February 2012
98 posts
2 tags
'Phantom' mobile phone vibrations: why we get them
Bzzt, bzzt. You check the supposed vibration in your pocket, yet no one has called or sent you an SMS.
Known commonly as a phantom vibration, this sensation has been felt by many and left them baffled.
But according to scientists, mobile users aren’t necessarily imagining things and the vibrations may not be “phantom” after all.
Some people believe there is a compulsive...
The SOX Win: How Financial Regulation Can Work
When SOX was passed, it was attacked — almost exactly like Dodd-Frank is today. Sarbanes-Oxley got “horrible press,” said Jack T. Ciesielski, who edits the Analyst’s Accounting Observer. People mocked it for requiring companies “to flow chart the keys to the executive washroom,” he said. But the result is that accounting at American companies is much cleaner today.
...
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The Mobility Myth
When Americans express indifference about the problem of unequal incomes, it’s usually because they see the United States as a land of boundless opportunity. Sure, you’ll hear it said, our country has pretty big income disparities compared with Western Europe. And sure, those disparities have been widening in recent decades. But stark economic inequality is the price we pay for living in a...
Something about Hats →
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The Death of Honesty →
Yet to recognize that honesty is not an absolute standard demanded for every life circumstance—and that we can expect a certain amount of deceit from even our respected public figures—is not to say that the virtue of honesty can be disregarded with impunity. A basic intent to be truthful, along with an assumption that people can be generally taken at their word, is required for all...
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Romney says no hospitals are exempt from pill law →
By Scott Helman, Globe Staff | December 9, 2005
Governor Mitt Romney reversed course on the state’s new emergency contraception law yesterday, saying that all hospitals in the state will be obligated to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims.
The decision overturns a ruling made public this week by the state Department of Public Health that privately run hospitals could ...
Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Are Great for... →
According to the data, drunk students solved more of these word problems in less time. They also were much more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. And the differences were dramatic: The alcohol made subjects nearly 30 percent more likely to find the unexpected solution.
Once again, the explanation for this effect returns us to the benefits of not being able...
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Nano quadrotors: Watch a swarm of tiny robots fly... →
If you worry about the domestic use of drones, this video may give you nightmares.
The nano quadrotors flying in formation. (YouTube)
Since at least 2010, researchers at GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania have been working with nano quadrotors, managing to get them to fly aggressively, build a tower structure and now — fly in perfect formation.
The video posted by GRASP makes it...
Energy-sharing is the new internet →
The Second Industrial Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiralling into a dangerous endgame: prices are climbing, unemployment remains high, debt is soaring and the recovery is slowing. Worse, climate change from fossil-fuel-based industrial activity looms. Facing a collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a new vision to take us into the future.
...
The Cancer in Occupy
The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy...
“Rather than learning from or trying to emulate HuffPo’s hugely valuable...”
– Why The New York Times Will Lose to The Huffington Post | Epicenter | Wired.com (via mediafuturist)
Charge Your Phone (and Your Car) from Afar →
The idea of wireless power transfer is hardly new. Nikola Tesla demonstrated a version of it a hundred years ago, and inductive chargers for electric toothbrushes and video game controllers are now widespread. But the inductive chargers available today work over only very short distances and require physical contact between the charger and electronic device, which isn’t much more...
“What accounts for the rhetorical excesses of the Catholic Church and its...”
– -Wendy Kaminer
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/in-birth-control-debate-religious-beliefs-dont-trump-rights/252801/
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The Math on Romney's Promises →
In his speech to CPAC, Mitt Romney repeated a promise that he’s delivered repeatedly on the campaign trail. “Without raising taxes or sacrificing America’s critical defense superiority, I will finally balance the budget.” That sounds pretty good. It sounds really good, in fact. And then you look at the numbers.
Romney has, essentially, made four significant fiscal promises: He has pledged...
Poor Wall Street
The crash four years ago was shocking enough to the financial class. But what is happening on Wall Street now is even more terrifying. No doubt the economy itself—the crisis in Europe, the effects of the tsunami in Japan, America’s sputtering recovery—has played a large part in the financial industry’s struggles. But even the most stubborn economies improve eventually. The bigger issues are...
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Is Your Cat Making You Crazy?
The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain...
Why willpower matters – and how to get it →
Those with low willpower, the study discovered, fared less well academically. They were more likely to be in low-paying jobs with few savings, to be overweight, to have drug or alcohol problems, and to have difficulty maintaining stable relationships (many were single parents). They were also nearly four times more likely to have a criminal conviction. “Willpower,” concludes...
Right-wingers are less intelligent than left... →
Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study. Conservative politics work almost as a ‘gateway’ into prejudice against others, say the Canadian academics. The paper analysed large UK studies which compared childhood intelligence with political...
