January 1, 2014

Doesn’t seem to matter anymore, does it?

August 14, 2013

Improvements in hygiene could partly explain increased rates of Alzheimer's disease seen in many developed countries, according to research into the link between infections and the condition. Researchers studied the prevalence of the neurodegenerative disease across 192 countries and compared it with the diversity of microbes in those places. Taking into account differences in birth rate, life expectancy, and age structure in their study, the scientists found that levels of sanitation, infectious disease, and urbanisation accounted for 33%, 36% and 28% respectively of the discrepancies seen in Alzheimer's rates between countries. In their report which was published in the journal Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, the researchers concluded that hygiene was positively associated with risk of Alzheimer's disease. Countries with a greater degree of sanitation and lower prevalence of pathogens had a higher burden from the disorder. Countries with a greater degree of urbanisation and wealth also had higher Alzheimer's burdens. Whether hygiene causes the pattern is not yet clear – cleanliness or infectious disease might be associated with some other factor – but the team does have a speculative hypothesis for how the two factors might be linked: exposure to micro-organisms – good and bad – is important for the body to develop proper immune responses. The researchers' "hygiene hypothesis" suggests that as societies have become cleaner, the reduced level of contact with bacteria and other kinds of infectious agent might stall the proper development of important elements of the body's immune system such as white blood cells. The team suggests that developing Alzheimer's might be linked to autoimmune disease, in which the body's immune system attacks itself.

August 2, 2013

Shifts in climate change are strongly linked to human violence around the world, according to a comprehensive new study released Thursday by the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University. The research, which was published in Science, examined 60 previous studies from all major regions of the globe. The results suggest that changes such as drought, flood, and high temperatures strongly correlate with spikes in conflict. Researchers noted examples including increased domestic violence in India and Australia, assaults and murders in the United States and Tanzania, ethnic violence in Europe and South Asia, land invasions in Brazil, police violence in the Netherlands, and civil conflicts throughout the tropics. The biggest culprit: higher temperatures. Out of 27 modern societies studied, all 27 showed a positive relationship between higher temperatures and violence. One standard deviation shift towards hotter conditions causes the likelihood of personal violence to rise four percent and intergroup conflict to rise 14 percent. If the study's calculations are correct, a global temperature rise of just 2 degrees Celsius could increase intergroup conflicts (such as civil wars) by over 50 percent. And, as Climate Central notes, projections estimate that temperatures will make that jump by 2040.

July 31, 2013

An excerpt from a story at The Atlantic Wire: "...In other words, a warmer atmosphere from climate change likely yields greater extremes in weather. This syncs with the draft report issued by the government's Federal Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee last year. That report predicted the following for the Midwest: "longer growing seasons and rising carbon dioxide levels will increase yields of some crops, though those benefits will be increasingly offset by the occurrence of extreme events such as heat waves, droughts, and floods." That prediction was meant to be borne out over the next several decades. What it predicted, though, has already been seen over the course of six months..."

July 22, 2013

How terrible for a person to know what he could have been. How he could have gone on. But instead having to live along being nothing, and know he is just going to die and that is the end of it.

Oakley Hall  Warlock

July 20, 2013

On this date, July 20, in 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. I was in Finland. The next day, walking around Helsinki, random people came up to me, shook my hand, and said what a great thing it was. Americans no longer travel to space because here, everything is about money, and space travel doesn’t make the right people rich enough. Greed is strangling us, and it has made us much smaller than we were.

June 20, 2013

Analysis of the earnings of the top 200 chief executives at public companies with at least $1 billion in revenue indicates another big raise last year. The research, conducted by Equilar Inc., the executive compensation analysis firm, found that the median 2012 pay package came in at $15.1 million — a leap of 16 percent over 2011.  As usual, cash pay pales next to the value of the stock and option grants they received. Median cash compensation was $5.3 million last year, while stock and option grants came in at $9 million. Stock grants are clearly where the action is, and their value can really add up. Equilar’s analysis calculates the median value of stock holdings of these C.E.O.’s at $51 million. That’s a median of $66.1 million dollars per year. Median. And you thought baseball players were overpaid.

