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The bad news seems to be that America's image throughout the Muslim world is continuing to erode, and that, " 70 percent of Palestinian respondents saying that suicide bombing that targets civilians in defense of Islam can be often, or at least sometimes, justified."
Stating the obvious Pew president, Andrew Kohut, called that "a very big number".

Here is the link to the transcript and video.

Posted by Edd at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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When geocentrists marry it seems that there are fewer of us heliocentrists left to hold fast to our marginalized position in this solar system we call home. The fear is that not only are geocentrists marrying, but they may be breeding as well. How else to explain this curious bit of data…

In this year’s General Social Survey individuals were asked this provocative question:
Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?

And survey says…

Earth around sun 73.6%
Sun around earth 18.3%
Don’t Know 8.0%
Refused to answer 0.1%

Yikes! Almost one-fifth of us are basking in the Dark Ages.

More here at orgtheory dot net. Check out the link. It just gets worse.

Posted by Edd at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not long at all, as it happens – just 13 milliseconds. The research, originally published in the Journal of Vision, is summarized nicely here in Cognitive Daily. The article also has an example of the images used in the research.
Turns out we use memory more than perception when making very quick, rough assessments of emotional content, i.e., positive, negative and neutral.

Posted by Edd at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So just how many ones and zeros are there in the world of web pages, digital photos, chats, calls, and e-mails? The answer is 161 exabites, or 161 billion (that’s a b) gigabytes.
Or another way to think about it is to imagine all the books ever written in all the languages in the history of the world, and then multiply that number by 3 million. So I guess the answer is “a lot”.
Here are the details of the study.

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2 ounces

The question? After the jump…

Continue reading "And the Answer Is! …" »

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The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient geared device (with more than 30 geared wheels) found in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece about a hundred years ago. It may be a much more intricate computer-like instrument than previously thought. In fact some call it the “first computer”.
According to an article in the NYT the researchers said, “their findings showed that the inscriptions related to lunar-solar motions, and the gears were a representation of the irregularities of the Moon’s orbital course, as theorized by the astronomer Hipparchos. They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C.”
The technology was somehow lost, and it was not for another thousand years that an instrument matching that level of sophistication was “invented” again in Baghdad.
Here is the article in Nature.

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Does a preference for George Bush as president make you crazy, or do you have to be crazy to prefer this man to be in office?
Not sure which is the chicken and which the egg here, but there is a study that seems to indicate that the crazier you are, the more likely you are to prefer W to be president. Why? Well, here is one possibility according to the study's author:

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”

Update: The research was performed at Southern Connecticut State University. The mental patients live in Connecticut. George W was born in Connecticut. Correlation? Causality? Go figure.

Posted by Edd at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Almost twenty years ago, we received a note from my son’s first-grade teacher one day. The note said that he had asked her this question: “Where is reality?”, and she wrote that she did not know what to say.
It is still an intriguing question. Maybe better than its sibling: What is reality? Neuroscience is an amazing new field. If I had had the kind of brain that could understand the brain, I would have liked to have studied that in my youth.
And just when we thought this was all some California woo-woo, What the Bleep kind of thing, along comes some scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK who did some experiments with Virtual Reality (VR) on amputees with phantom limb pain. Turns out that, when these patients experience a 3-D simulation with all their limbs intact, they can trick the brain into thinking that the limb is still there. They are able to reduce and even eliminate the pain that way.
So, it is still a good question – Where’s reality?
Here is the article.

Posted by Edd at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, is the physical impairment that makes it difficult to recognize faces, including one’s own. Once considered a rare brain disorder that was the result of a stroke or head injury, now thanks to the internet, many of those who suffer from this disorder are able to connect on-line, and researchers are beginning to learn just how prevalent it is.
Some data indicates that as many as 6 million Americans (roughly 2%) are face blind. One startling implications of this has to do with national security. Just how many screeners and ID checkers out there are face blind? No one knows.
Here is a link to the research site, faceblind.org. And Wired magazine has an extensive piece about one particular researcher in the field. Check it out here.

Posted by Edd at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mother Jones Magazine has a new article out that takes a fresh look at some recent research into global warming, and how we all really are in this together.
The author shares some hopeful anecdotes from some of the very far and near reaches of nature to show what kind of a mess we are in, and some ways for us to get out of this predicament without either becoming post toasties or popsicles.
Check it out here.

