March 2012
92 posts
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February 2012
98 posts
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Wealthy More Likely To Lie, Cheat: Research
Maybe, as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, the rich really are different. They’re more likely to behave badly, according to seven experiments that weighed the ethics of hundreds of people.
The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and...
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2012 or Never
Of the various expressions of right-wing hysteria that have flowered over the past three years—goldbuggery, birtherism, death panels at home and imaginary apology tours by President Obama abroad—perhaps the strain that has taken deepest root within mainstream Republican circles is the terror that the achievements of the Obama administration may be irreversible, and that the time remaining...
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The myth of the eight-hour sleep
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.
“People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before...
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Workers of the world: Invest!
When the Brookings Institution issued its blueprint for a manufacturing revival this month, it was noteworthy that one of its four key recommendations was for “an increased role for workers and communities in creating and sharing the gains from innovative manufacturing.” Germany provides the model for how a high-wage country can still have a globally competitive manufacturing sector, and like...
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On Bailouts, Romney Is Intellectually Bust:... →
By all accounts, Mitt Romney is a smart businessman with a sophisticated understanding of how economies work. So why is he so tied up in knots over basic questions of government spending in a recession and the limits of the free market?
Because he’s running for president in a party that has lost its economic common sense, its political bearings and probably Michigan’s electoral votes.
Here’s the...
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“If you want to know why an entire group of people are choosing to behave in a...”
– Julian Sanchez making the nuanced case that despite a conservative desire to emphasize personal responsibility in economic outcomes, societal and cultural forces constrain the set of individual choices available. The either/ or dichotomy fails as usual, but a complex interweaving of layered factors...
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Playboy Interview - Paul Krugman →
I’ve gotten some grief for my remark that if it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves, we’d have full employment in a year and a half. But that’s true. Why couldn’t we do that to repair our sewer systems and put an extra tunnel under the Hudson instead of to fight imaginary space aliens? Everybody in the world except us is doing a...
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“The United States is finished with the business of sending large land armies to...”
– Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.
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Shareable: Cultivating a Sustainable Community:... →
Only by working together can we create a coherently sustainable community out of the fragmented entropy we have inherited. Not the greatest genius among us is competent to concoct a grand scheme that will solve all our problems and meet all our needs. Top-down plans have always suffered from the law of unintended consequences. But with everyone connecting, communicating, and co-creating together...
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Invisibility cloak could protect buildings from...
The prospect of cloaking devices has become more realistic in recent years as scientists have developed means of making objects invisible to certain wavelengths in limited circumstances.
Now researchers from Manchester University say a similar approach could be used to defend structures against earthquakes and other natural disasters.
In the same way that cloaking devices make objects...
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Why Curation Is Important to the Future of... →
Despite shrinking newsrooms and overworked reporters, journalism is in fact thriving. The art of information gathering, analysis and dissemination has arguably been strengthened over the last several years, and given rise and importance to a new role: the journalistic curator.
The concept of curating news is not new. One can look to the supply-chain process of a news organization to see...
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Sending DNA robot to do the job
Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have developed a robotic device made from DNA that could potentially seek out specific cell targets within a complex mixture of cell types and deliver important molecular instructions, such as telling cancer cells to self-destruct. Inspired by the mechanics of the body’s own immune system, the...
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“It’s understandable that politicians say this: it was America’s experience in...”
– How to Restore the Middle Class (via azspot)
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Watch
Freedom of and From Religion
by Bill Moyers
So here we are once again, arguing over how to honor religious liberty without it becoming the liberty to impose on others moral beliefs they don’t share. Our practical solution is the one Barack Obama embraced the other day: protect freedom of religion — and protect freedom from religion. Can’t get more American than that.
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Romney’s Olympic earmarks under fire
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has hammered rival Rick Santorum on his support for federal pork as a senator, but Romney, too, is guilty of nabbing Washington cash, especially while heading the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Romney sought congressional directed funds — known as earmarks — to help build transportation systems and augment security operations for the Games and...
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Robert Reich: Manufacturing Illusions →
robertreich:
Suddenly, manufacturing is back – at least on the election trail. But don’t be fooled. The real issue isn’t how to get manufacturing back. It’s how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren’t at all the same thing.
