From The Week magazine, three on-line psychology sites:
Youjustgetme.com rates your personality in categories such as outgoingness and empathy—and lets you find out how others see you. The “I Just Get Myself” test comprises “40 easy questions but delivers a surprisingly insightful assessment.”
Implicit.harvard.edu/implicit, the homepage for Harvard’s Project Implicit, tries to show how unconscious biases can effect our decisions. It currently features a test designed to uncover bias about race and other issues raised by this year’s presidential race.
Sanityscore.com is “one of the best online mental health resources.” This simple test assesses aspects of mental health, “including your risk of depression, anxiety, and other emotional disorders.” Just don’t treat it as a replacement for a professional assessment.
There are giant strides to be made in the Third World by providing appropriate technology. Envirofit.org, for example, now has available clean-burning cookstoves that use charcoal or biomass fuels. From the link:
More than three billion people, or half the world’s population, cook in their homes using traditional fire and stoves, burning biomass fuels like wood, dung and crop waste. Day in and day out, for hours at a time, families breathe in lethal fumes from these cooking fires. Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) currently claims the lives of 1.5 million people a year worldwide, or one person every 20 seconds. Women and children make up the vast majority of these deaths due to their increased exposure in the home.
OUR SOLUTION
Independent UK charity Shell Foundation and leading US environmental nonprofit Envirofit International today announced a ground-breaking partnership that has the potential to significantly reduce the number of global deaths caused by Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) – the smoke generated by traditional fires and stoves used in developing world homes. Envirofit will be tasked with handling the scale-up and spin off of the Shell Foundation’s Breathing Space program, which was founded in 2002 to achieve significant global reductions in IAP. This new partnership is part of the Foundation’s mission to see 10 million clean-burning stoves sold in five countries over the next five years. The Foundation is providing Envirofit with investment and organizational support to form an independent global entity. In turn, Envirofit International, working with their technology partner Colorado State University’s Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory, will design, develop, market and distribute clean cookstoves that are engineered to emit significantly less toxic emissions and use less fuel.
For more information please see the full press release, located here
I blogged earlier about the new DVD players that upscale the resolution to exploit what new TV sets can deliver. The price then was $180. I note the prices now (Toshiba and Sony) are around $75-80.
Edge has a fascinating video interview with philosopher Alva Noë who discusses his work on the philosophy of consciousness, arguing that we will be led astray if we think of consciousness solely as a brain process that happens within us without reference to how we act in the world.
Noë is primarily arguing for a form of embodied cognition which argues that the mind and brain can only be understood as situated in the world in which we interact. The function of the mind is inherently connected to the sorts of tasks we need to do to survive on a day-to-day basis.
This view has been bolstered by experimental work which has shown that we perceive the world differently depending on the task we are doing or how we intend to act.
For example, in one of my favourite studies, psychologist Dennis Proffitt and his colleagues found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.
The temperature might not be the only thing plummeting this winter. Many people also will experience a decrease in their vitamin D levels, which can play a role in heart disease, according to a new review article in Circulation. Vitamin D deficiency results in part from reduced exposure to sunlight, which is common during cold weather months when days are shorter and more time is spent indoors.
“Chronic vitamin D deficiency may be a culprit in heart disease, high blood pressure and metabolic syndrome,” said Sue Penckofer, PhD, RN, study author and professor, Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, Loyola University Chicago.
The review article cited a number of studies that linked vitamin D deficiency to heart disease. These studies found rates of severe disease or death may be 30 to 50 percent higher among sun-deprived individuals with heart disease.
Penckofer and colleagues concluded that diet alone is not sufficient to manage vitamin D levels. Treatment options to correct this level, such as vitamin D2 or D3, may decrease the risk of severe disease or death from cardiovascular disorders. The preferred range in the body is 30 – 60 ng/mL of 25(OH) vitamin D.
“Most physicians do not routinely test for vitamin D deficiency,” said Penckofer. “However, most experts would agree that adults at risk for heart disease and others who experience fatigue joint pain or depression should have their vitamin D levels measured.”
A commenter recently expressed the hope that those who find coal a bad energy source in the light of global warming would all die by freezing—I hope he gets help for such unwarranted anger and hostility before he harms someone. But certainly coal would be a good energy source if only we could sequester the CO2 it produces. MIT is working on that:
Construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States is in danger of coming to a standstill, partly due to the high cost of the requirement — whether existing or anticipated — to capture all emissions of carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas. But an MIT analysis suggests an intermediate step that could get construction moving again, allowing the nation to fend off growing electricity shortages using our most-abundant, least-expensive fuel while also reducing emissions. Instead of capturing all of its CO2 emissions, plants could capture a significant fraction of those emissions with less costly changes in plant design and operation, the MIT analysis shows.
“Our approach — ‘partial capture’ — can get CO2 emissions from coal-burning plants down to emissions levels of natural gas power plants,” said Ashleigh Hildebrand, a graduate student in chemical engineering and the Technology and Policy Program. “Policies such as California’s Emissions Performance Standards could be met by coal plants using partial capture rather than having to rely solely on natural gas, which is increasingly imported and subject to high and volatile prices.”
Hildebrand will present her findings on Nov. 18 at the 9th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies in Washington, DC. Her co-author is Howard J. Herzog, principal research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative and chair of the conference organizing committee.
