Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Monday, December 13, 2010.
OND is a community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
The OND concept was borne under the keen keyboard of Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: I Can't Go For That (No Can Do) by Darryl Hall and Chromeo
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Astronomers Find First Evidence Of Other Universes
By The Physics arXiv Blog
. . .
Today, another group says they've found something else in the echo of the Big Bang. These guys start with a different model of the universe called eternal inflation. In this way of thinking, the universe we see is merely a bubble in a much larger cosmos. This cosmos is filled with other bubbles, all of which are other universes where the laws of physics may be dramatically different to ours.
. . .
Now Stephen Feeney at University College London and a few pals say they've found tentative evidence of this bruising in the form of circular patterns in cosmic microwave background. In fact, they've found four bruises, implying that our universe must have smashed into other bubbles at least four times in the past.
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There are precautions statisticians can take to guard against this, which both Feeney and Penrose bring to bear in various ways.
. . .
The only way to settle this will be to confirm or refute the findings with better data. As luck would have it, new data is forthcoming thanks to the Planck spacecraft that is currently peering into the cosmic microwave background with more resolution and greater sensitivity than ever. |
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Continued Death of Forests Predicted in Southwestern US Due to Climate Change
By (ScienceDaily)
If current climate projections hold true, the forests of the Southwestern United States face a bleak future, with more severe -- and more frequent -- forest fires, higher tree death rates, more insect infestation, and weaker trees. The findings by university and government scientists are published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"Our study shows that regardless of rainfall going up or down, forests in the Southwest U.S. are very sensitive to temperature -- in fact, more sensitive than any forests in the country," said first author Park Williams, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara. "Forests in the Southwest are most sensitive to higher temperatures in the spring and summer, and those are the months that have been warming the fastest in this area."
Past forest studies have shown that warmer temperatures are associated with wildfires and bark beetle outbreaks. "We found that up to 18 percent of forest area in the Southwest -- millions of acres -- has experienced mortality due to severe wildfires and bark beetle outbreaks in the last 20 years," said Williams.
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Researchers found that historic patterns of vegetation change, insect outbreaks, fire activity, runoff, and erosion dynamics show that landscapes often respond gradually to incremental changes in climate and land-use stressors until a threshold is reached, at which time there may be dramatic landscape changes, such as tree die-offs or episodes of broad-scale fire or erosion. They also found that the stressors that contribute to tree mortality tipping points can develop over landscape and even sub-continental scales |
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Erin Brockovich II? Activist Returns To Aid Town
By Carrie Kahn
Brockovich famously took on utility Pacific Gas & Electric over contamination of drinking water in Hinkley, Calif., a saga chronicled in a movie that won actress Julia Roberts an Oscar in 2001. Thanks to Brockovich's efforts, in the 1990s PG&E settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit with hundreds of residents and pledged to clean up the contamination.
But it appears the plume of contaminated groundwater is spreading. And Brockovich finds herself again in Hinkley, fighting for residents who say the toxic chemical chromium 6 is still in their water supply.
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Brockovich says she can't believe that after all this time, the contamination has spread. She blames state and local regulators for not supervising PG&E's cleanup, but she mostly blames the utility.
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For its part, PG&E says it has been closely monitoring the contamination and has had a lot of success containing it. |
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BP oil spill victims will get 3 options for compensation
By Maria Recio
Kenneth Feinberg, the head of the Gulf oil spill fund, said Monday that victims of the BP oil spill will have three options for final compensation from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and all but one of them requires claimants to give up their right to sue.
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The three options would apply to the next phase of the compensation program, now that the emergency phase — which distributed $2.5 billion to more than 160,000 businesses and individuals in Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Texas — is complete.
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Feinberg said that the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, as his operation is officially known, will provide legal counsel to advise claimants on the claims process, but not, however, to represent them in lawsuits.
