February 17, 2012

Education was historically considered the great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. It is the engine of a thriving democracy. A body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects and American democracy. It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially. A Stanford University study has found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students has grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s. In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s. The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. And, the data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend. A study by researchers at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by only 20 percent. The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989. Greatest country in the world, right? Banana republic here we come.

February 15, 2012

The top sources of air pollution are burning fossil fuels (such as gas, oil, and coal), and industrial emissions, both of which are prevalent in the Salt Lake Valley, a smog-rich environment. Fine particulate matter pollutants consist of microscopic particles of metal, carbon, sulfates, and other materials that result from these sources of pollution. These specks of dust are about 30 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair, so they can be inhaled deep into the lungs. Breathing fine particulate matter may harm the cardiovascular system in two ways: if particles find their way into the bloodstream they can make blood vessels less elastic, and they may also boost activity of the sympathetic nervous system, which tends to increase heart rate and blood pressure and trigger the release of stress hormones. New research suggests that even a brief uptick in traffic-related air pollution may be enough to increase a person's short-term risk of stroke. The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, was conducted by researchers at Brown University School of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the Harvard School of Public Health. It analysed 10 years of data from a Boston stroke center. It found that strokes are more likely to occur immediately following 24-hour periods in which air quality drops from the range the Environmental Protection Agency considers “good” into "moderate." The study compared 1,705 stroke cases in the Boston area with detailed data on the day-to-day levels of various airborne pollutants, including vehicle emissions such as particulate matter, black carbon, and nitrogen dioxide. After taking into account each patient's medical history, the researchers concluded the odds of having a stroke were 34% higher following a day of "moderate" air quality than following a "good" air day. Based on this finding, they estimate that a 20% reduction of levels of fine particulate matter would have prevented 6,100 of the 184,000 stroke hospitalizations that occurred in the northeastern United States in 2007. A second study, appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, provides additional evidence that air pollution may increase cardiovascular risk. In that study, a team of French researchers at at the University Paris Descartes re-analyzed data from 34 previous studies conducted around the world. Most of the studies used methods similar to those analyzed by the Brown study. Higher levels of airborne pollutants, including particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide, were associated with a slight increase in the short-term risk of heart attack. The researchers observed an uptick in heart risk even at pollution levels classified as safe by the World Health Organization. The increase in heart attack risk was small on the individual level, but it can have a substantial impact at the population level. In addition to affecting blood flow, air pollution appears to increase inflammation, an immune system response that is believed to contribute to both heart disease and strokes. If inhaled pollutants reach the alveoli, the tiny sacs in the lungs where oxygen and carbon dioxide pass into and out of the bloodstream, they trigger an inflammatory reaction. They can also spread through the blood stream and reach the heart. Breathe!

January 28, 2012

Jackson Pollock, perhaps the most controversial artist of the already controversial 20^th century, was born one hundred years ago today on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming. He was only 44 when he died. He remains a polarizing figure in art and culture, but for all the right reasons. He is derided on each level of society for his drip paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s. From Joe Six-Pack claiming that his third grade daughter could do just as well, to post-modern scholars deriding the assertion that the arts can contain a singular heroic act, many can meet and agree that Pollock is overrated while sharing no other cultural attitudes. Feminists scold the complex relationship he maintained with his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, and the entire Pop Art and Pop Surrealist movements seem simply to exist to stand in opposition to what Pollock created.

I have loved Pollock’s drip paintings since I first saw them, and the highlight of my visit to MOMA was seeing some of them in person. It seems almost magical the way a unity emerges from apparent chaos. Check out this video of him painting and this one of him discussing his process. He also has one of the great quotes about art. When asked by a reporter how he knew when he was done with one of his paintings, he replied, “How do you know when you’re done making love?” Happy Birthday, Jackson Pollock! Your work has enriched my life.

January 27, 2012

According to NASA, although nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000, 2011 was only the ninth warmest year on record. The world's average temperature in 2011 was 0.92 degrees Fahrenheit (0.51 degrees Celcius) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline period of 1951 to 1980. James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said, "We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting. So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record." There is some disagreement over 2011's ranking, however. NOAA scientists arrived at the same temperature data, but have ranked 2011 as the 11th warmest year on record. 2011, which was slightly cooler because of La Niña, was still "hotter than every year last century except 1998." This diagram shows world-wide annual temperature increases since 1884:

Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, explained that a cooler year did not mean overall trends of rising temperatures would necessarily change. Check out this very scary video that shows the temperature changes.

