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anonymous

Taxpayers Get Bilked For Sarah Palin's Diva Bus Tour Perks - 0 views

www.politicususa.com/...sarah-palin-taxpayers

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 11
     
    "Rep. Blumenauer wondered if the same perks that the Palins got were available to an average American family. More importantly, he wondered how much Sarah Palin's traveling road show cost federal taxpayers. He requested that the National Park Service provide an explanation of their policies towards the use of taxpayer funds for publicity events. He also wants an accounting of how much was spent giving Sarah Palin the celebrity treatment. As a private citizen Sarah Palin is allowed to visit any public place that she wants, but the taxpayers should not be responsible for her escort and security any more than they would be for any other citizen. Why are taxpayers footing the bill for Palin to get the VIP treatment? After all, she was supposed to be on a "family vacation." In these tough economic times America can't afford to make the transplanted Cactus Queen feel like a VIP. Sarah Palin is a millionaire many times over. She can afford her own escorts and security. I know that she believes that because she is a celebrity she doesn't have to stand in line like the rest of us, but taxpayers should not be picking up the tab for her decision to use historic locations as a backdrop for her publicity tour. What kind of fiscal conservative makes the federal government spend more tax payer money to pamper her? Sarah Palin's record of huge spending in Alaska blows the notion that she is a fiscal conservative to smithereens, so the idea that Sarah Palin even knows what a budget is, much less how to adhere to one is laughable. If Palin wants to reduce the size of government, she could start by not requiring our tax dollars pay for her diva act. Sarah Palin mooched off of the people of Alaska, and now she is taken her act national. Sarah Palin's brand of fiscal conservatism makes George W. Bush look like Ron Paul. Sarah Palin is a big spending publicity generating machine, and every American taxpayer is getting stuck with the bill."
anonymous

The Expanding Role of Russia's Youth Groups - 3 views

www.stratfor.com/...ding-role-russias-youth-groups

shared by anonymous on 09 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Over the past two years, the Kremlin has been steadily shifting its focus from consolidation within Russia and in Moscow’s former Soviet territory to planning for Russia’s future. Part of that planning involves launching a series of massive economic projects involving modernization and privatization. A more controversial component of Moscow’s plans is the use of the government’s nationalist youth groups, like Nashi and the Young Guard, to create the next generation of leadership.
  • The first step in Russia’s becoming a Eurasian power once again was consolidation
  • The concept of Nashi is nothing new. Aspects of it have been widely compared to the Soviet Komsomol and even the Hitler Youth. Throughout the years, Nashi inspired and incorporated many other groups (both officially and unofficially).
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  • Although these pro-Kremlin groups are not officially part of the government, they all receive a great deal of funding from the government. According to STRATFOR sources, the Russian government spent approximately $250 million on Nashi in the organization’s first year.
  • Nashi’s activities typically are nonviolent, but the group does have a government-trained paramilitary branch that has been used to ensure security and to incite riots. Nashi also took part in protests in Finland and riots in Estonia and is thought to have been responsible for the 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia.
  • Nashi and the other youth organizations have taken on a large social role in the country by organizing large programs with goals ranging from promoting education to discouraging drinking. These programs, plus the unifying element of the youth groups, are preparing the new generation for leadership roles in the government, business and civil society. This is meant to keep Russia strong, nationalistic and united.
  • anonymous on 09 Jun 11
     
    "When it was founded in 2005, the Russian youth group Nashi was meant to instill nationalism in the next generation of Russian society. Since its inception, Nashi has incorporated other youth groups and founded new groups with the goal of training their members to respect the primacy of the Kremlin; it has eventually evolved into something the Kremlin could use as a foreign policy. Now the Russian state's focus is to use the youth programs to train the next generation to take leadership roles in government, business and civil society."
anonymous

100 years of statism, 100 years of neoliberalism - 0 views

www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=10333

econoics politics cycles trends megatrends

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • 1.  For nearly 100 years statism was on the advance in the US, and indeed in almost every country.
  • 2.  In the US the period of growth of government started at least as far back as 1887 (the ICC) and continued until 1977, after which deregulation, free trade agreements, and MTR cuts kicked in.  In other countries one saw MTR cuts, deregulation and privatization.
  • 3.  During the statism megatrend, the term ‘reform’ implicitly meant bigger government.  That’s how governments reacted to crises.  During the current (neoliberalism) megatrend, the tern ‘reform’ implicitly means less government.
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  • 4.  In the US this pattern has recently been hidden by health care, which is one aspect of the welfare state that was never completed in the statist era (although it was completed in all other developed countries.)
  • 5.  During the megatrends, there are periods of consolidation, which are falsely viewed as countertrends.  They are not countertrends.  The trend is still intact.  In the US the 1920s and 1950s were falsely viewed as countertrends.  Don’t be fooled, we are only 1/3 of the way through the neoliberalism megatrend.
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 11
     
    "I'd like to argue that to understand what's going on in the world, one needs to understand the megatrends.  Yes, I know that 'megatrend' is a rather disreputable term, associated with crackpots.  But I'm going to use it anyway.  Here's my basic hypothesis:" Thanks to Adam Gurri for the interesting read.
anonymous

The Paradox of America's Electoral Reform - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...adox-americas-electoral-reform

shared by anonymous on 10 Mar 15 - Cached
  • This election process matters to the world for two reasons.
  • First, the world's only global power will be increasingly self-absorbed
  • The United States sees itself as the City on the Hill, an example to the world. But along with any redemptive sensibility comes its counterpart: the apocalyptic.
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  • Likely an archaic institution, the Electoral College still represents the founders' fear of the passions of the people — both the intensity of some, and the indifference of others.
  • They had two visions: that representatives would make the law, and that these representatives would not have politics as a profession.
  • The founders saw civil society — business, farms, churches and so on — as ultimately more important than the state, and they saw excessive political passion as misplaced.
  • First, it took away from the private pursuits they so valued, and it tended to make political life more important than it should be.
  • Second, they feared that ordinary men (women were excluded) might be elected as representatives at various levels.
  • They tried to shape representative democracy with standards they considered prudent — paralleling the values of their own social class, where private pursuits predominated and public affairs were a burdensome duty.
  • Of course it was the founders who created political parties soon after the founding. The property requirements dissolved fairly quickly, the idea that state houses would elect senators went away, and the ideological passions and love of scandal emerged. 
  • Political parties were organized state by state, and within state by counties and cities. These parties emerged with two roles.
  • The first was to generate and offer potential leaders for election at all levels.
  • The second was to serve as a means of mediation between the public — for multiple classes, from the wealthy to the poor — and the state.
  • The party bosses did not have visions of redemption or apocalypse. They were what the founders didn't want: professional politicians, not necessarily holding office themselves but overseeing the selection of those who would.
  • This was a system made for corruption, of course, and it violated the founders' vision, but it also fulfilled that vision in a way. The party bosses' power resided in building coalitions that they could serve.
  • The system was corrupt, but it produced leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as some less illustrious people.
  • Starting in 1972, following Richard Nixon's presidency, the United States shifted away from a system of political bosses. This was achieved by broadly expanding primaries at all levels. Rather than bosses selecting candidates and controlling them, direct democratic elections were used for candidate selection. Since the bosses didn't select candidates, the candidates were beholden to the voters rather than the bosses. Each election year, the voters would select the candidates and then select the officeholder. Over time, the power of the political machine was broken and replaced by a series of elections. The founders did not want this level of democracy, but neither did they explicitly want the party boss.
  • This change had two unanticipated consequences.
  • The first was that the importance of money in the political process surged.
  • Corruption moved from favors for bosses to special treatment of fundraisers, but it was still there.
  • Reformers tried to limit the amount of money that could be contributed, but they ignored two facts.
  • First, a primary system for the presidency is fiendishly expensive simply because delivering the message to the public in 50 states costs a fortune. Second, given the stakes, the desire to influence government is difficult to curb.
  • The second unintended consequence was that it institutionalized political polarization.
  • The founders designed politics to be less important than private life, and in the competition on Election Tuesday, private life tends to win, particularly in off-year elections and primaries.
  • in the primaries, only two types of candidates win. One is the extremely well funded — and the passion of the wings make funding for them even more important. The other is the ideologically committed.
  • All of this applies equally to elections to the House and Senate. It has been said that there has never been less bipartisanship than there is now. I don't know if that is true, but it is certainly the case that the penalties for collaboration with the other party, or for moving to the center, are extremely high.
  • This is not meant to romanticize the bosses. We are, on the whole, better off without them, and we can't resurrect them. I am trying to explain why our elections have become so long, why they cost so much money, and why the wings of the parties get to define agendas and legislative and executive behavior.
  • Geopolitics, as Stratfor uses the concept, argues that the wishes and idiosyncrasies of individual leaders make little difference in the long run. This is because leaders are constrained by global realities. It is also because internal political processes define what must be done to take and hold power. Those internal political processes have their own origins in impersonal forces.
  • There has been a long struggle between the founders' vision of how politics should work and the reality of the process.
  • The American Republic was invented and it is continually being reinvented on the same basic theme. Each reform creates a new form of corruption and a new challenge for governance. In the end, everyone is trapped by reality, but it is taking longer and longer to enter that trap.
  • The political parties emerged against the founders' intentions, because political organization beyond the elite followed from the logic of the government. The rise of political bosses followed from the system, and simultaneously stabilized and corrupted it. The post-Watergate reforms changed the nature of the corruption but also changed the texture of political life. The latter is the issue with which the United States is now struggling.
  • The problem endemic in American culture is the will to reform. It is both the virtue and vice of the U.S. government. It has geopolitical consequences.
  • anonymous on 10 Mar 15
     