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He also stressed that people who had been denied compensation before, such as casino workers, should resubmit claims. "We will give any claimant an opportunity to resubmit documentation," he said. |
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As Congress tells schools to raise lunch prices, some worry kids will go hungry
By Ed Bruske
Somehow Congress can find money to give tax breaks to billionaires. But in a little-noted provision of its reauthorization of child nutrition programs, signed into law today by President Barack Obama as part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, lawmakers have told schools to raise lunch prices to at least cover what it views as the full cost of making a meal. Entitled "equity in school lunch pricing," the new mandate could, by increasing prices gradually for students whose families aren't low income, pump an additional $2.6 billion into the school meal program over the next 10 years, according to one estimate.
While that's a much-needed infusion of cash, school food services professionals say the move could have the side effect of driving hundreds of thousands of children from the federally subsidized school meals program. The School Nutrition Association (SNA), representing some 50,000 food service workers across the country, likens the new law to cuts in federal support for school meals enacted during the Reagan years, when participation in the National School Lunch Program plummeted 25 percent among full-price students because schools were forced to charge more -- and ketchup was declared a vegetable.
"When you raise prices, it has a real impact on participation," said SNA spokeswoman Diane Pratt-Heavner. "Our members tell us time and time again, even when they raise prices by just a dime, they see participation drop."
. . .
Critics argue that underpricing also helps explain why schools never seem to have enough money to improve the quality of the food they serve, and that low-income children should not be short-changed in order to support kids who come from wealthier homes, even though there is nothing in federal law to say that government subsidies can only be used to feed needy students. Food service professionals counter that lower prices attract more kids to the meal line, creating economies of scale and helping to lower the marginal cost of meals served in a program they contend is chronically underfunded. |
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Aid groups fear central Africa LRA 'Christmas massacre'
By (BBC)
Aid groups have called for efforts to prevent mass killings by one of Africa's most feared rebel militias over the Christmas period.
The aid agencies say a concerted effort is needed to stop the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) from committing what have become known as "Christmas massacres".
LRA fighters killed hundreds of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan in December 2008 and 2009.
. . .
Figures show that the LRA over the past two years has become the most deadly militia in the DRC, the aid groups say in a report published today. |
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Minister forces troubled Allied Irish Bank to cancel £34m bonus payouts
By Henry McDonald
Ireland's finance minister has forced one of the country's debt-ridden banks not to pay a controversial €40m (£34m) bonus to its top staff.
. . .
"At a time when the exchequer is putting a huge amount of capital into AIB, everyone has to be mindful of their responsibilities, and that includes management, the board and the government."
The bank said that its legal advice had been that it was obliged to pay the bonuses, but that the minister's intervention overtook that obligation. |
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U.N.: Opium production surges in SE Asia
By (UPI)
. . .
"Poverty and instability are two of the drivers which push farmers to grow, or sometimes return to growing, illicit crops," U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime Executive Director Yury Fedotov said of his agency's 2010 Southeast Asia survey that covers Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
Progress has been made in reducing opium poppy fields during the past decade, but recent global financial crisis may have tempted growers to enter the drug market, the report released by the United Nations in New York indicated. The rising price of opium over the last few years also played a role in making its cultivation an attractive option.
. . .
In terms of eradication 9,135 hectares of poppy fields in the region were destroyed in 2010, up by 85 percent from 4,939 hectares in the previous year. |
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Turkmens Open New Gas Export Market After Agreement on Trans-Afghan Pipe
By Stephen Bierman
Turkmenistan has moved closer to opening another market for its natural gas reserves after signing an agreement for a pipeline to India via Afghanistan.
Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov signed the preliminary accord with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and Indian Oil Minister Murli Deora during a meeting in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, on Dec. 11, according to the Turkmen state website.
The 1,735 kilometer project through Afghanistan, where the United States has fought an insurgency for eight years, envisions capacity of 33 billion cubic meters gas a year, according to the website. The Turkmen leader called the Asia Development Bank’s support a key element in signing the accord. |
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New Zealand Pike River mine blast firm in receivership
By (BBC)
he coal mine in New Zealand where 29 miners were killed in an explosion in November has gone into receivership.
The company operating the Pike River mine said it faced insolvency and could not repay its loans.
An executive said there would be an extended period before mining could resume. |
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EU shelves recognition of Palestine
By (Al Jazeera)
Foreign ministers from the European Union have said they would recognise a Palestinian state "when appropriate".