Posted by Edd at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems that one reliable way to tell Bush’s approval rating is to look at the price of gas at the pump. PROFESSOR POLLKATZ's Pool of Polls has a link to a graph showing how closely the two track together. Now, we all know that correlation is not causality, but it will be interesting to see what gas prices are like around Election Day, and then what happens afterwards.
Here is the graph.

Posted by Edd at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Canaries and Mines...

Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey reported in a lecture entitled, The Antarctic Canary - the human impact on climate change that,

“Ice cores reveal the Earth's natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change. Over the last 200 years human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range and we have no analogue for what will happen next."

They urge the rapid development of new technologies to reduce the impact we humans are having on our climate. It cannot come too soon.

Posted by Edd at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With all the ink being sacrificed about the dangers of flying, it is good to note that it is still much safer than slipping into something comfortable – like a Toyota or a Honda. Just how much safer? Researchers Michael Sivak and Michael J. Flannagan published their findings in American Scientist Online in 2003.
So how much riskier is driving than flying? Their findings:

... we estimate that driving the length of a typical nonstop segment is approximately 65 times as risky as flying.

Posted by Edd at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it is big. Today, according to Technorati (a company that tracks such things) there are more than 50,000,000 blogs in the blogosphere. In the beginning of 2003 there were none. The blogosphere is doubling in size at an ever-increasing rate – 75,000 new blogs created every day.
Here is the graph.

Posted by Edd at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While we worry about shampoo and hair gel getting zapped by an iPod by a passenger in the airline seat next to us, here is something actually worth a rapid heartbeat or two. A recent poll published in the journal Science showed:

A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries [and] finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower.

And this from the study co-author, Jon Miller of Michigan State University:

American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close.

So while other countries are cutting at the edge of science and stemming a few cells here and there, we in the US are thwarting such efforts, and even refusing to “believe” in such matters.

Now that’s terrifying.

Posted by Edd at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What makes one face more beautiful than another? And what makes one image of the same face more or less attractive than another image? Some researchers in Tel Aviv have been working on a Digital Face Beautification project, and judging from some of the before and after pictures, they seemed to have cracked the code.

Posted by Edd at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The state’s Climate Change Center has released a report, Our Changing Climate, about the future climate considerations, and the results are truly alarming for everyone in the state. Water shortages, more wildfires in rural areas, longer heat waves, flooding in the coastal regions, parched farmland in the Central Valley. No part of the state gets a reprieve. While California is burning, the federal government is concerned with gay marriage and stem cell research. We are so hosed.

Posted by Edd at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a latest Harris poll, half the American people believe that Iraq had WMDs when the administration chose to invade the country. This is up from 36% last year. Pollsters find this “surprising”. The Washington Times were all over it. Go figure.

Posted by Edd at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is difficult to calculate the true coast of “being professional”, i.e. buying into the notion that it is possible to leave your emotional life at home when you come to work. Or even the more bizarre notion of somehow leaving your "personal life" at the front door of the office, or the front gate of the plant. Some researchers in Australia are working on those calculations with one such emotion – depression, and the
price tag is a steep one.

So, how much do you figure depression costs companies per year?

Here are the numbers.

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... shitless. According to researchers at Harvard, shy folks have different activity in the part of the brain called the amygdala than those outgoing, bubbly, popular, small-talking, insufferably easy going “other people”, who co-inhabit our planet.
It is the amygdala that is stimulated when we are afraid, or need to be vigilant. Mostly nowadays it is activated when we are cornered at a cocktail party desperately trying to think of something to say that won’t sound completely stupid. Thanks God for that amygdala!! Here is their report.

Posted by Edd at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alternative fuels are much in the news these days. Brazil is well on its way (if not there already) to complete energy independence. They are doing it with ethanol formed from sugar cane. As it happens, sugar cane as a fuel source is much more efficient than the corn based solution so favored by… well, by corn producers (think ADM ‘Supermarket to the World”) and their congressional representatives (think of the vermillion states in the midwest).

Steve Stolt is an economist who crunched some numbers that tell why corn based ethanol is a non-starter for our cars.

Here are the numbers.