    "We are now in the early phases of selecting the president of the United States. Vast amounts of money are being raised, plans are being laid, opposition research is underway and the first significant scandal has broken with the discovery that Hillary Clinton used a non-government email account for government business. Ahead of us is an extended series of primaries, followed by an election and perhaps a dispute over some aspect of the election. In the United States, the presidential election process takes about two years, particularly when the sitting president cannot run for re-election."
anonymous

Five Billion Years of Solitude: Lee Billings on the Science of Reaching the Stars - 0 views

io9.com/...-science-of-reaching-the-stars

shared by anonymous on 09 Oct 12 - Cached
  • The question of habitability is a second-order consideration when it comes to Gliese 581g, and that fact in itself reveals where so much of this uncertainty comes from. As of right now, the most interesting thing about the "discovery" of Gliese 581g is that not everyone is convinced the planet actually exists. That's basically because this particular detection is very much indirect - the planet's existence is being inferred from periodic meter-per-second shifts in the position of its host star.
  • So it's very difficult to just detect these things, and actually determining whether they are much like Earth is a task orders of magnitude more difficult still. Notice how I'm being anthropocentric here: "much like Earth." Astrobiology has been derisively called a science without a subject. But, of course, it does have at least one subject: our own living planet and its containing solar system.
  • This is really a chicken-and-egg problem: To know the limits of life in planetary systems, we need to find life beyond the Earth. To find life beyond Earth, it would be very helpful to know the limits of life in planetary systems. Several independent groups are trying to circumvent this problem by studying abiogenesis in the lab - trying to in effect create life, alien or otherwise, in a test tube.
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  • I do think humans are motivated to daydream about extraterrestrial intelligence, and, to put a finer point on it, extraterrestrial "people." They are motivated to dream about beings very much like them, things tantalizingly exotic but not so alien as to be totally incomprehensible and discomforting. Maybe those imagined beings have more appendages or sense organs, different body plans and surface coverings, but they typically possess qualities we recognize within ourselves: They are sentient, they have language, they use tools, they are curious explorers, they are biological, they are mortal - just like humans. Perhaps that's a collective failure of imagination, because it's certainly not very easy to envision intelligent aliens that are entirely divergent from our own anthropocentric preconceptions. Or perhaps it's more diagnostic of the human need for context, affirmation, and familiarity. Why are people fascinated by their distorted reflections in funhouse mirrors? Maybe it's because when they recognize their warped image, at a subconscious level that recognition reinforces their actual true appearance and identity.
  • More broadly, speculating about extraterrestrial intelligence is an extension of three timeless existential questions: What are we, where do we come from, and where are we going?
  • The first pessimistic take is that the differences between independently emerging and evolving biospheres would be so great as to prevent much meaningful communication occurring between them if any intelligent beings they generated somehow came into contact.
  • The second pessimistic take is that intelligent aliens, far from being incomprehensible and ineffable, would be in fact very much like us, due to trends of convergent evolution, the tendency of biology to shape species to fit into established environmental niches.
  • It stands to reason that any alien species that managed to embark on interstellar voyages to explore and colonize other planetary systems could, like us, be a product of competitive evolution that had effectively conquered its native biosphere. Their intentions would not necessarily be benevolent if they ever chose to visit our solar system.
  • The third pessimistic scenario is an extension of the second, and postulates that if we did encounter a vastly superior alien civilization, even if they were benevolent they could still do us harm through the simple stifling of human tendencies toward curiosity, ingenuity, and exploration.
  • Right now reaching low-Earth orbit generally comes at a cost somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000 per kilogram, depending on which launch vehicle is used. This creates an enormous barrier to making profitable ventures in space or building major space-based infrastructure. It also engenders further high costs in the design, fabrication, and testing of most spaceflight hardware, which due to the high cost to orbit must be made as lightweight and reliable as possible.
  • If launch costs fall well below $1,000 per kilogram, a host of economic activities that were previously prohibitively expensive should at a stroke become cheap enough to be readily profitable.
  • I'm an American citizen, so I will focus my comments on the American space program and the American political system. I'm sad to say that in this country, the most powerful nation presently on the planet, space science, exploration, and development are treated as fringe issues at best. Too many politicians, if they consider these issues at all, treat them in one of two ways: Dismissively, as things to be joked about, or cynically, as little more than pork-barrel job programs for their districts, things to be defended purely for the status quo and only given token lip-service when absolutely necessary.
  • And who can blame them? Look at what happens to politicians when they try to talk seriously and ambitiously about space today. They are lampooned and ridiculed by the media and by their political opponents as starry-eyed idealists who are disconnected from everyday realities.
  • anonymous on 09 Oct 12
     
    "One of the best briefings on the state of the art of interstellar exploration is Lee Billings' essay "Incredible Journey," recently reprinted in a wonderful new anthology called The Best Science Writing Online 2012, edited by Scientific American's Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Ouellette. I'm very honored to have a piece in the anthology myself: my NeuroTribes interview with John Elder Robison, author of the bestselling memoir of growing up with autism, Look Me in The Eye, and other books. When SciAm's editors suggested that each author in the book interview one of the other authors, I jumped at the chance to interview Billings about his gracefully written and informative article about the practical challenges of space flight. Billings is a freelance journalist who has written for Nature, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, and Seed. He lives outside New York City with his wife, Melissa."
anonymous

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...-up-psychology-economics-53135

shared by anonymous on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.
  • As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.
  • In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
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  • The trio of researchers are young—as professors go—good-humored family men. They recalled that they were nervous as the publication time approached. The paper basically suggested that much of what social scientists thought they knew about fundamental aspects of human cognition was likely only true of one small slice of humanity. They were making such a broadside challenge to whole libraries of research that they steeled themselves to the possibility of becoming outcasts in their own fields.
  • “We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.” “We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan. “Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
  • Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.
  • The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
  • Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      I did a shit ton of this. I was very internal, didn't have many friends, and came to identify with 'things' as though they were people.
  • Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”
  • The three insisted that their goal was not to say that one culturally shaped psychology was better or worse than another—only that we’ll never truly understand human behavior and cognition until we expand the sample pool beyond its current small slice of humanity.
  • Despite these assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.
  • THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      This is another place where my love of long-term thinking rears its head. So modern as we imagine ourselves, with all our fancy machines, we are still bareinfants when it comes to reckoning about ourselves.
  • Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places.
  • Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
  • As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it.
  • The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.
  • This new approach suggests the possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now open for study.
  • “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”
  • He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations.
  • If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.
  • almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.
  • HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced. Response to the paper, both published and otherwise, has been nearly universally positive, with more than a few of their colleagues suggesting that the work will spark fundamental changes. “I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences,” said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. “It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement.”
  • At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!); it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.
  • Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.
  • He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      Goodness, though! I'm in TOTAL control of everything! :P
  • The unique trick of human psychology, these researchers suggest, might be this: our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life’s dance.
  • People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.
  • Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t go down very easily.
  • That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically.
  • That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.
  • Shown another way, in a different test analytic Americans will do better on something called the “rod and frame” task, where one has to judge whether a line is vertical even though the frame around it is skewed. Americans see the line as apart from the frame, just as they see themselves as apart from the group.
  • Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression).
  • These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.
  • And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.
  • anonymous on 02 Mar 13
     
    "The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind's capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do-the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like-but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception."
anonymous

Assessing Inspire Magazine's 10th Edition - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...inspire-magazines-10th-edition