The ministers' declaration on Monday followed a call from Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, for the EU to recognise Palestine based on the 1967 borders.
Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 war. It withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005.
The EU foreign affairs council "reiterates its readiness, when appropriate, to recognise a Palestinian state", the European foreign ministers' said in a statement. |
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Group sues for gay troops' reinstatement
By (UPI)
A gay rights group filed a suit Monday in California demanding the U.S. government reinstate three gay service members dismissed from the armed forces.
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an organization based in Washington dedicated to repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" ban on gays and lesbians openly serving in the military, said the suit was a preview of a more aggressive legal strategy if the Senate doesn't repeal the law during the lame-duck session, The Hill reported.
"This filing is a shot across the bow as we prepare to pursue and sustain an aggressive far-reaching litigation strategy if the Senate fails to act this month to repeal the law," the organization's executive director, Aubrey Sarvis, said. |
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Shell Rejected by High Court on $54 Million Award in Oklahoma Lease Case
By Greg Stohr
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Royal Dutch Shell Plc unit’s appeal of a $54 million punitive damage award in a decades-old Oklahoma dispute over oil and gas profits.
Declining to consider putting tighter restrictions on damages, the justices today left intact an Oklahoma state court decision that said the award was within constitutional bounds.
The case stemmed from Shell’s failure from 1973 to 1985 to pay $750,000 to the owners of rights connected to an Oklahoma lease. The jury that considered the case added as much as 12 percent a year in interest, as allowed under an Oklahoma oil- and-gas statute, bringing the sum to $13 million. The jury then added the punitive damages for a total award of $67 million. |
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US to keep seeking 'candor' in diplomacy: Obama
By (AFP)
President Barack Obama vowed Monday the United States would renew its drive for "candor" and "trust" in its diplomacy, in remarks lent added relevance by the WikiLeaks document dump drama.
Obama did not specifically mention the blizzard of cables containing frank and sometimes highly critical dispatches by US envoys on their hosts abroad, as he addressed foreign diplomats and US foreign service officers.
But he vowed that his administration would renew its search for engagement, and was looking for open relationships with foreign nations -- and told US diplomats that he knew their work, and appreciated it. |
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Clock Ticking, Obama Urges Senate OK Of Arms Treaty
By Mike Shuster
The Obama administration is increasingly optimistic that the Senate will ratify the New START treaty, possibly this week.
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed earlier this year, and if ratified by the Senate and the Russian parliament, would bring deployed U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear weapons to 1,550 on each side. That would slash current deployment of these weapons by one-third.
. . .
The administration needs a lot of Republican support. It takes 67 votes to ratify a treaty. The treaty has 58 votes on the Democratic and independent side.
That leaves nine Republican votes to get to 67, a heretofore impossible task on major issues. |
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GM Offers $60K Buyout for Skilled Workers at 14 Plants
By Joseph Woodside
On the heels of an announcement made by General Motors (GM), along with the Chrysler Group, that an additional 1,000 engineers and researchers will be hired during run up to production on electric-run vehicles, GM is reportedly making an offer to "skilled workers" to buy them out.
In the report, GM has been offering a $60,000 buyout to skilled-trades workers, a segment of the GM workforce that traditionally make more money than an assembly line worker. . .
GM revealed that the company has around a "couple thousand" more skilled-trade workers than it needs. |
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Blinkered to Reality
By Jack M. Balkin
When uninsured individuals get sick, they borrow money from their families to pay for the costs of health care. They buy over-the-counter medicines. Above all, they go to emergency rooms and demand medical services. In 2008 these demands cost hospitals some $43 billion. All of these are significant effects on interstate commerce.
But according to Judge Hudson's decision striking down the individual mandate, these effects on commerce are completely irrelevant and Congress cannot take any of them into account. Congress cannot regulate uninsured individuals, Judge Hudson explained, because these individuals are not doing anything when they fail to buy insurance -- yet they are borrowing money, purchasing drugs, or visiting emergency rooms instead.
