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anonymous

Intelligence Guidance (Special Edition): Israel - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...tion_israel_takes_center_stage

shared by anonymous on 19 Mar 10 - Cached
  • While in the immediate future, Washington isn’t going to do what Israel wants on Iran, the close relationship with the United States represents a long-term foundation of Israeli national security and a huge psychological foundation for the Israeli public.
  • On the other hand, and not to be ignored, was the firing of Qassam rockets at Israel and the death of a Thai. Rocket fire is another red line in Israeli politics, and it is enormously difficult for Netanyahu not to respond. But a response at this moment would really exacerbate relations with the United States.
  • The thing to study now is Washington. Is Washington going to cut Netanyahu some slack and get him off the hook domestically, or will it squeeze him, forcing a political crisis in Jerusalem? Washington has the power to do just that. But Washington loses all power if there are further rocket attacks and it insists that Israel do nothing. Washington has the initiative now: Netanyahu has handed Obama a big present. What will Obama do with it and how far will he press it?
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  • Something is clearly happening with Hamas as well.
  • anonymous on 19 Mar 10
     
    From March 18, 2010. A look at Israel's predicament.
anonymous

Venezuela: A Deeper Look at the Electricity Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...deeper_look_electricity_crisis

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Venezuela is in the midst of a severe electricity crisis, with its national electrical grid so stressed that it could, according to the Venezuelan National Electric Corporation (CORPOELEC), be headed for a nationwide system failure within the next two months.
  • (click here to enlarge image) The center of gravity of Venezuela’s electricity crisis is the Guri dam, which, along with the nearby Francisco Miranda and Antonio Jose de Sucre dams, provides about 70 percent of the nation’s electricity.
  • Only 37 percent of electricity users have been following rationing plans, according to a recent CORPOELEC study. Questionable government estimates place the reduction of public-sector use at 23 percent and private sector use at 5 percent since 2009.
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  • Indeed, the director of one state-owned electricity subsidiary has resorted to company-wide prayer vigils to end the crisis.
  • Venezuela is not at that break point, but the red line is clearly in sight. Isolated protests across the country have broken out over the blackouts and could spread as the situation deteriorates. Meanwhile, political challengers to Chavez, such as Lara state Gov. Henri Falcon, appear to be sensing an opportunity and are positioning themselves for a potential break from within the regime. The stakes are high in this electricity crisis, and without a clear short-term resolution in sight, the proven resilience of the Chavez government will undergo a serious test in the coming weeks.
  • anonymous on 24 Mar 10
     
    A StratFor article from March 23, 2010.
anonymous

Can nuclear power make a comeback? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...100322taco_talk_hertzberg

longterm energy

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The happy consensus did not last long. It was already breaking down by the nineteen-seventies, and by the late eighties it was gone, obliterated by the accidents at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979 (where no one was killed), and at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 (which caused thousands of deaths). But the giant anti-nuclear demonstrations of the time, in Europe and America, were fuelled at least as much by fear of nuclear war as by fear of nuclear reactors.
  • Such founding fathers of the environmental movement as Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Patrick Moore, an early stalwart of Greenpeace, now support nukes. James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a climate-change prophet, favors the so-called fourth-generation nuclear systems, which would substantially reduce the amount of nuclear waste. Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, is another supporter. So, within limits, are liberal senators like John Kerry and Barbara Boxer. And so is President Obama.
  • anonymous on 18 Mar 10
     
    Hendrik Hertzberg looks at whether nuclear power can make a comeback in the U.S. Thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for pointing this one out (http://bit.ly/bFUiEq)
anonymous

What Is Geoengineering and Why Is It Considered a Climate Change Solution? - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

longnow climate

shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Some scientists are calling for more study of technological interventions to forestall catastrophic global warming. Why?
  • When a report on climate change hit the U.S. president's desk, the suggestion was not to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, scientific advisors counseled intervention via technology in the climate system itself—a practice now known as geoengineering. And the president was not Barack Obama, George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton—it was Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
  • Typically what people call geoengineering is divided into two major classes.
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 10
     
    From Scientific American on April 6, 2010.
anonymous

Decades of research show massive Arctic ice cap is shrinking - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/...ve_Arctic_ice_cap_is_shrinking

layscience sustainability environmentalism

shared by anonymous on 13 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking.
  • The work of Boon and her colleagues demonstrates the importance of long-term research.
  • "We all know long-term studies are important but they are really hard to pay for."
  • anonymous on 13 Apr 10
     