geopolitics terrorism

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - Cached
  • I have been very surprised at how the media and other analysts have received the magazine. Some have overhyped the magazine even as others have downplayed -- even ridiculed -- its content. I have heard others say the magazine revealed nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
  • All these reactions are misguided. So in response, I've endeavored to provide a more balanced assessment that can be placed in a more appropriate perspective.
  • Inspire 10 is not going to launch the grassroots jihadist apocalypse al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seeks to foment any more successfully than the magazine's previous nine editions. The fact that a photograph of Austin, Texas, appears in the magazine does not mean that the city is somehow being secretly targeted for attack by jihadist sleeper cells.
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  • But laughing at the magazine or dismissing it as irrelevant would be imprudent. The magazine has in fact inspired several terrorist plots.
  • Other cases have not been as blatant as those involving Abdo and Pimentel. However, they have involved individuals who were radicalized or motivated by Inspire.
  • Some commentators have noted that most of the suspects arrested in connection with these plots were fairly hapless and clueless -- the type of individuals we have long referred to as "Kramer jihadists." Though partly incompetent, these grassroots operatives are exactly the demographic al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is targeting for radicalization and mobilization.
  • Inspire seeks to reach amateur terrorists living in the West; professional terrorists already know how to create pipe bombs. For this reason, the magazine urges amateurs to undertake simple attacks rather than the complex attacks. Too often they find assistance from an FBI informant.
  • It is a grave error to dismiss Kramer jihadists and assume they pose no threat.
  • Kramer jihadists can also be deadly if they actually find a real terrorist, rather than a government informant, to assist or equip them. It is very important to remember that amateur, committed jihadists such as shoe bomber Richard Reid and underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly succeeded in destroying an airliner.
  • Twenty years ago last month, I witnessed firsthand the dangers of discounting Kramer jihadists when I peered into a massive crater in the floor of the World Trade Center parking garage. The FBI had deemed those responsible for the attack too hapless to do much more than assassinate the leader of the Jewish Defense League in a midtown Manhattan hotel. And they were -- until a trained terrorist operative traveled to New York and organized their efforts, enabling them to construct, deliver and detonate a massive 590-kilogram (1,300-pound) truck bomb.
  • I also take umbrage at those who snicker at the thought of grassroots jihadists lighting fires. As noted last month, I believe that fire is an underappreciated threat. Many people simply do not realize how deadly a weapon it can be, even though starting fires does not require sophisticated terrorist tradecraft.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      This is intriguing, and something I hadn't thought about. With the limited response resources, a bunch of nasty terrorists *could* affect an area too large for response capability to control. Ugh.
  • Like all propaganda and political rhetoric, its assertions must not be taken at face value. But to claim that the magazine tells us nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is simply lazy analysis.
  • Clearly, the concept of reaching out and attempting to radicalize and equip English-speaking jihadists was not something promoted only by Anwar al-Awlaki and Khan. English-speaking outreach has continued after their deaths. The group maintains that traveling to places such as Yemen for training is too dangerous.
  • That al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula continues to publish Inspire, which takes time and resources to produce, is also revelatory.
  • The copyediting in Inspire 10 was also cleaner than the previous edition, which had a major typo on the front cover. The new editor, who uses the nom de guerre Yahya Ibrahim, has worked with Khan since the first edition of the magazine.
  • In Inspire 10, for example, Ibrahim attempts to replicate the insulting one-page "advertisements" that Khan included in earlier editions of the magazine -- one in particular racially derided U.S. President Barack Obama -- but they lack the bite and general snark of Khan.
  • Inspire seems to be more serious and less edgy than when Khan was in charge. This may dull its appeal to its targeted audience.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      StratFor: Offering design and outreach advice to the editorial crew. Hah!
  • Another thing we can ascertain from Inspire 10 is that, despite al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's continued commitment to foment grassroots terrorism in the West, the group is clearly disappointed by the response it has gotten.
  • The Open Source Jihad section also continues to show the low view that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's professional terrorist cadre has for grassroots operatives. They see them as not-so-exceptional individuals
  • Inspire 10 can also tell us some important things about what tactics we can expect the group to use and what locations we can expect it to target.
  • Clearly the magazine continues to focus on targets in the West that have insulted the Prophet Mohammed. It revives the "the dust has not settled" theme from the first edition of the magazine and provides an updated hit list of individuals who have insulted Mohammed, including Terry Jones, the controversial Koran-burning pastor; Morris Sadek, who made a controversial film that disparaged Islam; and Stephane Charbonnier of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 22 Mar 13
       
      Terry Jones?! Okay, now it's ON.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released the 10th edition of its English-language magazine, Inspire, on March 1. After discussing its contents with our analytical team, initially I decided not to write about it. I concluded that Inspire 10 conformed closely to the previous nine editions and that our analysis of the magazine, from its inception to its re-emergence after the death of editor Samir Khan, was more than adequate."
anonymous

Libyan Report Card - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...libyan-report-card

geopolitics libya

shared by anonymous on 03 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The authorities in the capital of Tripoli openly acknowledge the fact that they do not monopolize the use of force and have wisely opted for compromise and arbitration in eastern Libya (the Benghazi region) and in the far-flung Sahara to the south.
  • Libya's fundamental problem is that rather than comprising a compact cluster of demography like the Nile Valley, it is but a vague geographical expression -- a monumentally vast desert and coastal region between historic Egypt and Greater Carthage (Tunisia).
  • Because Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt are geographically associated with specific knots of civilization going back to antiquity, they did not require suffocating forms of tyranny to hold them together like Libya, and to a lesser extent like Algeria, which for decades during the height of the Cold War had a radical socialist regime. For Libya, Moammar Gadhafi's regime was, in fact, anarchy masquerading as tyranny.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Therefore, it should surprise no one that the toppling of Gadhafi brought about the veritable collapse of the state. Libyan authorities do not govern so much as negotiate the terms of geographic control.
  • Modern states have borders; weak and failed states have frontiers.
  • The stability of regimes in places like Mauritania and Niger are somewhat more in doubt than before Gadhafi's collapse. Libya, for that matter, is now an ungovernable space in significant parts of the country where al Qaeda can very possibly find refuge. The killing of the American ambassador in Benghazi was indicative of the terrors that a chaotic, post-Gadhafi Libya can offer up.
  • It would seem from this accounting that the Obama administration's decision to militarily intervene in Libya (along with its NATO allies) was a blunder of the first magnitude.
  • A post-Gadhafi world now clearly presents the CIA with greater security challenges than it had before.
  • But the political reckoning for the Obama administration is not that simple.
  • Those reportedly in the forefront of arguing for intervention on such grounds were then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and National Security official Samantha Power.
  • The three women had good arguments: Were Gadhafi to have massacred large numbers of civilians with U. S. warships hovering just offshore, it would have been a demonstration of American fecklessness comparable to that of European (and particularly Dutch) fecklessness when Serb troops massacred large numbers of civilians in 1995 in Srebrenica under the thumb of U.N. peacekeepers.
  • The loss of prestige the United States might have suffered throughout the Arab world as a result could have been substantial.
  • More to the point, because we still do not know all the intelligence the administration had available at the time regarding Gadhafi's intentions in Benghazi, to condemn administration officials outright is too easy a judgment at this date.
  • But there is a conundrum here that those who favored intervention -- in Libya as well as elsewhere -- do not own up to. That is, short of deploying large numbers of ground troops, the ability of the U.S. government to rebuild weakened or collapsed states is severely limited.
  • Even the presence of more than 100,000 American ground troops was insufficient to make Iraq an adequately effective democracy, so how can one argue that a band of civilian experts, plus small numbers of special operations forces, could have accomplished more in Libya?
  • Gadhafi's regime had virtually eliminated civil society in a country that was barely a country -- and you say that the United States had it in its power to make it all whole, or partly whole, again?
  • Toppling an evil regime or stopping a war is a profoundly moral act.
  • But taking moral responsibility for what happens next in a country is the hard part.
  • because Washington tends to overestimate its own significance in terms of its ability to alter distant societies, the following pattern will continue to emerge: a terrible war resulting in calls for humanitarian intervention, an intervention in some cases, always followed by a blame game inside the Washington Beltway after the country has slipped back into tyranny or anarchy.
  • Meanwhile, here is a probability: Libya's relatively short history as a strong state is over. It will go on and on as a dangerous and weakly governed area between Tunisia and Egypt. Its considerable oil resources can internally generate revenue for armed groups and politicians both. Thus, Libya will become a metaphor for much of North Africa and the Sahara, places where frontiers are more common than borders. 
  • anonymous on 03 Apr 13
     
    "In the starkest terms, a state is defined by a bureaucratic hierarchy that monopolizes the use of force over a specific geography. Ideally, nobody need fear the authorities except those who break the law. And because the authorities monopolize violence, nobody need fear his fellow man. Of course, tyrannical states induce general fear among much of the population. And weak states have a difficult time monopolizing the use of force -- the reason they are weak in the first place. By these standards, many states in the world are weak. And Libya has gone from being a tyrannical state to being barely a state at all."
anonymous

Things We Don't Know: The beast with a billion backs: Part 1 - 0 views

blog.thingswedontknow.com/...with-billion-backs-part-1.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • We like to think of ourselves in the singular, but the reality is we are a swirling composite of thousands of species, more accurately thought of as an ecosystem than as an individual.
  • There is the core ‘us’, the cells that contain our DNA. But we are also like the land on which a rich forest might grow
  • Together they are our ‘microbiome’.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • in return for shelter and a share of the spoils from our meals, some make vitamins, liberate nutrients and energy from food, and protect us from their pathogenic cousins. Millions of years of co-evolution with our microbial horde have forged this relationship, shaping us both in ways whose significance we’re still trying to understand.
  • One of the biggest problems in unpicking the microbiome’s relationship with health is working out if the changes and differences are a cause, an intermediate step, or a consequence of developing a disease.
  • separating our environment from disease is proving hard.
  • Crohns disease is a good example
  • we know a disrupted microbiota is one of its features.
  • But we can’t yet say for sure if this is the cause or the effect.
  • If it starts with our own physiology, then we need to investigate treatments targeted at those changes, but if it starts with the microbiome our treatments will be different.
  • With so many branches it’s perhaps no surprise that so many other organisms can call us ‘home’.
  • In the past we’ve been well served by the one-pathogen-one-disease model for tracking, monitoring and avoiding infectious diseases. But do beneficial, or harmless, bugs in the microbiome spread like pathogens? If not, how?
  • It is important to understand this because of the number of links between the microbiome and a number of diseases like diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, food allergies, and even obesity.
  • An improved picture of how our communities of microbes – good and bad – come together and move through populations could help us to develop interventions to significantly reduce, or prevent, the numbers of people with these conditions. Or, at the least, find ways to hobble this trend.
  • Understanding both the flow of microbes and the factors which influence it may also be important for any treatments we produce.
  • We’ve been manipulating our microbial ecosystems for years, both naturally through our immune systems and, perhaps more worryingly, through a weapon of microbial mass destruction: antibiotics.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "This post is by freelance science writer Gavin Hubbard. Gavin originally trained as a Medical Biochemist at the University of Surrey and spent over 10 years working in biotechnology, immunology and clincal trials. He writes both for industry and for a general audience, with a focus on health, immunology and pathology. He blogs at Sciencehubb.co.uk and can be found on twitter as @GavinHub"
anonymous

Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems. - 0 views

www.nextnewdeal.net/...and-there-are-serious-problems

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 17 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate, in fact.
  • This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession.
  • In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadhseet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed.
  • They find that three main issues stand out.
  • First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth.
  • Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries.
  • Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.
  • All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result.
  • Selective Exclusions. Reinhart-Rogoff use 1946-2009 as their period, with the main difference among countries being their starting year.
  • The paper didn't disclose which years they excluded or why.
  • Unconventional Weighting. Reinhart-Rogoff divides country years into debt-to-GDP buckets. They then take the average real growth for each country within the buckets.
  • this weighting significantly reduces the average; if you weight by the number of years you find a higher growth rate above 90 percent.
  • Coding Error. As Herndon-Ash-Pollin puts it: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis.
  • Being a bit of a doubting Thomas on this coding error, I wouldn't believe unless I touched the digital Excel wound myself. One of the authors was able to show me that, and here it is. You can see the Excel blue-box for formulas missing some data:
  • If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.
  • So what do Herndon-Ash-Pollin conclude? They find "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent as [Reinhart-Rogoff claim]." [UPDATE: To clarify, they find 2.2 percent if they include all the years, weigh by number of years, and avoid the Excel error.] Going further into the data, they are unable to find a breakpoint where growth falls quickly and significantly.
  • This is also good evidence for why you should release your data online, so it can be properly vetted.
  • But beyond that, looking through the data and how much it can collapse because of this or that assumption, it becomes quite clear that there's no magic number out there. The debt needs to be thought of as a response to the contingent circumstances we find ourselves in, with mass unemployment, a Federal Reserve desperately trying to gain traction at the zero lower bound, and a gap between what we could be producing and what we are. The past guides us, but so far it has failed to provide evidence of an emergency threshold. In fact, it tells us that a larger deficit right now would help us greatly.
  • anonymous on 17 Apr 13
     
    "In 2010, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a paper, "Growth in a Time of Debt." Their "main result is that...median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower." Countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate, in fact."
anonymous

Why Stratfor Tracks the Locations of U.S. Navy Capital Ships - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...r-tracks-us-navy-capital-ships

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Roughly 90 percent of trade worldwide happens by sea, so the global economy depends on safe maritime transport. Unimpeded access to the seas is also necessary for the defense of far-flung national interests.
  • The United States could not have fought in World War II or Afghanistan, for example, without the ability to quickly move forces, supplies and aircraft to distant corners of the globe. Thus, the movement of U.S. Navy ships can tell us a lot about America's foreign policy.
  • For example, take the U.S. execution of sanctions on Iran in recent years. In April 2012, the Navy positioned a second carrier battle group in the Strait of Hormuz, thus sending a message to Iran that the United States is ready to respond if aggressive action is taken to close the strait.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • During the Israel-Gaza conflict in November, the Navy diverted an amphibious group to the eastern Mediterranean, making it available to evacuate U.S. citizens if needed.
  • The key is looking for the unexpected.
  • Each week, we have a pretty good idea of where the ships will be, based on geopolitical patterns, strategies and developments. But surprises -- and they do happen -- allow us to challenge and re-evaluate our positions.
  • This is a fundamental part of our methodology: constantly checking our net assessments against new intelligence to maintain the high degree of accuracy on which our readers and clients depend.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Apr 13
       
      Their methodology is high-level. I'm still not satisfied that I have an accurate picture. Moreover, I'm on the lookout for tools to help me critique their work. I realize that's almost *cute* given that I'm a layman, but I'm pretty sure I can leverage the internet to at LEAST ask some interesting questions.
  • The map contains only publicly available, open-source information. We're not publishing any secrets; we're compiling available information and applying it to an easy-to-use, actionable graphic for our analysts, subscribers and clients.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "In Stratfor's weekly Naval Update Map, we track the approximate locations of U.S. fleet aircraft carriers and amphibious war ships. The map helps our analysts -- and customers -- decipher Washington's strategy and even predict looming conflicts."
anonymous

The Declining Relevance of Generation Gaps - 1 views

declineofscarcity.com/?p=2647

shared by anonymous on 08 Apr 13 - Cached
  • In terms of cultural artifacts, we are shifting to an on-demand system, in which all the media from all of the ages just exists in a giant pile on the internet for anyone to peruse at any time.
  • The increasing fragmentation of entertainment outlets suggests that what will matter most is not so much what generation you’re from, but what micro niche you belong to.
  • Computers interfaces are getting easier to use and increasingly dumbed down.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Relatively fast adoption of new technologies is already pretty much a necessity
  • Better health and medical technology will make the physical differences between the young and the old increasingly less salient.
  • The increasing difficulty of finding a job, the growing impermanence of jobs that exist, the inevitable transformation of higher education, and the continued decoupling of education from work
  • anonymous on 08 Apr 13
     
    "Something I think is already happening and will accelerate in the future, is that traditional generation gaps are going to stop being relevant."
  • anonymous on 08 Apr 13
     
    My comment to the post: What I'd add is that the more traditional elements of generation gaps - namely the cohort/group you identify with - will remain. I'm thinking here of "You were in *this* age group when *that* global event happened." Still, on the surface I can't see anything to disagree with. Surely, the maturation of IT is definitely levelling the operational playing field quite a lot. When I started using PC's, it was considered more akin to, say, having a "chemistry set." Now, my son, my parents, and my grandparents all use the computer as a productivity device in a variety of overlapping fashions. I suppose one could argue against this, claiming (correctly) that all generations have enjoyed TV, but that's a consumption device, a small but very important distinction. As for education, you ain't kidding. In fact, noticing how my son and his peers use or do not use the internet with sufficient interest gives rise to an INTEREST gap. Namely: If you care to invest the effort, you can excel. If not, you don't have too many excuses. Regarding point #5, that's (at least) true for Gen-X'ers and younger. The idea of workplace stability seems almost anachronistic at this point. :) Great post!
anonymous

Speed Up Windows 7 - Ultimate Tweaks For a Blazing Fast Windows 7 - 0 views

www.computingunleashed.com/ndows-7-ultimate-guide-to.html

windows 7 tweak performance windows

shared by anonymous on 28 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Disabling the Search Indexing Feature in Windows 7
  • Right Click the “Computer” Icon in the desktop and select “Manage”. Click “Services and Applications” in the “Computer Management” window. Click on “Services”. You’d see a lot of services being listed inside the window. Find “Windows Search” from the list. Right Click on “Windows Search” from the list and choose “Properties”. The “Windows Search Properties Window” will open up. From “Startup type” click on the drop down menu and choose “Disabled”.
  • Click “Apply” then “OK” and that’s it. The Windows 7 Search Indexing Feature is now disabled.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Disable the Aero Theme on Windows 7
  • You may also Apply a Standard or Basic theme from the previous window. The Standard Windows 7 theme is more preferred as its gives a neutral look than the classy windows old theme.
  • Disabling the Unwanted Visual Effects in Windows 7 to Speed Up more
  • Right click on ” Computer” and select “Properties” from the right click menu. Click on ” Advanced System Settings ” from the left pane to open up the ” System Properties ” window. Select the “Advanced” tab from it. Then Under ” Performance ” click ” Settings “. Choose ” Custom: ” Options From it. Now un tick all the options (Choose “Adjust for best performance“) and select only the last four options (actually three are preferable  you may un- tick the second option out of the last four). Take a look at the screen shot below.
  • List of services in Windows 7 that can be safely set to manual / disabled
  • Turn off Unused Windows 7 Features
  • Open up ” Programs and Features ” from Control Panel. Click the ” Turn Windows features on or off ” from the left pane. Now uncheck all the Feature that you don’t use in Windows 7 and restart the system for the changes to take effect.
  • Speeding Up, Tweaking and Optimizing Your SSD
  • If you’ve got a new ssd for your system, then you’d definitely consider checking out this guide which explains 9 tweaks to properly speed up, optimize your ssd and prolong the life of your ssd, while getting the best performance from it.
  • Disable the Windows 7 Sidebar (The Gadgets)
  • Right click on the sidebar and choose ” Properties “. On the properties windows untick the check box showing ” Start sidebar when Windows Starts “ From now on windows sidebar won’t start when windows 7 start up.
  • Disable the Aero Peek and Aero Snap features in Windows 7
  • Aero Snap will help you to maximize, minimize and resize the windows just by dragging and dropping it into the screen corners. I dont advice to turn it off as the Aero Snap feature really helps to speed up working with windows by arranging them side by side. But, if you are not a regular user of the same, you may proceed by turning of aero snap in windows 7. Open the Windows 7 ” Control Panel ” and double-click on ” Ease of Access Center ” icon. Now click on the ” Make it easier to focus on tasks ” seen at the bottom in there Now untick the check box saying ” Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen ” . Right click on the Windows 7 taskbar and select ” Properties “. Now untick the ” Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop ” option from there. That will now disable the Aero Snap in Windows 7.
  • Now To Disable the Aero Peek feature in Windows 7
  • The Aero Peek feature in Windows 7 helps you to peek through all open windows by hiding all other windows and showing only the outlines of all windows. Aero Peek is similar to the ” Show Desktop ” Feature in XP and Vista. If you have followed step 3 then Aero Peek will be automatically disabled. If not, Right Click the Taskbar and choose Properties. Un-select the ”Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop” option. The aero peek feature will now be disabled in windows 7.
  • Change the Power Plan To Maximum Performance
  • Double click the ” Power Options ” in the Control panel. Click the down arrow showing ” Show Additional Plans ” to see the ” High Performance ” power plan.
  • Now just activate the ” High Performance ” plan and that’s it. You may go for the advanced settings for further tweaking if you want.
  • Disable the Thumbnail Preview Feature to speed up File browsing in Windows 7
  • For disabling thumbnails in Windows 7, Double Click on ” Computer ” >click on the “Organize” drop-down menu and select the “Folder and Search options” Under ‘Files and Folders’ section, go to the “View” tab and tick the check box showing “Always show icons, never thumbnails” checkbox.
  • Turn OFF Windows 7 Screen Saver and Wallpaper
  • To Disable The Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7, Right click on desktop and choose “Personalize”. Click the Screen Saver link ” From the Screen Saver drop down menu, Set it to “None” and click “Apply” and then “OK”. Now click on “Desktop Background” link. From the “Location” drop down menu select “Solid Colors” and pick one color and click “OK”.
  • Disable Unwanted Start Up Items and Speed Up Windows 7 Start Up
  • Type ” msconfig ” in the “RUN” option from start menu press [Enter] to open up the System Configuration Utility. Now navigate to the “StartUp” tab. Untick the Entries which are not needed
  • Disable Unwanted System Sounds in Windows 7
  • To disable the system sounds in Windows 7, Type mmsys.cpl in RUN From the Windows 7 Startmenu search box and press [Enter]. Navigate to the “Sounds” tab. Now from under “Sound Scheme:” select “No Sounds” > Click “Apply” > “OK”.
  • anonymous on 28 Apr 13
     