May 11, 2013

Worldwide levels of the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming have hit a milestone, reaching an amount never before encountered by humans. Carbon dioxide was measured at 400 parts per million at the oldest monitoring station in Hawaii which sets the global benchmark. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the last time the worldwide carbon level was probably that high was about 2 million years ago. That was during the Pleistocene Era. Other scientists say it may have been 10 million years ago that Earth last encountered this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The first modern humans only appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago. The measurement that was recorded is only a daily figure, the monthly and yearly average will be smaller. The number 400 has been anticipated by climate scientists and environmental activists for years as a notable indicator, in part because it's a round number — not because any changes in man-made global warming happen by reaching it. Physically, we are no worse off at 400 ppm than we were at 399 ppm. But as a symbol of the painfully slow pace of measures to avoid a dangerous level of warming, it's somewhat unnerving. "This number is a reminder that for the last 150 years — and especially over the last several decades — we have been recklessly polluting the protective sheath of atmosphere that surrounds the Earth and protects the conditions that have fostered the flourishing of our civilization. We are altering the composition of our atmosphere at an unprecedented rate", said Al Gore. Carbon dioxide traps heat just like in a greenhouse and most of it stays in the air for a century; some lasts for thousands of years. It accounts for three-quarters of the planet's heat-trapping gases. There are others, such as methane, which has a shorter life span but traps heat more effectively. Methane concentrations also are rising because of human activity such as industrial farming. Both trigger temperatures to rise over time which is causing sea levels to rise and some weather patterns to change. When measurements of carbon dioxide were first taken in 1958, it measured 315 parts per million. Some scientists and environmental groups promote 350 parts per million as a safe level for CO2, but scientists acknowledge they don't really know what levels would stop the effects of global warming. The level of carbon dioxide in the air is rising faster than in the past decades, despite international efforts by developed nations to curb it. On average the amount is growing by about 2 parts per million per year. That's 100 times faster than at the end of the Ice Age. Back then, it took 7,000 years for carbon dioxide to reach 80 parts per million. Because of the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, carbon dioxide levels have gone up by that amount in just 55 years. Before the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels were around 280 ppm.

April 8, 2013

A new Gallup survey indicates people feel safer in the Twin Cities than any other major metro area in the country. Of the Minneapolis-St. Paul residents, 80 percent said they feel safe walking around at night. That is two percentage points higher than Denver and Raleigh, N.C., which each clocked in at 78 percent. The results are part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which is derived from interviews with 500 people every day in 2012. The average level of perceived safety in major cities was 72 percent. “Minneapolis-St. Paul… residents have the highest sense of personal security among Americans living in the nation’s top metro areas, at least in terms of feeling safe walking alone at night in their local area,” Gallup said. Memphis and New Orleans metro areas had the lowest perceived safety scores.

February 8, 2013

Central Connecticut State University just announced this year's most literate U.S. cities. The annual study is conducted by the University's president, John Miller, who ranks the 75 largest U.S. cities based on various information, such as library resources, Internet resources, the number of bookstores, periodical publishing resources, newspaper circulation, and education levels. The "Internet resources" category also includes visiting a newspaper website, buying books online, and/or owning an e-reader. Miller indicated that the study's aim is to shift attention from school test scores on reading "to how much people are reading, and where are they reading the most." Washington DC came in first place for the third year in a row. Proud to say my city came in third! These are the top 25 most literate U.S. cities for 2012, according to this study:

1. Washington, DC
2. Seattle, WA
3. Minneapolis, MN
4. Pittsburgh, PA
5. Denver, CO
6. St. Paul, MN
7. Boston, MA
8. Atlanta, GA
9. St. Louis, MO
10. Portland, OR
11. San Francisco, CA
12. Cincinnati, OH
13. Kansas City, MO
14. Cleveland, OH
15. Honolulu CDP, HI
16. Oakland, CA
17. Virginia Beach, VA
18. Raleigh, NC
19. Baltimore, MD
20. Tampa, FL
21. New York City, NY
22. Tulsa, OK
23. Austin, TX
24. Lexington-Fayette, KY
25. New Orleans, LA

Saturday December 22, 2012

On this date in 1864, during the Civil War, my namesake, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman sent a message from Georgia to President Abraham Lincoln saying, "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah."

December 17, 2012

I agree with Rep. Keith Ellison’s recent assertions about gun control:

We should reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban, a law on the books until 2004 that prevented dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of violent criminals, and fully support implementation of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to ensure dangerous individuals who are already barred by federal law from owning a gun cannot buy guns online or at gun shows. A strong national background check system will ensure that violent drug dealers, domestic abusers, murderers, or the criminally insane are not able to buy guns to hurt and kill others. This ban is supported by virtually every federal, state and local law enforcement agency and more than two thirds of the American people. We should also limit the amount of deadly ammunition shooters can hold in a single magazine. The shooters in Tucson and in Aurora, Colorado, used high capacity magazines that allowed them to fire for extended periods without reloading. The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary also had high-capacity magazines. There is no justified civilian purpose for firing dozens of rounds without stopping.