    From Lab Spaces on April 12, 2010.
anonymous

Backs to the Future - 0 views

ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/...backsfuture06.asp

science reflections time

shared by anonymous on 07 Apr 10 - Cached
  • New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.
  • “Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world – from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on – have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model,” said Nunez.
  • no one had previously detailed the Aymara’s “radically different metaphoric mapping of time” – a super-fundamental concept, which, unlike the idea of “democracy,” say, does not rely on formal schooling and isn’t an obvious product of culture.
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  • Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.
  • This cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed, Nunez said, to the conquistadors’ disdain of the Aymara as shiftless – uninterested in progress or going “forward.”
  • anonymous on 07 Apr 10
     
    By Inga Kiderra on June 12, 2006. Referred to by Dave Gottlieb. More thoughts about time, the future, and the past. Thanks, Dave.
anonymous

Mat of microbes the size of Greece discovered on seafloor - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms, the census scientists reported.
  • the mighty microbes, which constitute 50 to 90 percent of the oceans' total biomass, according to newly released data.
  • This genetic data has revealed that there might be as many as 100 times more microbe genera than researchers had assumed. One study conducted in the English Channel landed 7,000 new genera alone. Current estimates place the number of marine microbial species at about a billion, according to a prepared statement by John Baross of the University of Washington and chair of the International Census of Marine Microbes's scientific advisory council.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 10
     
    By Katherine Harmon at Scientific American on April 18, 2010. More indicators of the massive role that largely-invisible microorganisms have in Earth's biosphere.
anonymous

We Are Not Alone - 0 views

seedmagazine.com/...we_are_not_alone

layscience

shared by anonymous on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • according to a new book by astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and science writer David Darling, we’ve had good evidence of microbial life on Mars since NASA’s Viking missions in the late 1970s.
  • The Viking researchers thought life on Mars would be heterotrophic, feeding off abundant organic compounds distributed everywhere all over the Martian surface. That picture was wrong, and studies of extremophiles on Earth have made us think differently about Mars.
  • There were three life-detection experiments: the Labeled Release Experiment that yielded a positive result, the Gas Exchange Experiment that gave a negative result, and the Pyrolytic Release Experiment, which was gave ambiguous, inconclusive results.
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  • We now have much better technologies, and a much better understanding of the Martian environment, but we still haven’t had a life-detection experiment since Viking!
  • all our biological molecules have a certain “handedness,” a left- or right-handed orientation to their structures. So if the molecules in the organisms from Mars have a different handedness than the molecules from Earth life, that would be pretty good proof.
  • The biggest thing is that we don’t yet understand the origin of life on Earth. Rather, we understand the persistence of life in habitable environments on this planet. There are tons of potential habitable environments elsewhere in our own solar system, and we know that life originated on Earth and spread nearly everywhere.
  • It’s hard to see other possibilities, other forms life can have, what other options, avenues, and paths, life could take elsewhere. I think as we discover more and more strange planets and moons, in our solar system and beyond, most scientists will realize that it’s very important to look at these other possibilities, so that we’re somewhat prepared for what else might be out there.
  • anonymous on 20 Apr 10
     
    "In his new book, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch says that extraterrestrial life has already been found." By Lee Billings in Seed on April 20, 2010.
anonymous

Attention Whole Foods Shoppers - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...attention_whole_foods_shoppers

sustai sustainability contrarian longnow

shared by anonymous on 29 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Food has become an elite preoccupation in the West, ironically, just as the most effective ways to address hunger in poor countries have fallen out of fashion.
  • Yet 850 million people in poor countries were chronically undernourished before the 2008 price spike, and the number is even larger now, thanks in part to last year's global recession. This is the real food crisis we face.
  • Poverty -- caused by the low income productivity of farmers' labor -- is the primary source of hunger in Africa, and the problem is only getting worse. The number of "food insecure" people in Africa (those consuming less than 2,100 calories a day) will increase 30 percent over the next decade without significant reforms, to 645 million, the U.S. Agriculture Department projects.
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  • Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.
  • we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West.
  • It's true that the story of the Green Revolution is not everywhere a happy one. When powerful new farming technologies are introduced into deeply unjust rural social systems, the poor tend to lose out.
  • Traditional food systems lacking in reliable refrigeration and sanitary packaging are dangerous vectors for diseases. Surveys over the past several decades by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that the U.S. food supply became steadily safer over time, thanks in part to the introduction of industrial-scale technical improvements.
  • The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last year published a study of 162 scientific papers from the past 50 years on the health benefits of organically grown foods and found no nutritional advantage over conventionally grown foods. According to the Mayo Clinic, "No conclusive evidence shows that organic food is more nutritious than is conventionally grown food."
  • Less than 1 percent of American cropland is under certified organic production. If the other 99 percent were to switch to organic and had to fertilize crops without any synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, that would require a lot more composted animal manure. To supply enough organic fertilizer, the U.S. cattle population would have to increase roughly fivefold. And because those animals would have to be raised organically on forage crops, much of the land in the lower 48 states would need to be converted to pasture. Organic field crops also have lower yields per hectare. If Europe tried to feed itself organically, it would need an additional 28 million hectares of cropland, equal to all of the remaining forest cover in France, Germany, Britain, and Denmark combined.
  • between 1990 and 2004, food production in these countries continued to increase (by 5 percent in volume), yet adverse environmental impacts were reduced in every category. The land area taken up by farming declined 4 percent, soil erosion from both wind and water fell, gross greenhouse gas emissions from farming declined 3 percent, and excessive nitrogen fertilizer use fell 17 percent. Biodiversity also improved, as increased numbers of crop varieties and livestock breeds came into use.
  • Foreign assistance to support agricultural improvements has a strong record of success, when undertaken with purpose. In the 1960s, international assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and donor governments led by the United States made Asia's original Green Revolution possible.
  • Development skeptics and farm modernization critics keep pushing us toward this unappealing second path. It's time for leaders with vision and political courage to push back.
  • anonymous on 29 Apr 10
     