One of Britain’s most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a “world vigilante”.
Lord Bingham, in his first major speech since retiring as the senior law lord, rejected the then attorney general’s defence of the 2003 invasion as fundamentally flawed.
Contradicting head-on Lord Goldsmith’s advice that the invasion was lawful, Bingham stated: “It was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had.” Adding his weight to the body of international legal opinion opposed to the invasion, Bingham said that to argue, as the British government had done, that Britain and the US could unilaterally decide that Iraq had broken UN resolutions “passes belief”.
Water vapor is known to be Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change. Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
With new observations, the scientists confirmed experimentally what existing climate models had anticipated theoretically. The research team used novel data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite to measure precisely the humidity throughout the lowest 10 miles of the atmosphere. That information was combined with global observations of shifts in temperature, allowing researchers to build a comprehensive picture of the interplay between water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other atmosphere-warming gases. The NASA-funded research was published recently in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters.
“Everyone agrees that if you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, then warming will result,” Dessler said. “So the real question is, how much warming?”
The answer can be found by estimating the magnitude of water vapor feedback. Increasing water vapor leads to warmer temperatures, which causes more water vapor to be absorbed into the air. Warming and water absorption increase in a spiraling cycle.
Water vapor feedback can also amplify the warming effect of other greenhouse gases, such that the warming brought about by increased carbon dioxide allows more water vapor to enter the atmosphere.
“The difference in an atmosphere with a strong water vapor feedback and one with a weak feedback is enormous,” Dessler said.
Mary Kane reports in the Washington Independent on a bad development:
All during the presidential campaign, candidates of both parties practically tripped over themselves declaring their support for America’s veterans and vowing to do all they could to support them.
But I never heard either President-elect Obama or Sen. John McCain talk about the devastating financial problems that face some of the newest returning veterans, who find themselves readjusting to life, recovering from injuries – and facing foreclosure, the New York Timessays.
From the Times:
While few Americans are sheltered from the jolt of the recent economic crisis, the nation’s newest veterans, particularly the wounded, are being hit especially hard. The triple-whammy of injury, unemployment and waiting for disability claims to be processed has forced many veterans into foreclosure, or sent them teetering on its edge, according to veterans’ organizations.
This sad situation also is the inevitable result of the targeting by subprime lenders of military families. Bloomberg reported last spring that foreclosures in towns near military bases were four times higher than the national average. Until a recent crackdown, payday lenders regularly clustered around military bases. Soldiers and their families were subprime targets because they moved often, they had modest salaries, and some had little financial experience.
Michelle Obama has said she’ll use her role as First Lady to highlight the problems of military families. It’s about time the financial stress they face, and their vulnerable position as sitting ducks for the subprime lending industry, gets the attention it deserves.
The rule of law requires that those who break the law, even if they have lots of money and/or lots of power, still must answer for their offenses in a court of law. (It also requires that suspects and even criminals get appropriate protections under the law, including the right to legal counsel and a fair trial.) Obama seems less than interested in pursuing lawbreakers in the Bush Administration, of whom there are many. Certainly efforts to prosecute former officials for crimes they committed, including serious offenses such as war crimes, would roil the Republicans and lead to their fighting every initiative the new Administration proposes. (Of course, they may well oppose new initiatives in any event.)
At any rate, Obama seems to want to forget about the broken laws, but voices are being raised that this is not appropriate in America or in any country that pretends to respect the rule of law. Here are a couple of good examples of those who believe that justice should be served:
I made a pork shoulder following, more or less, the pork belly recipe I linked to earlier. So I had to get some dry cider. I went to the local liquor store, not expecting success, but he had several brands. I got Blackthorn, made in England, a liter of very tasty sparkling dry cider for $4.60. Not bad at all. In fact, this will be something I return to. It seemed noticeably less alcoholic than wine. A good thing to have on the table for Thanksgiving, I think.
I greatly enjoyed watching Unconditional Love last night, a comedy starring Kathy Bates, Rupert Everett, Jonathan Pryce, and Dan Ackroyd. It’s really quite wonderful. Each scene starts totally normal but then goes that little extra distance to become weird (and funny).
It’s always a pleasure to see evolution in action with the rise of a new species. That process is now underway with the apple maggot. Creationists, rejoice at the additioinal confirmation of the theory of evolution.
The Gold-Dachs arrived yesterday, in the tin shown above. A small folder enclosed stated its virtues, so it was definitely Gold-Dachs, which I lathered with the Rooney Style 2. The usual excellent lather and (so far as I could tell) the same scent as the Gold-Dachs Rivivage I used yesterday. The Merkur Progress provided an excellent shave—not sure which blade it carries, but it did the job. And the Dominica Bay Rum was exactly the right finish.
Here is a photo of yesterday’s soap vs. today’s. You’ll see that they look identical, even to the small shield embossed on the soap. I think it’s the same stuff. (You can click image for a closer view.)
Written for the man who wants to enjoy his shave. User comment: "I bought this as a gift for my fiancé, along with a wet-shaving starting kit and a safety razor. He DEVOURED this book, and finds himself reading it again and again. He finally enjoys shaving. This book has helped him figure out so many things about wet shaving, and has recommended it to all of his friends and family. Truly a great source of information for any man."