    "Windows 7 is Engineered for speed. Special attention has been given by the Windows team for making Windows 7 faster than the previous operating systems. Windows 7 is much faster than Windows Vista, but even then most of us don't get satisfied with it. There are many who still have their old PC. Installing Windows 7 on them wont be as soothing as they would work with XP and Even with latest hardware's installed some users are still avaricious  for more performance. We could optimize Windows 7 to the maximum possible extent to squeeze out extra performance from it. So, for all the extra performance lovers, here is the Ultimate Guide To Speed Up Windows 7."
anonymous

"Engagement" Is Not A Metric, It's An Excuse - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - 0 views

www.kaushik.net/...-is-not-a-metric-its-an-excuse

analytics google metrics engagement

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • There was so much we could measure and so little. As Marketers we have been frustrated with the near constant 2% conversion rates for our websites. We would like to have another metric that justifies our existence, and of course that of our website.
  • The fervor for measuring engagement is even higher for non-ecommerce websites because there is little in terms of Outcomes to measure there.
  • Engagement, that phrase / name, is not a metric that anyone understands and even when used it rarely drives the action / improvement on the website.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Because it is not really a metric, it is an excuse.
  • Even as creating engaging experiences on the web is mandatory, the metric called Engagement is simply an excuse for an unwillingness to sit down and identify why a site exists.
  • An excuse for a unwillingness to identify real metrics that measure if your web presence is productive. An excuse for taking a short cut with clickstream data rather than apply a true Web Analytics 2.0 approach to measure success.
  • let's try to understand why in the context of web analytics so many efforts at measuring "engagement" have yielded almost no results:
  • Each business is unique and each website is trying to accomplish something unique.
  • It is nearly impossible to define engagement in a standard way that can be applied across the board.
  • At the heart of it engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative.
  • One of my personal golden rules is that a metric should be instantly useful. This one is not.
  • Most of all engagement is a proxy for measuring an outcome from a website.
  • Conversion is not enough, as mentioned above, so we try something else. The problem that we'll define engagement as a measure of some kind of outcome but we won't give it the sexy name of engagement.
  • In Summary: The reason engagement has not caught on like wild fire (except in white papers and analyst reports and pundit posts) is that it is a "heart" metric we are trying to measure with "head" data, and engagement is such a utterly unique feeling for each website that it will almost always have a unique definition for each and every website.
  • "So what you are saying is that we should not measure engagement." I am saying you should very very carefully consider the above points, then not take a short cut (or as the American's say, a cop out) and actually define the metric as a Outcome metric (see element three of the trinity ).
  • Here is a process you can follow:
  • Step One: Define why your website exists. What is its purpose? Not a five hundred word essay, rather in fifteen words or less. If it helps complete this statement: "When the crap hits the fan the only purpose of my website is to ……….".
  • Step Two: If you did a great job with it then the above statement contains the critical few metrics (three or less) that will identify exactly how you can measure if your website is successful at delivering against its purpose.
  • Step Three: If you have a ecommerce website then revenue or conversion is probably one of your critical few. But one of the critical few is what your senior management might call engagement. Work hard to define exactly what that metric is (see below for ideas).
  • Step Four: Don't call that metric engagement. Call it by its real name. Don't hide behind a pretty moniker.
  • To stimulate your thought process here are some metrics you can use to measure "customer engagement" (that visitors are engaging with your website):
  • "Are you engaged with us?"
  • Likelihood to recommend website
  • Use primary market research
  • Customer retention over time
  • # of Visits per Unique Visits, Recency of Unique Visitors
  • In Summary : When most people measure "engagement" they have not done due diligence to identify what success means for their online presence. In absence of that hard work they fall into measuring engagement, and then measure something that is hard to action or something that will rarely improve the bottomline. Avoid this at all costs. Think very carefully about what you are measuring if you do measure engagement. If engagement to you is repeat visitors by visitors then call it Visit Frequency, don't call it engagement. Don't sexify, simplify! :) If you want to measure "engagement" then think of new and more interesting ways to measure that (see list above). Engagement at its core a qualitative feeling. It really hard to measure via pure clickstream (web analytics data). Think different.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    "Measuring "engagement" seems to be an even longer quest for Marketers and Analysts. There was so much we could measure and so little. As Marketers we have been frustrated with the near constant 2% conversion rates for our websites. We would like to have another metric that justifies our existence, and of course that of our website."
anonymous

I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success? - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - 0 views

www.kaushik.net/...merce-how-do-i-measure-success

analytics google metrics engagement

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - Cached
  • My recommendation: Measure the four metrics that are under the "Visitor Loyalty" button in Google Analytics (or in your favorite web analytics application). Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit, Depth of Visit.
  • The goal is to use web analytics data to interpret success of a visit to your website.
  • There is one singular reason I loved 'em: they showed distribution and not simply averages for each of the metric!
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Visitor Loyalty: During the reporting time period how often do "people" ("visitors") visit my website?
  • The number you are used to seeing is "average visits per visitor". That is usually one point something. It hides the truth.
  • For example you update your website ten times each month. If you have 100% loyal visitor base then they should be visiting your website ten times each month. Are they? What's your number? Is it going up over time?
  • Action: 1) Identify a goal for your non-ecommerce website for the # of visits you expect from the traffic to your website in a given time period (say week, month etc). 2) Measure reality using above report. 3) Compare your performance over time to ensure you are making progress, or potentially not as in my case…
  • Recency: How long has it been since a visitor last visited your website? Sounds confusing? Don't worry it is cool (it even has a psychedelic border! :)……
  • As would be the case for a jobs site. Or craigslist. Or any website that wants lots lots of repeat visits. Using this simple report you can now see how you are doing when it comes to the distribution of visitors in terms of their propensity to visit your site.
  • Length of Visit: During the reporting period what is the quality of visit as represented by length of a visitor session in seconds.
  • But it has always been frustrating to me how hard it is to get away from the average and measure the distribution of the visits to check if the average time on site is 50 seconds because one person visited for one second and the other person for 100 seconds. The average hides so much. Here's a better alternative……
  • Ain't that better? I think so. So many things jump out at me, but notice that either I lose 'em right away or if some how I can suck them in for one minute then they tend to stay for a long time. Hurray! I have a better idea of how to interact with my visitors.
  • 1) Identify what the distribution is for your website for length of visits. 2) Think of creative ways to engage traffic – what can I do to keep you for sixty seconds because after that you are mine! 3) Should I start charging more for ads on my site – if I have 'em – after 60 seconds? 4) If you are a support website then should you be embarrassed if 20% of your audience was on the site for more than ten minutes!
  • Depth of Visit: During a given time period what is the distribution of number of pages in each visit to the website.
  • You are used to seeing average page views per visitors, above is something that is a lot more helpful. I was also able to get this exact metric from my indextools implementation…..
  • Action: There has been so much said about this already so I'll spare your the pain. You can easily imagine how wonderful and fantastic this data is as you go about analyzing experience of your customers (and so much more powerful, a million times more, than average page views per visitor!).
  • Recommendations for all of the above metrics:
  • Socialize them to your key stake holders and decision makers to make the realize what is really happening on your website.
  • Absolutely positively work with your leadership to create goals and then measure against goals over time
  • Segment the data! For Visitor Loyalty or Length of Visit what are the most important acquisition sources? What are the keywords that drive valuable segments of traffic to the website?
  • Segmentation is key to insights that will drive action.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    "A vast majority of discourse in the web analytics world is about orders and conversions and revenue. There is not enough of it about non-ecommerce websites, metrics and KPI's."  - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
anonymous