This is pure sophistry. Such arguments are reminiscent of the constitutional struggles over the New Deal, when the Supreme Court's conservative majority argued that no matter how great an effect labor strikes had on the national economy, Congress could not regulate working conditions because their effects on interstate commerce were only indirect. Judge Hudson's decision is yet another example of a long line of formalist jurisprudence that is blinkered to reality. |
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Tax-cut bill includes sales tax deduction for 9 states
By Les Blumenthal
The Senate on Monday cleared the way for a final vote on a $858 billion tax package that will allow residents of Washington and eight other states without state income taxes to deduct the sales tax they paid on their 2010 and 2011 federal returns.
. . .
The sales tax deduction saves Washington state's roughly 1 million taxpayers between $350 million and $500 million annually on their federal returns. By some estimates, the deduction has put an average of $600 more per year in the pockets of Washington state taxpayers. It was set to expire at the end of this year.
The deduction was eliminated in 1986 when the federal tax code was simplified. |
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
One night in 1981, after a long day spent working on the Private Eyes album, the crowd cleared out of Electric Lady Studios (New York City). Hall, Oates, engineer Neil Kernon and a bunch of instruments and amplifiers that had been left turned on were all that remained. For almost a year, a phrase — "I can't go for that, no can do" — had been knocking around Hall's head. Now it was moving into his body.
"Remember the old Roland CompuRhythm box?" he asks. "I turned to the Rock and Roll 1 preset, sat down at a Korg organ that happened to be lying there and started to play this bass line that was coming to me. It's the old recording studio story: The engineer heard what I was doing and turned on the tape machine. Good thing, because I'm the kind of person who will come up with an idea and forget it. The chords came together in about 10 minutes, and then I heard a guitar riff, which I asked John, who was sitting in the booth, to play."
. . .
As it turns out, this infectious frisson had a great influence on the pop music that would follow. Listening to "I Can't Go for That" after letting it drift out of the mind for a while, one can clearly identify this track — one of the first pop hits to feature a drum machine — as a precursor to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" and the generation of songs built on drum machine tracks that came in its wake.
"No question about it," Hall agrees. "Michael Jackson once said directly to me that he hoped I didn't mind that he copped that groove. That's okay; it's something we all do. . .
Back to what's happening:
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They Haven’t Learned
By (NYT)
The oil industry, its lobbyists and its Congressional allies are predictably furious at the Obama administration’s decision not to allow exploratory oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic coast. The decision was unquestionably the right one.
. . .
Industry’s biggest weakness is its inability to handle a blowout or other major accidents in deep water, where most new drilling is likely to occur. The BP well gushed nearly five million barrels of oil before it was capped. Initially, BP was seen as a uniquely careless company, but subsequent inquiries by a presidential commission suggest that the entire industry ignored safety precautions in pursuit of ever-higher gains.
As the commission co-chairman William Reilly said last week, companies that invested billions in sophisticated deepwater drilling techniques "devoted essentially nothing" to dealing with the consequences of disaster. |
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U.S cities becoming 'heat islands'
By (UPI)
The size and development patterns of northeastern U.S. cities make them unusually warm, more than 10 degrees warmer than rural areas, researchers say.
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A study of 42 cities in the Northeast showed a city's development pattern can have a significant impact on the strength of a city's heat island, the researchers said. Densely-developed cities with compact urban cores are more apt to produce strong urban heat islands than more sprawling, less intensely-developed cities, they found.
Development produces heat islands by replacing vegetation, particularly forests, with pavement, buildings, and other infrastructure that limits plant transpiration, an evaporative process that helps cool plant leaves and results in cooler air temperatures, NASA scientist Robert Wolfe said. |
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Feinstein pushes amendment to trim ethanol tax breaks
By Ben Geman
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is seeking support for an amendment to the Senate tax package that would reduce federal tax credits and import protections for ethanol, according to a Capitol Hill source.
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"Subsidizing blending ethanol into gasoline is fiscally indefensible. If the current subsidy is extended for five years, the Federal Treasury would pay oil companies at least $31 billion to use 69 billion gallons of corn ethanol that the Federal Renewable Fuels Standard already requires them to use. We cannot afford to pay industry for following the law," they wrote in a Nov. 30 letter to Senate leaders.