    By Robert Paarlberg at Foreign Policy on May/June 2010. Hat tip from Modeled Behavior (http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/04/28/in-defense-of-the-industrial-farm-and-against-local-sustainable-and-organic/) - Printable, full version
anonymous

Believers Responding to Doubt | Godless Girl - 0 views

www.godlessgirl.com/...believers-responding-to-doubt

religion

shared by anonymous on 21 Jan 11 - Cached
  • A 2009 study in Britain found that non-religious parents have a near 100 percent chance of passing on their views to their children, whereas religious parents have only about a 50 / 50 chance of passing on their views.
  • anonymous on 21 Jan 11
     
    "A little while ago I stumbled on a blog post about how some Christians tend respond to the doubts of their fellow believers and how that may actually be pushing doubters away."
anonymous

5 Things They Never Told Us - 0 views

www.cracked.com/...5-things-they-never-told-us

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 11 - Cached
  • #5.You Don't Become An Adult, You Just Suddenly Are One
  • There's no class or test or paperwork to sign. One day you just realize you're a person who pays bills. You're a person who signs up for a club card at your local grocery store because, "Oh, I might as well, I'm there so often." You're a person who gradually is getting less and less familiar with whatever's going on in pop music. You can vote and rent a car and get married and have kids, and it's not weird, it's normal.You're an adult, and no one told you.
  • Remember when you were a kid and you saw adults as all-knowing authority figures who had shit figured out? As the people who were allowed to tell you what to do and make rules, because they were the ones who were running the world? That's what kids think when they see you, even though you're an idiot.
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  • #4.Almost Everything You're Doing is Absolutely Meaningless
  • The only skills you really need to learn in high school and college are how to socialize and be a functioning human in society, because that's the only thing you'll be consistently doing for the rest of your life.
  • College is important, but what you study? Not so much. Focus on learning how to be a human, and focus on networking and meeting the right people, because they are much better at hiring you than your GPA is. Professors and Deans and your parents will stress that your grades are important, but I guarantee you that, as long as they were good at their job, no one in the history of time has ever been fired because of their GPA.
  • You'll Never Have as Much Time, Energy, Or Excuses For Doing Dumb Shit Than When You're 14
  • At 14, you're not legally allowed to work in most states, school is a pointless breeze and you have nothing to be stressed about because you're not paying bills or fighting in a war and no one depends on you for anything. You just have boundless energy, and a stupid amount of free time and no accountability whatsoever.
  • anonymous on 25 Mar 11
     
    "Given the opportunity, there are probably a lot of tiny, superficial things you say to your fourteen-year-old self, (Get a haircut; Stop being a smartass; Maybe try not masturbating for, like, a night, and see what that does to the amount of free time you have). Small things you wish you'd known, because they would've made middle school, high school and whatever comes after slightly easier. There are also much bigger things, things about life and growing up that someone damn sure should've told you about."
anonymous