The Walking Dead, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy - 1 views

www.psychologyofgames.com/...ead-mirror-neurons-and-empathy

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 12 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Suddenly the researcher noticed that according to the equipment hooked up to the monkey’s brain, neurons were firing that were associated with grasping motions, even though the animal had only SEEN something being grasped. This was odd, because normally brain cells are very specialized and nobody knew of any neurons that would activate both when performing an action or when seeing someone else perform the same action. Yet here the monkey was, blithely firing neurons previously only associated with performing motor actions while just sitting still and watching.
  • Thus was the first observation of a mirror neuron in action, a brain cell set apart from many of its peers and which are also present in delicious human brains. It turns out that many researchers like the aforementioned Dr. Marco Iacoboni, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UCLA, believe that mirror neurons are important for our ability to empathize with things we see, like the plight of poor Lee and Clementine in The Walking Dead.
  • I think this is one of the reasons why The Walking Dead is so good at eliciting emotions: it frequently shows us the faces of the characters and lets us see all the work put into creating easily recognizable and convincing facial expressions. And so it’s not the zombies that elicit dread in us. Instead it’s things like the face that Kenny makes when Lee tells him to make a hard decision about his family.
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 12
     
    "And the amazing thing is that the game gets me to feel all those emotions too. I'm glad that the game comes in monthly installments, because I need the time between episodes to recover. But why is that? By what psychological, neurological, and biological mechanisms do video games like The Walking Dead get us to not only empathize with characters onscreen, but also share their emotions?"
anonymous

Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie - 0 views

www.mensjournal.com/...print

shared by anonymous on 15 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Weight machines, on the other hand, are far more insidious because they appear to be a huge technological advance over free weights. But quite the opposite is true: Weight machines train individual muscles in isolation, while the rest of you sits completely inert. This works okay for physical therapy and injury rehab, and it’s passable for bodybuilding, but every serious strength-and-conditioning coach in America will tell you that muscle-isolation machines don’t create real-world strength for life and sport.
  • Most gyms do include a few token free weights, but think about where you’ll find them: around the edges of the room, like fresh fruits and vegetables in a supermarket that gives all the prime middle-of-the-store shelf space to Frosted Flakes and frozen cheesecake. Truly indispensable gear — like the good old-fashioned adjustable barbell rack, the sine qua non of any remotely serious gym — has, by contrast, become a downright rarity. As for niche but no less important equipment like an Olympic lifting platform, forget about it: The lawyers would never let it through the door.
  • Here’s the problem: If you’re in the fitness-equipment business, free weights are a loser.
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  • Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense.
  • Next up, shake hands with that nice, buff guy in the “trainer” shirt, and confess that you really don’t have a clue how to use a gym but that you’re into outdoor sports and you want to stay fit enough to have fun on weekends. He’ll nod a lot and pretend to take notes. Then he’ll measure your body fat with some high-tech-looking device and ask you lots of questions, ultimately convincing you to hire him twice a week.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 Dec 11
       
      This is known as the *Chiropractor* approach.
  • these days, it’s all about “functional fitness,” a complex integration of balance and stability and strength.
  • My conversion moment came in a garage-like industrial space next to an ATV rental yard in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was lying on a concrete floor, near puking, having just humiliated myself on the king of all strength exercises, the old-school back squat. “The best thing I can do for an athlete,” coach Rob Shaul said to me as I struggled to get up, “is to make him strong. Strength is king, and you’re fucking little-girl weak.”
  • I jumped on a plane, slept in a motel, gulped a crappy coffee, drove down a lonely highway, and presented myself. Beneath the Mountain Athlete banners, I saw nothing but dumbbells, barbells, iron weight plates, braided climbing ropes hanging off the ceiling, pull-up bars, and dip bars. No mirrors, no TVs, no music, no elliptical trainers, no weight machines, and, to my annoyance, absolutely no rubber bands or stability balls.
  • He ordered us over to the barbell racks, telling us to work our way up to the heaviest squat we could do once. I realized that I had never done this particular test in my life. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I’d never even done plain old squats. Wasn’t it far better to squat on a stability ball and get all that additional balance and core work?
  • The rest of the session — more barbell moves, along with push-ups, pull-ups, and dips — revealed more of the same. I was, in a word, weak. Not even middle-aged-lady weak — little-girl weak.
  • True sport-specific training, for literally everybody except elite athletes, isn’t sport-specific at all. It’s about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure. Nobody does crunches training this way, nobody watches television from the stationary bike, and 60-year-old women dead-lift 200 pounds and more.
  • And now I knew this wasn’t about a gym or about gym equipment; it was about an ethos, an understanding that nothing on Earth beats the fundamentals, a commitment to regular, measurable improvement in everything that a gym trainer won’t teach, for fear you’ll walk away bored: push-ups, pull-ups, bench presses, squats, dead lifts, and even such military-seeming tests as just how fast you can run a single mile.
  • TRUTH 3: ONCE YOU “GET IT,” YOU’LL LOVE IT.
  • Shaul’s guys out in Wyoming get massively strong and powerful on precisely three gym sessions a week, each lasting an hour and no more. Louie Simmons, the single biggest name in gorilla-style competitive power lifting, will tell you that 45 minutes is the max length of any smart training session.
  • Strength means how much you can lift once
  • Power is a more slippery term that means “speed strength,” or how much you can lift very, very quickly
  • Muscle mass can be a liability in sports like climbing, where it’s all about strength-to-weight ratio, but mass helps enormously with games like rugby and football, and it can support strength and power
  • Muscular endurance means how many times you can lift a given weight in a row without stopping
  • Down the road, if you’re like me, you’ll want to train multiple aptitudes at once: strength, power, and endurance.
  • Every serious strength-and-conditioning coach sticks to the basic barbell movements, because our bodies don’t operate as single muscles — they operate as a whole.
  • First: The human body adapts to stress. Throw us in ice-cold water every day and we’ll sprout subcutaneous fat for insulation; expose us to the desert sun and our skin will darken. What this means for getting in shape is that each week, you have to stress your body a little more than last time — lift a little heavier, run a little harder. Muscles weaken with exhaustion after a workout, but then they recover and typically, a few days later, go into what’s known as “supercompensation,” a fancy word that just means bouncing back a little stronger than before.
  • Finally, keep it simple; understand that variety is overrated. Variety does stave off boredom — it’s fun to mix in new exercises all the time — but a guy who hasn’t trained in a long time, if ever, will get stronger faster on the simplest program of squats, dead lifts, and presses, three times a week.
  • To get it just right, keep meticulous records, writing down every rep and every lift so your targets for each workout are easy to spot and your gains are easy to measure.
  • This simple formula is 90 percent of what you need to know, and you now officially know more than the buff 25-year-old doing your gym-membership orientation.
  • “Somewhere inside every man’s body,” Brown told me, lying in a La-Z-Boy, “there’s a weak link, a weak muscle waiting to fail. My job is to find that muscle and make it strong.”
  • two problems: First, if you have powerful prime movers from doing muscle-isolation machines at the gym but weak stabilizers because you rarely get to play a sport, you can’t access all your strength when you, say, bang off a mogul on a ski hill
  • Second, and worse still, the strength of the prime movers can shred your unstable joints.
  • He returned to the matters at hand, telling me that my weak knees and shoulder, my tight neck and spastic lumbar, were absolutely typical of a middle-aged recreational athlete with a desk job who spends all day slumped over and slack and then goes out and plays hard. Ignore this stuff, he said, and keep training, and I was guaranteed to get injuries that could set me back for a year. The good news, Brown told me, was that joint stability in each area could be traced to a remarkably small number of tiny stabilizer muscles. And while you could spend a fortune on physical therapists, trying to get them to tell you the same thing, you could also just start exercising those stabilizers. “I’m not reinventing the wheel here,” Brown told me. “This is just better-mousetrap kind of stuff.”
  • One book in particular, Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, inspired me to start with the very first of the Fundamental Four: strength. I liked the clarity of the word, and I liked the idea of keeping life simple, learning one aptitude at a time. Many pros will tell you that strength is the place to start, because once you’ve built pure strength, you’ll have no trouble adding power, size, and endurance. I decided to just follow Rippetoe’s bare-bones old-school program.
  • Before Starting Strength, I didn’t even know what a dead lift was, but my dead lift went from 135 pounds to 335. My bench press went well over my body weight. At age 42 — 6-foot-2 and gangly and 20 years into complaining about a bad back and bum knees, and right when any doctor or physical therapist would have told me it was time to embrace the low-impact elliptical — my back squat hit 275, going below parallel. My thighs got so big I couldn’t fit into most of my jeans, and I had to start shopping for new T-shirts.
  • But there’s an even better reason to build pure strength. I’ve come to believe that men don’t go to gyms just to avoid heart disease or support our weekend sports. It’s worth getting strong because we go to gyms in large part to maintain a little goddamned self-respect, and to blow off steam, and to insist, against all odds, that we do remain fiercely vital physical beings. And trust me, there’s nothing like watching your dead lift skyrocket to make you feel vital. It’s the happy exhaustion, the sense of hard work well done, with a clear purpose; it’s the rush of seeing your body change, fat turning into lean mass.
  • anonymous on 15 Dec 11
     