In my opinion, these are minimum changes and just the beginning of what needs to be done to stop gun violence in the United States. It’s shameful what we allow. Blood is on all outr hands.

December 13, 2012

As men age, they are more likely to pass genetic mutations on to their children. By introducing change, older men's genes appear to be a major driving force in human evolution. But the mutations from a growing number of older fathers may also account for a portion of the recent increase in autism. Because the cells that give rise to sperm divide frequently--about 23 times a year—they are much more likely to accumulate genetic copying errors than the female precursor cells, oocytes, which divide only twice before becoming eggs. The mistakes add up over a lifetime, so that the older the father, the more mutations he has in his sperm. It is estimated that a 70-year-old dad passes on eight times as many mutations as does a 20-year-old. To grasp the implications, researchers compared the whole genome sequences of 78 Icelandic people diagnosed with autism or schizophrenia with the sequences of their fathers and mothers. Four times as many of the children's new genetic mutations came from their fathers as from their mothers. Similar results were announced in another study at the University of Washington in April and September that demonstrated that the mutation rate in men rises linearly with age. A father 50 or older is about twice as likely as one 29 or under to have an autistic child. A Yale University study further quantified the risk. In families that have only one autistic child, about 15 percent of the cases are linked to new mutations in sperm cells. Other studies suggest that offspring of older dads are at higher risk of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and epilepsy as well. Overall, advanced paternal age probably accounts for 5 percent to more than 25 percent of the risk for autism, depending on whom you ask. Because the average age of fatherhood is rising in many Western countries, more mutations are probably being passed along. Ultimately, older fathers are a double-edged sword. Most of the mutations they pass on are harmless and some are definitely beneficial, even essential to our long-term survival as a species, since a genetically varied population is the raw material of evolutionary change. So, though mutations can be dangerous for the next generation they also increase the diversity in our genome.

12.12.12

Nothing else to say. Just a perfect number.

December 4, 2012

According to Mercer's 2012 Quality of Living Index, Vienna, famous for its hundreds of museums, 2000 parks, and of course its roasted coffee, is the best place on the planet to live. This year's selection makes Vienna number one in the world for the fourth year in a row. The annual survey by the global human resources consulting firm points not just to Austria's qualities but to much of the region's virtues. Eight of the report's top 10 cities are in Europe. Zurich is the world's second most livable city while three German cities -- Munich, Dusseldorf, and Frankfurt -- follow close behind. Mercer's survey results are based on an analysis of local living conditions comprising 39 factors in 10 categories. Political considerations include government stability and crime rates. Economic factors take into account banking services and currency exchange laws. Health considerations include access to medical care and pollution levels. Transport, housing, and recreation are also taken into account. "Overall, European cities continue to have high quality of living as a result of a combination of increased stability, rising living standards, and advanced city infrastructures," said Slagin Parakatil, Senior Researcher at Mercer. This is despite economic turmoil, political tension, and high unemployment in some European countries. Australian, New Zealand and Canadian metropolises round out the top ten list. The world's top 30 cities of the Mercer 2012 index:
1. Vienna, Austria
2. Zurich, Switzerland
3. Auckland, New Zealand
4. Munich, Germany
5. Vancouver, Canada
6. Düsseldorf, Germany
7. Frankfurt, Germany
8. Geneva, Switzerland
9. Copenhagen, Denmark
10. Bern, Switzerland
10. (tie) Sydney, Australia
12. Amsterdam, Netherlands
13. Wellington, New Zealand
14. Ottawa, Canada
15. Toronto, Canada
16. Berlin, Germany
17. Hamburg, Germany
17. Melbourne, Australia
19. Luxembourg, Luxembourg
21. Perth, Australia
22. Brussels, Belgium
23. Montreal, Canada
24. Nuremberg, Germany
25. Singapore, Singapore
26. Canberra, Australia
27. Stuttgart, Germany
28. Honolulu, Hawaii U.S.
29. Adelaide, Australia
29. (tie) Paris, France
29. (tie) San Francisco, U.S.
City scores help multinational companies calculate compensation packages for the employees they send overseas. A lower score often correlates into a better compensation package that includes hardship allowances, according to Mercer. Countries with unstable governments or undergoing civil strife tend usually to have lower scores. Eight African cities dominate the bottom ten in this year's survey. Around the word and on a regional basis, the cities that score the lowest are:
64. Belfast, Northern Ireland (Western Europe)
71. Detroit, Michigan, (United States)
207. Dushanbe, Tajikistan (Asia-Pacific)
213. Tbilisi, Georgia (Eastern Europe)
219. Port-au-Prince, Haiti (North Americas)
This year's city with the worst quality of life is Baghdad, Iraq at #221. The United States, which constantly trumpets itself as “the greatest country in the world” couldn’t even break the top 25 with Honolulu slouching in at 28 and San Francisco tied for 29^th.