Conversational Narcissism: How to Avoid It - 3 views

artofmanliness.com/...void-conversational-narcissism

communication

shared by anonymous on 18 Aug 11 - Cached
  • In The Pursuit of Attention, sociologist Charles Derber shares the fascinating results of a study done on face-to-face interactions, in which researchers watched 1,500 conversations unfold and recorded how people traded and vied for attention.
  • Dr. Derber discovered that despite good intentions, and often without being aware of it, most people struggle with what he has termed “conversational narcissism.”
  • Conversational narcissists always seek to turn the attention of others to themselves.
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  • it takes much more subtle forms, and we’re all guilty of it from time to time.
  • the enjoyment of a good conversation is becoming more of a rarity these days. In our time of cell phones, text messaging, and emails, we’re having less face-to-face interactions, and thus when we do meet up with people in the flesh, our social skills can be a bit rusty.
  • A good conversation is an interesting thing; it can’t be a solely individual endeavor—it has to be a group effort.
  • Each individual has to sacrifice a little for the benefit of the group as a whole and ultimately, to increase the pleasure each individual receives.
  • During a conversation, each person makes initiatives. These initiatives can either be attention-giving or attention-getting. Conversational narcissists concentrate more on the latter because they are focused on gratifying their own needs. Attention-getting initiatives can take two forms: active and passive.
  • The response a person gives to what someone says can take two forms: the shift-response and the support-response.
  • The shift-response if often very subtle. People put in a nice transition to disguise it by prefacing their response with something like, “That’s interesting,” “Really? “I can see that,” right before they make a comment about themselves.
  • Most conversational narcissists–careful not to appear rude– will mix their support and shift responses together, using just a few more shift-responses, until the topic finally shifts entirely to them. 
  • it’s fine to share things about yourself, as long as you loop the conversation back to the person who initiated the topic.
  • Conversational narcissism can take an even subtler form. Instead of interjecting about themselves and trying to initiate a new topic, conversational narcissists can simply withhold their support-responses until the other person’s topic withers away and they can take the floor.
  • three forms support-responses can take
  • Background acknowledgments
  • Supportive assertions
  • Supportive questions
  • A conversational narcissist can kill someone’s story dead in its tracks by withholding these support-responses, especially by not asking any questions.
  • Conversationalist narcissists will also show their disinterest in the speaker by delaying their background acknowledgments
  • Good conversationalists place their background acknowledgments in just the rights spots, in the small natural pauses in the conversation.
  • The narcissist tries to adhere to social expectations by giving the speaker some cursory acknowledgments, but they’re not really listening, and so they throw them in there just a few seconds off.
  • one more form of conversational narcissism to avoid is the “Well, enough about me, I want to hear more about you!” tactic.
  • Once someone introduces a topic, your job is to draw out the narrative from them by giving them encouragement in the form of background acknowledgments and supportive assertions, and moving their narrative along by asking supportive questions.
  • anonymous on 18 Aug 11
     
    "In a time where a lot of the old social supports people relied upon have disappeared, people have become starved for attention. They bring this hunger to their conversations, which they see as competitions in which the winner is able to keep the attention on themselves as much as possible. And this is turning the skill of conversation-making into a lost art."
  • Erik Hanson on 19 Aug 11
     
    I think this sort of competitive behavior in conversations has existed far longer than modern communications devices. I have mys suspicions about this claim: "In our time of cell phones, text messaging, and emails, we're having less face-to-face interactions, and thus when we do meet up with people in the flesh, our social skills can be a bit rusty." There are plenty of cultures, even fairly large subcultures within the US, that take this "narcissism" as a given. As a Midwesterner (where talking in general can almost seem rude), I experience this a lot. But there are also things like Spanish classes that teach students to swap "um" and "er" for "eh," and to make that sound loung and loud to avoid "giving away" the attention in a conversation.
anonymous

Learned Helplessness - 2 views

youarenotsosmart.com/...learned-helplessness

criticalthinking misconceptions

shared by anonymous on 05 Jul 11 - Cached
  • If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you learn over time there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act – you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism. Studies of the clinically depressed show that when they fail they often just give in to defeat and stop trying.
  • Do you vote? If not, is it because you think it doesn’t matter because things never change, or politicians are evil on both sides, or one vote in several million doesn’t count? Yeah, that’s learned helplessness.
  • anonymous on 05 Jul 11
     
    Another great bubble bursting from David McRaney at You Are Not So Smart. "The Misconception: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it. The Truth: If you feel like you aren't in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in."
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Jul 11
     
    I wouldn't consider this the whole story. There's certainly a bad extreme to fatalism, but there's an alternate wrong in supposing that all things are achievable through fiat of will. A weakness of Classicism and PoMo may lie in resigning oneself to fate or the whims of complex systems, nut Modernism certainly had problems not only with those who successfully asserted their wills, but also in the psyches of the many who were unsuccessful supermen and were left to conclude that they must be inherently worse people.
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