

Science:  Scientists 'Trap' And Study Elusive Anti-Matter

At the moment of the big bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, matter and anti-matter are thought to have existed in equal quantities. If that balance had persisted, the observable Universe we inhabit would never have come into being.

For unknown reasons -- and fortunately for us -- Nature seemed to have a slight preference for matter, and today anti-matter is rare.

Scientists used CERN's high-energy accelerator to create the antihydrogen atoms, and then chilled them to near-zero temperatures.

The aim is to use laser and microwave spectroscopy to compare the immobilised particles to their hydrogen counterparts.

The same team succeeded last year in trapping dozens of anti-matter atoms and holding them in place for a fraction of a second, a world first at the time.

But that was not long enough for the excitable particles to settle into the stable "ground" state needed for precise measurements.

The new benchmark extended this storage time 5,000 fold, making it possible to carry out crucial experiments.

Scientists will now look for "violations" or discrepancies in something called the charge-parity-time reversal (CPT) symmetry.

For more, see Scientists 'Trap' And Study Elusive Anti-Matter, June 6, 2011 at The Telegraph.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Science:  Groundwater Depletion Is Detected from Space

For decades, groundwater measurements in the United States had been made from points on the Earth's surface — by taking real-time soundings at 1,383 of the United States Geological Survey's observation wells and daily readings at 5,908 others. Those readings are supplemented by measuring water levels in hundreds of thousands of other wells, trenches and excavations.

The two satellites, each the size of a small car, travel in polar orbits about 135 miles apart. Each bombards the other with microwaves calibrating the distance between them down to intervals of less than the width of a human hair.

If the mass below the path of the leading satellite increases — because, say, the lower Mississippi basin is waterlogged — that satellite speeds up, and the distance between the two grows. Then the mass tugs on both, and the distance shortens. It increases again as the forward satellite moves out of range while the trailing satellite is held back.

For more, see Groundwater Depletion Is Detected from Space by Felicity Barringer, May 30, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Economics:  The Bullish Case for the U.S. Economy

But can we really win merely by staying ahead of Europe and Japan? So far the answer seems to be yes. People are invariably shocked when [BlackRock Chief Equity Strategist Bob] Doll tells them that in 1995 the U.S. produced roughly 25% of the world's goods and services and in 2010, after 15 years that included a tech bust, a terrorist attack and a housing bust that triggered a financial crisis, the U.S. was still producing that same 25% of global GDP.

How is this possible given the rapid rise of China and India? Mr. Doll says the increase in emerging markets' share of the world economy has come "at the expense of mostly Japan and a bit Europe. The U.S. has held its own, which I think is a statement of our ability to be productive in a tough world."

But an investor would still have more upside in developing countries than in the U.S., right? Mr. Doll says that if he were forced to lock up his money in one place for the next 10 or 20 years he would indeed select the developing world and specifically India over China.

For more, see The Bullish Case for the U.S. Economy by James Freeman, June 4, 2011 at WSJ.com.

Mind:  Genes and Social Networks: New Research Links Genes to Friendship Networks

James [Fowler] and his colleagues Jaime Settle and Nicholas Christakis demonstrate that there is what they call "genotypic clustering in social networks", by statistically examining the association between markers for six different genes and the reported friendship networks from respondents in data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Framingham Heart Study Social Network. They show that one of these genes (DRD2) is positively associated with in friendship networks, meaning that those who have this gene are more likely to be friends with others who have this gene, controlling for demographic similarities and population stratification; another gene, CYP2A6 has a negative association in friendship networks.

From Genes and Social Networks: New Research Links Genes to Friendship Networks by R. Michael Alvarez, February 14, 2011 at Psychology Today.

Climate:  Mitt Romney on Climate Change

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney broke with Republican orthodoxy on Friday by saying he believes that humans are responsible, at least to some extent, for climate change.

"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," he told a crowd of about 200 at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire.

"It's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."

At an event in Manchester last week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also running for president, said that climate change is "the newest excuse to take control of lives" by "left-wing intellectuals."

For more, see Mitt Romney on Climate Change: 'The World Is Getting Warmer... Humans Have Contributed', June 4, 2011 at The Huffington Post.

Race:  Whites Say They, Not Blacks, Are Racism Victims

... whites believe that anti-white bias has increased as anti-black bias has decreased. On average, the researchers found, whites rated anti-white racism as more prevalent in the 2000s than anti-black bias by more than a full point on a 10-point scale. Eleven percent of whites said whites are currently "very much" targets of discrimination, compared with 2% of blacks who said blacks are "very much" discrimination targets.

For more, see Whites Say They, Not Blacks, Are Racism Victims by Stephanie Pappas, May 24, 2011 at LiveScience.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Science:  The Fun of Going Faster-than-Light

... even though you can't go faster than the speed of light in vacuum, there's no law saying you always need to be in a vacuum. So what can we do? Perhaps we can create a particle (like an electron) in some nuclear reaction that's moving close to the speed of light in vacuum, and then make it enter a medium, like water, glass, or acrylic!