Also, Transparency International has released its 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index, deeming more than two-thirds of the countries surveyed as "very corrupt." The usual suspects occupied both ends of the league table. Only 53 of 176 countries surveyed attained a "passing grade" of 50 out of 100 in the annual report. Two typical trios bookended the index, with Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand all tied at 90 at the top. Somalia, North Korea, and Afghanistan shared the ignominious end of Transparency's table, scoring just eight. As a geographic region, Scandinavia swept the board as usual. Sweden was fourth in line after joint leaders Denmark and Finland, with Norway bagging seventh spot with a score of 85. Weak civil society and rule of law can blight lives, particularly for those who most need the protection of the state. The comprehensive new report reveals wide disparities, with parts of Asia faring quite poorly. Transparency's Managing Director Cobus de Swardt said the world's top economies should "lead by example" and ensure "their institutions are fully transparent and their leaders are held accountable." But, the world's largest economy, the US, could only manage a score of 73 - 19th in the standings, between the UK and Chile. China, meanwhile, logged only 39 points, scraping into the top half in 80th place.

November 11, 2012

Two weak tornadoes touched down in the south metro late Saturday - an extremely rare phenomenon that Minnesota has not experienced this late in the season since the National Weather Service began keeping tornado statistics. After a day of record-breaking highs that topped out in the lower 70s in some parts of the Twin Cities, a strong cold front rode in from the Dakotas, spawning the tornadoes in Dakota County around 11 p.m. Saturday. They fanned into straight-line winds that ripped out trees, knocked out power, and caused light structural damage in Dakota, Ramsey, and southern Washington counties. The first tornado showed up on radar at 10:58 p.m., touching down near McAndrews Road and County Road 5 in Burnsville. It moved northeast. Wind speeds were estimated at 80 miles per hour. It then widened into straight-line winds.
Seven minutes later, a line of thunderstorms moving fast to the northeast produced a second tornado following the Mississippi River, and it dropped down near the intersection of Interstate 494 and Hwy. 13. That one had wind speeds of 70 to 75 mph. The winds had picked up intensity as they swept from the west into the east metro, with pockets of homes and businesses hardest hit, and power failures in West St. Paul and Mendota Heights. The straight-line winds were nearly as strong as the tornadoes, wreaking nearly as much damage and over wider swaths. Wind damage was reported as far north as White Bear Lake. No injuries were reported, but trees and power lines were blown down. Power was lost to about 12,000 homes and businesses. The twisters were rated as EF-0, on a scale that rates the most devastating tornadoes as EF-5. But even a weak tornado can still do damage. Any tornado in a metro area can be dangerous with so many people. The November twisters are not only rare in Minnesota, but are extremely rare for other places in the Northern Plains, the Upper Mississippi River Valley which includes Wisconsin, Iowa, and North and South Dakota. The tornadoes came four to six weeks later than the typical time that twisters end in Minnesota. As the cover of the November 5 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek said, It’s Global Warming, Stupid.

November 7, 2012

The United States no longer makes the list of the 10 most prosperous countries in the world, according to a new study by the Legatum Institute. The Legatum Prosperity Index found that while prosperity increased globally, the U.S. fell to 12th place in its rankings. The report writes: The American Dream is in jeopardy. In an unprecedented fall, America drops to twelfth position in the worldwide prosperity rankings – with weakening performance across five of the Index’s eight sub-categories. The Legatum Institute published its first Prosperity Index six years ago, ranking countries based on material wealth and personal well-being. The 2012 index analyzed 142 countries in eight categories: economy, education, entrepreneurship & opportunity, governance, health, personal freedom, safety & security, and social capital. According to the study, overall prosperity in Europe has increased despite the economic crisis, though several European countries have seen their scores drop in categories analyzing economic development. This study comes on the tails of the U.N.'s list of the most prosperous cities in the world -- with more than half of them located in Europe. It’s about time all those American exceptionalists stop the continuous bluster about “greatest country in the world.”