But Corn Belt senators and other ethanol advocates — who call the tax credits vital to farm-state economies — successfully won an extension of the credits in the larger package to extend Bush-era tax cuts and unemployment benefits. |
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Huge wave of coal plant closures coming, new reports find
By David Roberts
Congressional Republicans are going after Obama's EPA with both barrels blazing. Everyone who pays attention to politics knows that by now. What is somewhat less widely understood is why.
Here's what's at stake: new and emerging EPA regulations are going to force a huge wave of coal-plant retirements.
I've written quite a bit about this if you want background. The regulations will ratchet down standards for sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury, and other toxics, possibly restrict coal ash for the first time, and possibly require cooling towers (so that wastewater discharge doesn't fry river and stream ecosystems). Oh, and there's also those pending greenhouse gas rules, though their influence will be somewhat less in the short term.
. . .
Brattle's report digs into the upgrade-or-retire decision every coal plant in the U.S. will soon face, using a "retirement screening tool," and concludes that ...
... emerging EPA regulations on air quality and water for coal-fired power plants could result in over 50,000 MW of coal plant retirements and require an investment of up to $180 billion for remaining plants to comply with the likely mandates.
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David Lynch tackles post-traumatic stress with transcendental meditation
By Chris McGreal
. . .
"The soldiers are truly suffering," said Lynch, the director of Eraserhead. "No one knows what they've done, what they've experienced, what they've seen and their lives are a true nightmare."
Some studies say that about one third of soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer PTSD. Lynch's own foundation plans to teach 10,000 transcendental meditation (TM) techniques.
. . .
In a reflection of the scepticism about the claimed benefits for TM by some academic and medical studies, Eastwood was also keen to dispel any notion that it should not be taken seriously.
"I'm a great supporter of transcendental meditation," he said. "I've been using it for almost 40 years now. It's a great tool for stress ... especially considering the stress our men and women of the armed forces are going through. There's enough studies out there that show that TM is something that could benefit everybody." |
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New Evidence That Magnetism Is Driving Force Behind Superconductivity
By (ScienceDaily)
European and U.S. physicists this week are offering up the strongest evidence yet that magnetism is the driving force behind unconventional superconductivity. The findings by researchers from Rice University, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI-CPfS) in Dresden, Germany, and other institutions were published online December 13 in Nature Physics.
The findings follow more than three decades of research by the team that discovered unconventional superconductivity in 1979. That breakthrough, which was led by MPI-CPfS Director Frank Steglich, preceded by seven years the more widely publicized discovery of unconventional superconductivity at high temperatures. In the latest study, the team revisited the same heavy-fermion material -- a mix of cerium, copper and silicon -- that was used in 1979, applying new experimental techniques and theoretical knowledge unavailable 30 years ago.
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Classical superconductors, which were discovered almost a century ago, were the first materials known to conduct electrons without losing energy due to resistance. Electrons typically bump and ricochet from atom to atom as they travel down a wire, and this jostling leads to a loss of energy in the form of electrical resistance. Resistance costs the energy industry billions of dollars per year in lost power, so scientists have been keen to put superconducting wires to widespread use, but it hasn't been easy. |
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Science in Government Policy
By Kevin
In last week's editorial in Science, Bruce Alberts starts with a point that I think few here would disagree with: decisions in government need to be data-driven, and based on the best science available. This point has been made before, and it's certainly crucial, but the more crucial point is why the government currently doesn't pay much attention to science, and why there is wide-spread misunderstanding of what science means.
Most Americans have never met a scientist, and despite having been "taught science" at school, most have no real idea of how a scientific consensus is reached through continuous open debate and experiment.
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Every adult should have a base of scientific understanding about how the world works. But understanding the process through which scientific knowledge develops is equally critical. By the end of any introductory college science class--which can be an adult's final exposure to science--a student should have a realistic understanding of the nature of science.
I would go a step further: there's no reason to wait until college. |
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Stricter testing sought for gulf seafood
By (UPI)
. . .