Republicans have become born-again champions of American manufacturing. This…
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Successful human tests for first wirelessly...
Medication via remote-control instead of a shot? Scientists implanted a microchip in seven women that did just that, oozing out the right dose of a bone-strengthening drug once a day without them even noticing. Implanted medicine is a hot field, aiming to help patients better stick to their meds and to deliver those drugs straight to the body part that needs them.
“You could...
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Fox News 'course correction' rankles some
As a white, male, middle-aged conservative talk radio host from Virginia, John Fredericks is something close to the Platonic ideal of a Fox News fan.
And until last year, he was one. But then Fox’s treatment of the Republican primary race — the presentation of Karl Rove as a political analyst despite his having “thrown in for Romney” and Sean Hannity’s clear ties to the Republican...
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Al Gore: How to modify capitalism so it takes a...
The practice of companies issuing earnings guidance every quarter should be stopped, in the name of long-term and environmentally sustainable investing, according to Al Gore.
Quarterly reporting is mandatory for public companies in the US, and has been increasingly widely adopted in Europe and other regions. But the practice of issuing guidance on future earnings at the same time leads to...
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Don’t Mock the Artisanal-Pickle Makers
Like many successful entrepreneurs in the United States, Woehrle followed what seems like an ancient business model: making things by hand. He rejected the high-volume, low-margin commodity business in which ConAgra and PepsiCo compete against each other with their Slim Jim and Matador jerky products. Instead, Kings County found a niche in which engaged consumers will pay a premium for a...
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Spray-on Nanoparticle Mix Turns Trees Into...
A small company called ChamTech Operations based in Utah has developed a nanoparticle mix that can be sprayed on any vertical object—like a tree—and make that object act as a high-powered antenna.
Not only can the sprayed-on nanoparticles make trees into antennas, but it can also extend the range of an existing antenna by a factor of 100, according to one of the principals of the company,...
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Poor, White, and Republican
Is it useful to make generalizations about whole classes of people? We all know the reasons why it’s not—they stoke prejudice, crush nuance, distort reality, are unkind and unfair.
Perhaps the biggest political puzzle of our time is why, as the lives of working-class whites have descended from the stability and comfort of “All in the Family” to the chaos and despair of “Gran Torino” and ...
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The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia
A couple of years ago, on a slow day at the office, I decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled into the Wikipedia article. The description of the trial stated, “The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. … “
Coincidentally, that is the claim that initially...
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A Detroiter in his own mind
Following the bail-outs, the president eventually forced Chrysler and GM into bankruptcy, a step Mr Romney thought should occur naturally. And the government oversaw painful restructurings at both companies, which were largely in line with Mr Romney’s broad suggestions. But the course Mr Romney recommended in 2008 began with the government stepping back, and it is unlikely things...
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Corporate Citizens Can Do Well by Doing Good:...
More generally, is any way of making money acceptable as long as it is both profitable and legal?
There is an interesting irony here. Those who would favor this narrow definition of corporate responsibility are typically very skeptical of governments. Yet, in their worldview, it is the government that decides the limits of what a company should do.
If an activity is legal, no matter how unsavory...
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Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute’s Brainy...
I asked whether something analogous happened in fiction: was a beautiful sentence more likely to be true in some way? McCarthy laughed. “That’s tough. It’s hard to define beauty, though there’ve been some strange attempts. We know it involves harmony, repetition, symmetry. These things speak to us and have for a long time.”
In addition to aesthetics, McCarthy noted a deeper link between great...
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A New Theory of Democracy
Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer want to change the way Americans think about politics, and they want to do this with a new metaphor to describe how governance should work. This is the premise behind their new book, The Gardens of Democracy: that Americans politics can be greatly improved if we can agree that the country is like a garden.
Real gardens need to be tended to and cared for, but...
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Single By Choice
In the past decade, increased public support for gay marriage and a growing acceptance of domestic partnerships has helped to redefine what it means to be a couple — and a family — in this country. But what do we make of a person who remains single by choice? Our politically correct culture keeps us from voicing our judgments about people based on skin color, ethnicity, gender, or...