    Gym machines are boring, CrossFit is sadistic, and dieting sucks. Luckily, none of them is essential to being truly fit. Through years of trial and error - and humiliation at the hands of some of the world's top trainers - the author discovered the secrets to real health.
anonymous

The Next Stage of Russia's Resurgence: Introduction - 3 views

stratfor.com/...ussias-resurgence-introduction

shared by anonymous on 07 Feb 12 - Cached
  • In many ways, Russia's geopolitical strength is derived from its inherent geographic weaknesses. There are few natural barriers protecting Russia's core, and this has required Russia to expand into and consolidate territories around its core to acquire buffers from external powers.
  • this expansion created two fundamental problems for any Russian state:
  • It brought Moscow into conflict with numerous external powers and gave it the difficult task of ruling over conquered peoples (who were not necessarily happy to be ruled by Russia).
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  • when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 at the end of the Cold War and Moscow lost control of its constituent republics and fell into internal chaos, those circumstances did not guarantee that Russia was permanently removed from the international scene and that a unipolar world dominated by the United States would last forever
  • Russia has returned to its traditional status of legitimate regional power, and its influence is increasing in its historic geographic buffer zones, which are currently made up of more than a dozen independent states.
  • In the context of its resurgence, Russia's broad imperative has been to prevent foreign influence while building and ingraining its own.
  • anonymous on 07 Feb 12
     
    Stratfor has long followed and chronicled Russia's resurgence, which has included bolder foreign policy moves and resuming the role of regional power. In particular, Moscow has focused its energy in its former Soviet periphery: the Eastern European states of Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova; the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; the Caucasus states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In recent years, Russia has increased its influence in many of these states politically, economically, militarily and in the area of security, with the most obvious sign of its return to power coming in the August 2008 war with Georgia. Now, Moscow is preparing for the next stage of its resurgence. This new phase will include the institutionalization of Russia's position as the regional hub, but will also include the use of more subtle levers and influence in areas Moscow wants to bring into its fold -- though not all of these efforts will go unchallenged.
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  • Erik Hanson on 08 Feb 12
     
    Again with the "geographic weakness." I maintain that the biggest geographic strength that still counts is simply space, which Russia has plenty of. They could build a massive Maginot Line across the entire border and be no more secure for it. If Russia is being characterized as geographically vulnerable, it's by someone who's trying to leverage that notion or who hasn't realized that war has changed since WWI.
  • anonymous on 08 Feb 12
     
    I have to disagree with you, there. While the term "geographic weakness" can be flexible, I think that it applies to a lot more than just missile ranges. It also applies to things like how almost all the arable land in Russia is as far to the west as possible, or how the Russian interior is mostly inaccessible. Or think how the southmost end of its reach is so cut-up that we actually use the term "Balkanization." If you plopped that kind of geography in the center of north America, we likely wouldn't have extended from sea to shining sea. Russia proper doesn't have many geographic buffers. They surely don't have two oceans, like we do. This matters. We don't have a host of uneasy neighbors, either. You're right that a line wouldn't help. That's kind of the point, actually. By putting more miles between itself and any possibly hostile state - by charm or by threat - the entity increases its security.
  • Erik Hanson on 08 Feb 12
     
    I think that the way "geographic weakness" usually is used, it's not in reference to what I might call "infrastructural weakness." Even there, I think that there is a very real geographic similarity you're overlooking in your "sea to shining sea" comparison: The Great Plains of North America are a steppe, followed by one of the more troublesome mountain ranges in the world. How the two nations crossed and filled their steppes is I think part of what makes the two so different. I might also argue that Russia's interior is naturally richer in resources--we put a lot (financially and chemically) into the "Great Desert" to make it viable for farming, and now we still daydream about swapping that into a source of energy. Russia's backyard is built for industrial exploitation, not agricultural, and I think that's probably worth more. As for actual physical buffers, It's been a while, but the US certainly has had to mess around militarily along and within its land borders over the years. Russia does have ocean on the north and east ends, and that ain't nothing. I'd like to know what percent of both our borders are sea borders. I'd guess we're within 10% of each other.
anonymous

David Berreby - The obesity era - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...david-berreby-obesity-era

shared by anonymous on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • And so the authorities tell us, ever more loudly, that we are fat — disgustingly, world-threateningly fat. We must take ourselves in hand and address our weakness. After all, it’s obvious who is to blame for this frightening global blanket of lipids: it’s us, choosing over and over again, billions of times a day, to eat too much and exercise too little. What else could it be? If you’re overweight, it must be because you are not saying no to sweets and fast food and fried potatoes. It’s because you take elevators and cars and golf carts where your forebears nobly strained their thighs and calves. How could you do this to yourself, and to society?
  • Hand-in-glove with the authorities that promote self-scrutiny are the businesses that sell it, in the form of weight-loss foods, medicines, services, surgeries and new technologies.
  • And so we appear to have a public consensus that excess body weight (defined as a Body Mass Index of 25 or above) and obesity (BMI of 30 or above) are consequences of individual choice.
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  • Higher levels of female obesity correlated with higher levels of gender inequality in each nation Of course, that’s not the impression you will get from the admonishments of public-health agencies and wellness businesses.
  • Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends are not nearly as unanimous as Bloomberg makes out. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain.
  • As Richard L Atkinson, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Wisconsin and editor of the International Journal of Obesity, put it in 2005: ‘The previous belief of many lay people and health professionals that obesity is simply the result of a lack of willpower and an inability to discipline eating habits is no longer defensible.’
  • Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets.
  • As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas.
  • In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased.
  • ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.
  • It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence
  • On the contrary, the trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species.
  • In rich nations, obesity is more prevalent in people with less money, education and status. Even in some poor countries, according to a survey published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, increases in weight over time have been concentrated among the least well-off. And the extra weight is unevenly distributed among the sexes, too.
  • To make sense of all this, the purely thermodynamic model must appeal to complicated indirect effects.
  • The story might go like this: being poor is stressful, and stress makes you eat, and the cheapest food available is the stuff with a lot of ‘empty calories’, therefore poorer people are fatter than the better-off. These wheels-within-wheels are required because the mantra of the thermodynamic model is that ‘a calorie is a calorie is a calorie’: who you are and what you eat are irrelevant to whether you will add fat to your frame. The badness of a ‘bad’ food such as a Cheeto is that it makes calorie intake easier than it would be with broccoli or an apple.
  • Yet a number of researchers have come to believe, as Wells himself wrote earlier this year in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that ‘all calories are not equal’.
  • The problem with diets that are heavy in meat, fat or sugar is not solely that they pack a lot of calories into food; it is that they alter the biochemistry of fat storage and fat expenditure, tilting the body’s system in favour of fat storage.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Aug 13
       