November 6, 2012

Yes!

Except for Michele Bachman slithering by, it was a great night:

Both constitutional amendments, one to state that marriage is only between a man and a woman, and another to require voter ID, failed. Very proud to be a Minnesotan today, especially having been away in nothing land for nearly 3 years.

July 31, 2012

Even with a persistent gender gap in a presidential election year, House Republicans have not given up on their campaign to narrow access to birth control, abortion care, and lifesaving cancer screenings. Far from it. A new Republican spending proposal revives some of the more extreme attacks on women’s health and freedom that were blocked by the Senate earlier in this Congress. The resurrection is part of an alarming national crusade that goes beyond abortion rights and strikes broadly at women’s health in general. These setbacks are recycled from the Congressional trash bin in the fiscal 2013 spending bill for federal health, labor and education programs approved by a House appropriations subcommittee on July 18 over loud objections from Democratic members to these and other provisions. The measure would bar Planned Parenthood’s network of clinics, which serve millions of women across the country, from receiving any federal money unless the health group agreed to no longer offer abortion services for which it uses no federal dollars — a patently unconstitutional provision. It would also eliminate financing for Title X, the effective federal family-planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for sexually-transmitted diseases. Without this program, some women would die, and unintended pregnancies would rise, resulting in some 400,000 more abortions a year and increases in Medicaid-related costs, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading authority on reproductive health. On top of that, the bill would prevent implementation of most of the Affordable Care Act, wiping out its numerous advances for women’s health. It would seriously weaken the requirement that employee insurance plans cover birth control and other preventive health services by allowing any employer to opt out based on personal religious beliefs or moral objections. Pushed by the subcommittee’s chairman, Denny Rehberg, a Montana Republican, the budget plan stands little chance of being passed in its current form. Congress is about to leave on its August break, and, without explanation, the full Appropriations Committee’s consideration of the bill has been postponed indefinitely. It may be that Speaker John Boehner wants to avoid a controversy heading toward November that shifts focus from the economy. Even so, the subcommittee’s anti-woman work product is a statement of Republican policy. It is endorsed by the full committee chairman, Harold Rogers, and will be a starting point for negotiations on a budget deal with the Senate. Furthermore, when Congress puts forth bad ideas to curtail birth control and abortion access, they tend to spread, helping to inspire copycat bills in the states. Since House Republicans first tried to defund Planned Parenthood, for example, similar attacks have been enacted in six states, most recently in North Carolina earlier this month. There is a striking overlap between the subcommittee’s regressive politics and the polices espoused by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. That makes it a window on what a Romney presidency could mean for women’s rights and lives.

July 30, 2012

Unsettling data about IQ and Gender according to Dr. Paul Irwing a senior lecturer in organizational psychology at Manchester University. “All the research I've done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women. I don't know why this is, all I can say is that we have a huge amount of data. In my 2005 paper in the British Journal of Psychology we looked at 22 surveys sampling 20,000 university students. In 21 out of the 22 studies males always had an advantage. That's a lot. We ignored the survey from Mexico because the results were consistent with a university that was extremely selective with respect to females. The results of both studies were a shock to me. I find prejudice abhorrent. I've always taught sex differences from a left-wing point of view, that women are every bit as good as men. My findings don't fit my view of the world at all. Girls often do better than boys at school. There has to be some female compensating factor, most importantly the ability to process speech sounds, which means women read faster and more accurately and have an advantage in basic writing tasks. And women work harder than men and are more conscientious so they do things technically correctly. Men are often quite original but deficient in what is technically demanded. Historically women have been discriminated against. They've made tremendous progress and some people feel findings like this are a kick in the teeth. I have sympathy for that, but only people who know virtually nothing about IQ tests claim they have a cultural bias. All IQ tests are thoroughly tested and adjusted for bias, so if anything IQ tests are biased in favour of women not men. People should have equal opportunities but if you want a society where everyone feels satisfied you're not going to find men and women doing the same things in the same proportions. It would help if we recognised that.” The picture is of Marissa Mayer, newly appointed CEO of Yahoo.