What happens now, if the particle -- moving slower than c -- goes faster than light in some medium?

Amazingly enough, the particle freaks out, and starts emitting light.

The light is very special, and comes off in a particularly cone-like shape, and is the particle's way of trying to shed that extra energy until it gets down safely below the speed of light! The light is called ... Cherenkov radiation ... after its Nobel-prize-winning discoverer.

For much more, see The Fun of Going Faster-than-Light by Ethan Siegel, May 18, 2011 at Starts With A Bang!.

Economics:  Against Learned Helplessness

... the unemployed aren't jobless because they don't want to work, or because they lack the necessary skills. There's nothing wrong with our workers — remember, just four years ago the unemployment rate was below 5%.

For more, see Against Learned Helplessness by Paul Krugman, May 29, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Environment:  China Faces ‘Very Grave' Environmental Situation, Officials Say

In a blunt assessment of the problems facing the world's most populous country, officials from China's Ministry of Environmental Protection delivered their 2010 annual report. They pointed to two major advances: improvements in water and air quality — key goals that the ministry had set for itself to achieve over a five-year period ending last December.

Both targets were met, with pollutants in surface water down 31.9% over the period and sulfur dioxide emissions in cities down 19%.

But officials cautioned that many other problems were serious and scarcely under control.

Founded as an agency 13 years ago, the environmental protection office was upgraded to a ministry in 2007 but has still fought an uphill battle for funds and power. China's government has prioritized growth, worried that unemployment will lead to unrest.
Mr. Li said that over a fifth of the country's land set aside as nature reserves had been illegally developed by companies, often with local government collusion. But he said that the ministry had now deployed a satellite that can detect illegal development and would pressure local governments to stop the work. Failing this, Mr. Li said, the ministry has the power to influence officials' prospects for promotions because environmental compliance is now a part of their performance evaluation.

Independent observers say this is part of a gradual change toward giving the ministry more power.

For more, see China Faces ‘Very Grave' Environmental Situation, Officials Say by Ian Johnson, June 3, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Lib/Con:  Conservative or Liberal? Workspace Reveals All

While political conservatives tend to keep a tidy, organized office, political liberals favor colorful, more stylish but cluttered spaces.
Liberals' offices were judged as significantly more distinctive, comfortable, stylish, modern, and colorful and as less conventional and ordinary, in comparison with conservatives' offices, Jost said.
"Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration," Jost said during a panel discussion on "The Neuroscience of Elections and Human Decision-Making" at NYU, adding: "Conservatives' rooms were rated by independent raters as better organized and tidier in general."

Specifically, individuals who reported a more conservative ideology also had bedrooms that contained more organizational and cleaning supplies, including calendars, postage stamps, ironing boards and laundry baskets.

Liberals' rooms on the other hand were marked by more clutter, including more CDs, a greater variety of CDs, a greater variety of books and more color in the room in general.

In personality tests of thousands of college students, Jost found that liberals tended to score higher than conservatives on one key measure called openness to experiences, which includes holding wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

Conservatives showed higher scores for conscientiousness, which measures a person's need for order, discipline, achievement striving and rule following.

"I think it's a truly fascinating possibility that the left-right distinction, which emerged over 200 years ago in response to the French Revolution and continues to be the single best way of understanding ideological differences today, may be rooted in fundamental human needs for stability vs. change, order vs. complexity, familiarity vs. novelty, conformity vs. creativity, and loyalty vs. rebellion," Jost told LiveScience.

For more, see Conservative or Liberal? Workspace Reveals All by Jeanna Bryner, September 25, 2008 at LiveScience.

Healthcare:  Some Questions for Paul Ryan

Some questions Ezra Klein would like to ask Paul Ryan about his budget proposal:

2) The main cost control in your plan is that seniors will purchase regulated private health insurance on an exchange. But the Medicare Advantage program, in which seniors choose regulated private insurance options on an exchange and receive the savings through increased benefits, has proven more expensive than traditional Medicare. Why will your exchanges achieve such dramatically different results than the Medicare Advantage exchanges?

3) Alice Rivlin, your original coauthor on the premium-support model, believes the exchanges in your plan are functionally identical to those in [Obama's] Affordable Care Act, and that if you believe one will have a dramatic impact on costs, so too should the other. How, specifically, do your exchanges differ from those in the Affordable Care Act?

7) You say government control never works in health care. But other developed countries pay much less than we do and don't appear to suffer from worse outcomes. So what, specifically, is your evidence that the health-care system in the Netherlands, or in France, or in Germany, doesn't work?

For more, see Some Questions for Paul Ryan by Ezra Klein, May 25, 2011 at The Washington Post.