A survey released by the National Resources Defense Council shows gulf residents consume far more seafood than the amounts used by the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to determine the level of concern over potentially cancer-causing contaminants in seafood as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported Monday.
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The FDA's levels are being measured against a national average of consumption. In the case of shrimp, it's about one meal a week as small as 3 ounces, or about four jumbo shrimp.
The NRDC survey showed that many gulf residents consume three to 12 times that amount. |
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Smartphone Technology Improves Prosthetic Limbs
By (ScienceDaily)
Losing a limb can be a devastating experience, and while electrically powered prostheses can serve as a replacement for a lost arm, they are notoriously difficult to operate, and will never fully replace normal hand function. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) are working to improve this situation through the use of smartphone technology. The technology, called an accelerometer, gives users a better sense of the orientation of their artificial limb -- thus making the limb easier to operate.
An accelerometer is a tool for detecting changes in gravity or velocity, and enables a device to determine its orientation. Accelerometers are relatively inexpensive, and are widely used in everything from video consoles to smartphones. The accelerometer in your smartphone helps it determine whether you want to look at a photograph in a portrait or landscape format, for example.
. . .
"A simple task, like picking up a cup of tea, might prove difficult," says Stavdahl. "If you try to do this when the arm is in an awkward position, that is, a position that you haven't practiced with before, the muscles will start sending unfamiliar signals to the prosthesis. This will often lead to the prosthesis doing the opposite of what the user intended -- and the cup will fall to the ground."
An accelerometer helps to compensate for these unfamiliar signals, reducing the user's frustration. |
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Stop Me Before I Facebook Again
By Vanessa Romo
Being surrounded by a nonstop stream of information hasn't exactly helped us focus or concentrate on our work. But a new software application can help social media addicts kick the habit.
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"We get a serotonin hit from this," says Kathy Gills, who teaches about the intersection of digital media technologies and social institutions at the University of Washington. "So those of us who are susceptible to that high keep getting these little Pavlovian dog responses. It's new, it's shiny...wheee! So, if that's part of your personality or genetic makeup, then these technologies can be something that you need to consciously think about managing."
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Software called LeechBlock lets users choose specific sites to block. Turn on Isolator and you can cover up your desktop and all the icons on it. Dark Room and WriteRoom leave you with the equivalent of a blank typewriter page.
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Enable Anti-Social and it's impossible to access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and any other site you specify — without rebooting your computer. |
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Navy Railgun Fires 33-megajoule Shot
By Shane McGlaun
Much of the buzz in the defense community tends to focus on the Air Force with major aircraft programs like the F-35 and the ongoing tanker debacle. Other branches of the military are also working in some very interesting projects for new weapon systems.
The Navy announced last week that it hit a milestone with its railgun project. The railgun fires a very fast projectile that is accelerated with electricity rather than gunpowder or explosives. The weapon payload uses kinetic energy to destroy targets rather than a high-explosive warhead.
The Navy milestone hit last week was the world-record 33-megajoul shot from the electromagnetic Railgun aboard the Navy Surface Center Dahlgren Division. A megajoule is a measurement of energy associated with a mass traveling at a certain velocity. A one-ton vehicle moving at 100mph is a single megajoule of energy. |
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CDs, DVDs, Thumb-Drives Banned from SIPRNET Under Threat of Court-Martial
By Jason Mick
On Friday, December 3, 2010 the U.S. military rolled out a strict set of changes to try to prevent leaks of classified missions information to foreign sources.
Excerpts of a memo published in Wired magazine's Danger Room blog are attributed to Maj. Gen. Richard Webber, commander of Air Force Network Operations. The memo states that airmen will "immediately cease use of removable media on all systems, servers, and stand alone machines residing on SIPRNET."
Similar memos went out to members of the other U.S. military branches. Failure to comply could lead to a court-martial. States the memo, "Users will experience difficulty with transferring data for operational needs which could impede timeliness on mission execution...[but] military personnel who do not comply ... may be punished under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice." |
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Iraqi Christians Flee Wave Of Targeted Violence
By Kelly McEvers
In Iraq, a wave of attacks targeting Christians is leading to an exodus from Baghdad and other cities. Before the 2003 U.S. invasion, there were nearly 1 million Christians in the country. That number was cut in half in the past several years.