      RELEVANT.
  • if the problem isn’t the number of calories but rather biochemical influences on the body’s fat-making and fat-storage processes, then sheer quantity of food or drink are not the all-controlling determinants of weight gain. If candy’s chemistry tilts you toward fat, then the fact that you eat it at all may be as important as the amount of it you consume.
  • More importantly, ‘things that alter the body’s fat metabolism’ is a much wider category than food. Sleeplessness and stress, for instance, have been linked to disturbances in the effects of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain that the body has had enough to eat.
  • If some or all of these factors are indeed contributing to the worldwide fattening trend, then the thermodynamic model is wrong.
  • According to Frederick vom Saal, professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, an organic compound called bisphenol-A (or BPA) that is used in many household plastics has the property of altering fat regulation in lab animals.
  • BPA has been used so widely — in everything from children’s sippy cups to the aluminium in fizzy drink cans — that almost all residents of developed nations have traces of it in their pee. This is not to say that BPA is unique.
  • Contrary to its popular image of serene imperturbability, a developing foetus is in fact acutely sensitive to the environment into which it will be born, and a key source of information about that environment is the nutrition it gets via the umbilical cord.
  • The 40,000 babies gestated during Holland’s ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-1945 grew up to have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart trouble than their compatriots who developed without the influence of war-induced starvation.
  • It’s possible that widespread electrification is promoting obesity by making humans eat at night, when our ancestors were asleep
  • consider the increased control civilisation gives people over the temperature of their surroundings.
  • Temperatures above and below the neutral zone have been shown to cause both humans and animals to burn fat, and hotter conditions also have an indirect effect: they make people eat less.
  • A study by Laura Fonken and colleagues at the Ohio State University in Columbus, published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that mice exposed to extra light (experiencing either no dark at all or a sort of semidarkness instead of total night) put on nearly 50 per cent more weight than mice fed the same diet who lived on a normal night-day cycle of alternating light and dark.
  • A virus called Ad-36, known for causing eye and respiratory infections in people, also has the curious property of causing weight gain in chickens, rats, mice and monkeys.
  • xperiments by Lee Kaplan and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston earlier this year found that bacteria from mice that have lost weight will, when placed in other mice, apparently cause those mice to lose weight, too.
  • These theories are important for a different reason. Their very existence — the fact that they are plausible, with some supporting evidence and suggestions for further research — gives the lie to the notion that obesity is a closed question, on which science has pronounced its final word.
  • It might be that every one of the ‘roads less travelled’ contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn’t a simple school physics experiment.
  • obesity is like poverty, or financial booms and busts, or war — a large-scale development that no one deliberately intends, but which emerges out of the millions of separate acts that together make human history.
  • In Wells’s theory, the claim that individual choice drives worldwide weight gain is an illusion — like the illusion that individuals can captain their fates independent of history. In reality, Tolstoy wrote at the end of War and Peace (1869), we are moved by social forces we do not perceive, just as the Earth moves through space, driven by physical forces we do not feel. Such is the tenor of Wells’s explanation for modern obesity. Its root cause, he proposed last year in the American Journal of Human Biology, is nothing less than the history of capitalism.
  • In a capitalistic quest for new markets and cheap materials and labour, Europeans take control of the economy in the late 18th or early 19th century. With taxes, fees and sometimes violent repression, their new system strongly ‘encourages’ the farmer and his neighbours to stop growing their own food and start cultivating some more marketable commodity instead – coffee for export, perhaps. Now that they aren’t growing food, the farmers must buy it. But since everyone is out to maximise profit, those who purchase the coffee crop strive to pay as little as possible, and so the farmers go hungry. Years later, when the farmer’s children go to work in factories, they confront the same logic: they too are paid as little as possible for their labour. By changing the farming system, capitalism first removes traditional protections against starvation, and then pushes many previously self-sufficient people into an economic niche where they aren't paid enough to eat well.
  • Eighty years later, the farmer’s descendants have risen out of the ranks of the poor and joined the fast-growing ranks of the world’s 21st-century middle-class consumers, thanks to globalisation and outsourcing. Capitalism welcomes them: these descendants are now prime targets to live the obesogenic life (the chemicals, the stress, the air conditioning, the elevators-instead-of-stairs) and to buy the kinds of foods and beverages that are ‘metabolic disturbers’.
  • a past of undernutrition, combined with a present of overnutrition, is an obesity trap.
  • Wells memorably calls this double-bind the ‘metabolic ghetto’, and you can’t escape it just by turning poor people into middle-class consumers: that turn to prosperity is precisely what triggers the trap.
  • ‘Obesity,’ he writes, ‘like undernutrition, is thus fundamentally a state of malnutrition, in each case promoted by powerful profit-led manipulations of the global supply and quality of food.’
  • The ‘unifying logic of capitalism’, Wells continues, requires that food companies seek immediate profit and long-term success, and their optimal strategy for that involves encouraging people to choose foods that are most profitable to produce and sell — ‘both at the behavioural level, through advertising, price manipulations and restriction of choice, and at the physiological level through the enhancement of addictive properties of foods’ (by which he means those sugars and fats that make ‘metabolic disturber’ foods so habit-forming).
  • In short, Wells told me via email, ‘We need to understand that we have not yet grasped how to address this situation, but we are increasingly understanding that attributing obesity to personal responsibility is very simplistic.’ Rather than harping on personal responsibility so much, Wells believes, we should be looking at the global economic system, seeking to reform it so that it promotes access to nutritious food for everyone.
  • One possible response, of course, is to decide that no obesity policy is possible, because ‘science is undecided’. But this is a moron’s answer: science is never completely decided; it is always in a state of change and self-questioning, and it offers no final answers. There is never a moment in science when all doubts are gone and all questions settled,
  • which is why ‘wait for settled science’ is an argument advanced by industries that want no interference with their status quo.
  • Faced with signs of a massive public-health crisis in the making, governments are right to seek to do something, using the best information that science can render, in the full knowledge that science will have different information to offer in 10 or 20 years.
  • Today’s priests of obesity prevention proclaim with confidence and authority that they have the answer. So did Bruno Bettelheim in the 1950s, when he blamed autism on mothers with cold personalities. So, for that matter, did the clerics of 18th-century Lisbon, who blamed earthquakes on people’s sinful ways. History is not kind to authorities whose mistaken dogmas cause unnecessary suffering and pointless effort, while ignoring the real causes of trouble. And the history of the obesity era has yet to be written.
  • anonymous on 27 Aug 13
     
    "For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike. The diseases that obesity makes more likely - diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure - are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years. What's more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed. Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy."
anonymous

Strategy, Ideology and the Close of the Syrian Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...eology-and-close-syrian-crisis

shared by anonymous on 17 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • In searching for the meaning behind every gesture, diplomats start to regard every action merely as a gesture.
  • In the past month, the president of the United States treated the act of bombing Syria as a gesture intended to convey meaning rather than as a military action intended to achieve some specific end. This is the key to understanding the tale that unfolded over the past month.
  • The threat of war is useful only when the threat is real and significant. This threat, however, was intended to be insignificant.
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  • When he took office, Obama did not want to engage in any war. His goal was to raise the threshold for military action much higher than it had been since the end of the Cold War, when Desert Storm, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and other lesser interventions formed an ongoing pattern in U.S. foreign policy.
  • Strategy and the specifics of Syria both argued for American distance, and Obama followed this logic. Once chemical weapons were used, however, the reasoning shifted. Two reasons explain this shift.
  • One was U.S. concerns over weapons of mass destruction.
  • Tens of thousands have died in the Syrian civil war. The only difference in the deaths that prompted Obama's threats was that chemical weapons had caused them. That distinction alone caused the U.S. foreign policy apparatus to change its strategy.
  • The second cause of the U.S. shift is more important. All American administrations have a tendency to think ideologically, and there is an ideological bent heavily represented in the Obama administration that feels that U.S. military power ought to be used to prevent genocide.
  • This feeling dates back to World War II and the Holocaust, and became particularly intense over Rwanda and Bosnia, where many believe the United States could have averted mass murder. Many advocates of American intervention in humanitarian operations would oppose the use of military force in other circumstances, but regard its use as a moral imperative to stop mass murder.
  • His solution was to loudly threaten military action that he and his secretary of state both indicated would be minimal. The threatened action aroused little concern from the Syrian regime, which has fought a bloody two-year war. Meanwhile, the Russians, who were seeking to gain standing by resisting the United States, could paint Washington as reckless and unilateral.  
  • Obama wanted all of this to simply go away, but he needed some guarantee that chemical weapons in Syria would be brought under control.
  • For that, he needed al Assad's allies the Russians to promise to do something. Without that, he would have been forced to take ineffective military action despite not wanting to.
  • Therefore, the final phase of the comedy played out in Geneva, the site of grave Cold War meetings (it is odd that Obama accepted this site given its symbolism), where the Russians agreed in some unspecified way on an uncertain time frame to do something about Syria's chemical weapons. Obama promised not to take action that would have been ineffective anyway, and that was the end of it.
  • the point of the agreement was not dealing with chemical weapons, it was to buy time and release the United States from its commitment to bomb something in Syria.
  • The United States and Russia both want the al Assad regime in place to block the Sunnis. They both want the civil war to end, the Americans to reduce the pressure on themselves to aid the Sunnis, the Russians to reduce the chances of the al Assad regime collapsing.
  • The most important outcome globally is that the Russians sat with the Americans as equals for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Russians sat as mentors, positioning themselves as appearing to instruct the immature Americans in crisis management. To that end, Putin's op-ed in The New York Times was brilliant.
  • This should not be seen merely as imagery: The image of the Russians forcing the Americans to back down resonates all along the Russian periphery. In the former Soviet satellites, the complete disarray in Europe on this and most other issues, the vacillation of the United States, and the symbolism of Kerry and Lavrov negotiating as equals will shape behavior for quite awhile. 
  • The Obama administration has demonstrated a tendency to judge regimes that are potential allies on the basis of human rights without careful consideration of whether the alternative might be far worse. Coupled with an image of weakness, this could cause countries like Azerbaijan to reconsider their positions vis-a-vis the Russians.
  • The alignment of moral principles with national strategy is not easy under the best of circumstances. Ideologies tend to be more seductive in generalized terms, but not so coherent in specific cases. This is true throughout the political spectrum. But it is particularly intense in the Obama administration, where the ideas of humanitarian intervention, absolutism in human rights, and opposition to weapons of mass destruction collide with a strategy of limiting U.S. involvement -- particularly military involvement -- in the world. The ideologies wind up demanding judgments and actions that the strategy rejects.
  • The result is what we have seen over the past month with regard to Syria: A constant tension between ideology and strategy that caused the Obama administration to search for ways to do contradictory things.
  • anonymous on 17 Sep 13
     
    "It is said that when famed Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich heard of the death of the Turkish ambassador, he said, "I wonder what he meant by that?" True or not, serious or a joke, it points out a problem of diplomacy. In searching for the meaning behind every gesture, diplomats start to regard every action merely as a gesture. In the past month, the president of the United States treated the act of bombing Syria as a gesture intended to convey meaning rather than as a military action intended to achieve some specific end. This is the key to understanding the tale that unfolded over the past month."
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