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Quality vs quantity online
Have we really — finally — reached the point at which quality is asserting itself in the form of monster pageviews? Especially given the fact that the New York Observer, the subject of my original post, is getting fewer pageviews now than it was in its much more assiduously edited days at the end of 2007.
If we have reached that point — and I hope that we have — it’s a function of the way...
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Bush, Obama, Same Old Drama! →
truthaboutronpaul:
Among other things, since taking office Obama has:
- Signed the NDAA - an indefinite detention bill - into law
- Waged war on Libya without congressional approval - Started a covert, drone war in Yemen - Escalated the proxy war in Somalia - Escalated the CIA drone…
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Human Waste-Powered Robots May Be Future of...
The first EcoBot (created in 2003) was powered by E. coli bacteria feeding on refined sugar. Then “EcoBot-II” (2005) harnessed sludge microbes to break down dead flies, prawn shells and rotten apples. Finally, “EcoBot-III” (2010) showed how a “digesting” robot could also dump its leftover waste, so that its microbes wouldn’t be poisoned by their...
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Mattel Will Finally Release The Hoverboard From...
The year 2015 is coming up fast, and it seems like many of the future inovations seen in the future Hill Valley of Back to the Future: Part II have not come to pass — but I’m still hopeful that we’ll all be in flying hovercars in just three years time (um, yeah). Last year, Nike finally produced a limited edition “preview” run of the self-lacing Nike MAG sneakers. I saw last week...
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Let's Fix That Safety Net Mr. Romney
Romney spoke about how he would fix the safety net for poor people “if it needs repair.”
Let me suggest one place to fix things: end child poverty.
Whatever the causes of poverty, when children grow up in desperate circumstances - circumstances that they had no role in creating - studies show that they will be more likely to drop out of high school, be unemployed, use drugs, have...
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Compound May Help in Fight Against...
North Carolina State University chemists have created a compound that makes existing antibiotics 16 times more effective against recently discovered antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”
These so-called superbugs are actually bacterial strains that produce an enzyme known as New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase (NDM-1). Bacteria that produce this enzyme are practically impervious to...
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How Obama Set a Contraception Trap for the Right
Before the compromise, the spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops went even further, arguing that entirely secular corporations, if owned or run by faithful Catholics, should be able to exclude contraception from their employees’ health-insurance coverage. “If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell,” he declared, “I’d be covered by the mandate.” And even that would be...
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Christian Jihad
Is it true that the Bible teaches peace and the Koran war? Only if you approach the books selectively, taking the gentlest of Jesus’ teachings and setting them against the harshest of Muhammad’s.
Philip Jenkins’s challenging new book Laying Down the Sword shows that the Bible contains incitements not just to violence but also to genocide. He argues that Christians and Jews should struggle to...
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The New Geography of Trade: Globalization’s...
It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil, and policies to mitigate these two challenges.
At first, the increase in freight costs will be bad news for developed and...
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Severe Conservative Syndrome
[Romney’s] stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base. No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this “Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is at the heart of the Romney...
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Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on...
The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36...
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Religious Traditionalism
Those who reject gay marriage while (at least in principle) accepting practical equality for gay couples have found themselves in a bind when trying to explain their position in court. For most, the basis for this stance surely lies in religious traditionalism. Mores have changed, and discrimination against gay people is no longer socially acceptable in many circles. But marriage is so bound up...
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What You Need to Succeed—and How to Find Out If...
Whether you succeed at work may depend on many factors—intelligence, empathy, self-control, talent and persistence, to name a few. But one determinant may outweigh many of these: how you perceive those around you. New research suggests that your own ability to get things done—not to mention your success in non-work relationships—is highly correlated with how you see others. Are your coworkers...
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Republicans need more than rhetoric on defense
Few things so embitter a nation as squandered valor; hence Americans, with much valor spent there, want Iraq to master its fissures. But with America in the second decade of its longest war, the probable Republican nominee is promising to extend it indefinitely.
Mitt Romney opposes negotiations with the Taliban while they “are killing our soldiers.” Which means: No negotiations until the war...