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Officials in France and Germany have offered asylum to a limited number of Iraqi Christians. But diplomats in Iraq say that is a dangerous game. They say singling out Christians only makes them more of a target.
. . .
Iraqi politicians repeatedly make speeches about how the government should help the Christians. But so far little has been done.
Christians are now seeking refuge in the region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq. Protected by Kurdish forces, it's seen as a safe haven. |
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Inside 'Anonymous': tales from within the group taking aim at Amazon and Mastercard
By Charles Arthur
. . . I spent a big chunk of Thursday inside the Internet Relay Chat forums where Anonymous makes its decisions - and what a mess that turns out to be. I was led there not by the person I was speaking to above, but by someone else who had got in touch because he felt that the group was being misrepresented, and that the public comments of "Coldblood" were rubbish, the commentary of someone who had no right to be called a "spokesman" for the group.
. . .
My main guide we'll call an0n (his chosen name for our conversation, though not his online handle). He's been using b for about four years. He showed me how to get onto the IRC rooms where the chatter was trying to identify the next target - this at a time when the Mastercard web server had just been knocked offline.
. . .
They get lost in the flow: these chatrooms have up to 3,000 people, and the questions come in a stream and pass by in a river of commentary, observations, links and jokes. You wouldn't say that it's directed; more that it swings in various directions like a flock of birds, apparently aware of its own vector but unable to force it on any of its members.
My guide pointed out that the Anonymous group is conflicted from its core, because it's an outgrowth of people who themselves have come from b, which means that many aren't that interested in morality. They're in it for the lulz - or they're into whatever Anonymous and its associated scenes are doing for the money. Which means that the idea of attacking Amazon, or PayPal, or Twitter, over a moral or ethical issue is something of a new experience for the group. Usually they're into tormenting people. |
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Chernobyl: now open to tourists
By Peter Walker
Already been to North Korea? Hiking in Afghanistan a little bit too last year? Fear not. Tourism has a new frontier: the site of the world's biggest civilian nuclear disaster.
From next year the heavily contaminated area around the Chernobyl power plant will be officially open to tourists with an interest in post-apocalyptic vistas, late-period Soviet history, or both.
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While the area remains heavily contaminated, a ministry spokeswoman said, tourism routes had been drawn up which would cover the main sights while steering clear of the dangerous spots. |
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Vigilante jihad: Inside Indonesia’s Islamic Defenders Front
By Patrick Winn
. . .
After the three-decade reign of strongman Gen. Suharto came to an end 12 years ago, society went wild with freedom, said Tubagus Muhammed Siddiq, 53, a white-robed Islamic scholar and Jembatan Besi native.
Throughout the island of Java, he said, prostitution, gambling and boozing crept from the shadows and into the streets. Inept police did nothing, he said.
. . .
With other fundamentalists around the city, Siddiq co-founded a vigilante network called the "Islamic Defenders Front." Their legions of young, Muslim males torched brothels, ordered drinkers off the corners and beat back resisters with wooden rods.
Today, the Islamic Defenders Front is much more than a glorified neighborhood watch. They have positioned themselves as Indonesia’s moral police — a self-proclaimed, 15-million strong "pressure group" — sworn to rid Indonesia of sin. |
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Happiness doesn't increase with growing wealth of nations, finds study
By Alok Jha
Getting richer does not make a country happier in the long run, according to the largest-ever review of the links between a nation's wealth and the wellbeing of its citizens.
The researchers looked at life satisfaction data from 37 countries collected over various time periods, from 12 to 34 years, up to 2005. The sample included nations that are developed and developing, rich and poor, ex-Communist and capitalist.
It was specifically designed to test the paradox that although people in richer countries tend to be happier on average, as a country gets richer its inhabitants don't necessarily become happier.
. . .
"Simply stated, the happiness-income paradox is this: at a point in time both among and within countries, happiness and income are positively correlated," he said. "But, over time, happiness does not increase when a country's income increases." |
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