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The United States is in an unusual club. The other members are China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This is the club responsible for 94% of the 2,148 executions last year. 18 other countries worldwide took the lives of the other 6%.
To get a closer look at the numbers, go here.

Posted by Edd at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In ways deeply mysterious a times it seems that monuments hold the memories of past generations. Just having them around can be heartening at times. They allow us to hold on to the reality that others were indeed here before us. They too struggled and fought and loved, and died. And they left evidence of their existence.
Many monuments around the works are threatened because of disregard, lack of funds, in attention, war and strife – all sorts of reasons. Some monuments do fade form the world, and that is also how it is. But what is our responsibility, the caretakers for this time, to maintain those monuments that are old beyond reckoning, and the ones that hold sadness and grief beyond measure?
For the list of the 100 most threatened, click here.
For our New York City friends, you might want to click here.
And for our friends in England, you may want to see how Saint Mary’s and early church in Stow, Lincolnshire is faring. Here is that link.
In Iraq it is the entire country.

Posted by Edd at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Smithsonian Magazine has a fabulous article, Grace Under Fire, about the efforts by a small group of men to save the Mint during the Great Fire of 1906. As the lede says, there were two survivors that day – the Mint and the US economy.
A very good read.

Posted by Edd at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Science Daily reports that Dr Samuel Sommers from Tufts University has been researching race and the criminal justice system for many years. His most recent study involved participants on a mock jury to see if juried comprised of all white jurors acted differently than juries comprised of both blacks and whites. The results: “…diverse juries deliberated longer, raised more facts about the case, and conducted broader and more wide-ranging deliberations... They also made fewer factual errors in discussing evidence and when errors did occur, those errors were more likely to be corrected during the discussion."
(In the article there is also a link to the PDF to download the entire study.)

Posted by Edd at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Foreign Policy’s latest on-line issue has an important, and fairly sweeping article, called The Return of Patriarchy. It is about the impact of the falling birthrates in developed countries. It looks like lots more red states on the horizon – more conservative, and more of them. The author, Phillip Longman, makes a strong case that, from a cultural evolutionary perspective, the decline in population leads to a rise in the number of families with conservative values. He also presents a much more nuanced view of patriarchy than merely male dominance. Longman asserts that, “Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation.”
Worth a peak. Click here.

Posted by Edd at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"God created man exactly how Bible describes it."
Gallup says 53% of American agree. 53%?? Holy Intelligent Design, Batman, by my calculations that’s more than half!!
And here is the good news, such as it is… 12 % agreed with the statement, "God had no part."
For the rest of the rather bleak state of the empirical union, look here. [Summary}
Or you can log on to the Gallup site (fee based) here.

Posted by Edd at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, the connection may not be as obvious as it seems. Are Internet “power users” in terms of getting their news from on-line more civically engaged than the occasional user? Turns out that the answer, although complex, comes down to: No.

Here is the article, Log On, Tune Off? The Complex Relationship Between Internet Use and Political Activism, from the Personal Democracy Forum..

Posted by Edd at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The answer may be: No it is not too late, but it is getting very, very late.
The International Crisis Group has released a fairly thorough report outlining what can be done (and in their minds must be done) to keep Iraq from falling into a sectarian abyss.

Here is the quote that from the Executive Summary that got my attention:
“Today, however, the more significant and pressing question is what still can be done to halt Iraq’s downward slide and avert civil war. Late in the day, the U.S. administration seems to have realised that a fully inclusive process – not a rushed one – is the sine qua non for stabilisation. This conversion, while overdue, is nonetheless extremely welcome.”

Real Dialogue, that is geared toward an inclusive society with shared power and interdependencies built into the governmental structures, and where reconciliation is possible seems like the only hope. The question now might be: Who has the leadership capabilities and skills to convene and sustain such a process?

The report also has is extremely pragmatic recommendations as well. Consider this recommendation to the international community:
"Finally – and regrettable though it is that this is necessary – the international community, including neighbouring states, should start planning for the contingency that Iraq will fall apart, so as to contain the inevitable fall-out on regional stability and security. Such an effort has been a taboo, but failure to anticipate such a possibility may lead to further disasters in the future."

Again, here’s the link.

Posted by Edd at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So here is the question that some researchers from Hong Kong posed:
Would you rather pay $10 and have free shipping or pay $5 and pay $6 for shipping?
And the answer is… here.

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