January 25, 2012

Past research has suggested a link between coffee and a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. Now, researchers at Wuhan University have identified three major compounds in coffee that may provide potentially beneficial effects: caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid, and caffeine. These findings suggest that the beneficial effects of coffee consumption on type 2 diabetes mellitus may be partly due to the ability of the major coffee components and metabolites to inhibit the toxic aggregation of human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP), a substance normally found in the pancreas. Sometimes, however, abnormal protein deposits (toxic aggregation) arise from hIAPP. These abnormal deposits (amyloid fibrils) are found in people with type 2 diabetes. In 2009, a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine reported that people who drank the most coffee seemed to have the lowest risk of developing type 2 diabetes. That study reported that with each cup of coffee consumed daily, the risk of type 2 diabetes dropped by 7 percent. So, the researchers behind the new study conducted laboratory experiments to see if compounds found in coffee could inhibit the production of the abnormal protein deposits associated with hIAPP. They found that caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid, and caffeine, the three most common components in coffee, helped reduce the abnormal protein deposits. Caffeic acid appeared most effective. And, because decaffeinated coffee contains even higher levels of caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid than caffeinated coffee, the beneficial effect may be even stronger for decaffeinated coffee. Starbucks here I come.

January 23, 2012

Happy New Year!

January 20, 1012

Aa Paul Krugman points out, although disclosure of tax returns is standard practice for political candidates, Mitt Romney has never done so, and, at first, he tried to stonewall the issue even in a presidential race. Then he said that he probably pays only about 15 percent of his income in taxes, and he hinted that he might release his 2011 return. Even then, however, he will face pressure to release previous returns, too — like his father, who released 12 years of returns back when he made his presidential run. (The elder Romney, by the way, paid 37 percent of his income in taxes). And the public has a right to see the back years: By 2011, with the campaign looming, Mr. Romney may have rearranged his portfolio to minimize awkward issues like his accounts in the Cayman Islands or his use of the justly reviled “carried interest” tax break. But the larger question isn’t what Mitt Romney’s tax returns have to say about Mitt Romney; it’s what they have to say about U.S. tax policy. Is there a good reason why the rich should bear a startlingly light tax burden? For they do. If Mr. Romney is telling the truth about his taxes, he’s actually more or less typical of the very wealthy. Since 1992, the I.R.S. has been releasing income and tax data for the 400 highest-income filers. In 2008, the most recent year available, these filers paid only 18.1 percent of their income in federal income taxes; in 2007, they paid only 16.6 percent. When you bear in mind that the rich pay little either in payroll taxes or in state and local taxes — major burdens on middle-class families — this implies that the top 400 filers faced lower taxes than many ordinary workers. The main reason the rich pay so little is that most of their income takes the form of capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent, far below the maximum on wages and salaries. So the question is whether capital gains — three-quarters of which go to the top 1 percent of the income distribution — warrant such special treatment. Defenders of low taxes on the rich mainly make two arguments: that low taxes on capital gains are a time-honored principle, and that they are needed to promote economic growth and job creation. Both claims are false. When you hear about the low, low taxes of people like Mr. Romney, what you need to know is that it wasn’t always thus — and the days when the superrich paid much higher taxes weren’t that long ago. Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan — yes, Ronald Reagan — signed a tax reform equalizing top rates on earned income and capital gains at 28 percent. The rate rose further, to more than 29 percent, during Bill Clinton’s first term. Low capital gains taxes date only from 1997, when Mr. Clinton struck a deal with Republicans in Congress in which he cut taxes on the rich in return for creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And today’s ultralow rates — the lowest since the days of Herbert Hoover — date only from 2003, when former President George W. Bush rammed both a tax cut on capital gains and a tax cut on dividends through Congress, something he achieved by exploiting the illusion of triumph in Iraq. Correspondingly, the low-tax status of the very rich is also a recent development. During Mr. Clinton’s first term, the top 400 taxpayers paid close to 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, and even after his tax deal they paid substantially more than they have since the 2003 cut. So is it essential that the rich receive such a big tax break? There are theoretical and practical arguments against such special treatment. In particular, the huge gap between taxes on earned income and taxes on unearned income creates a perverse incentive to arrange one’s affairs so as to make income appear in the “right” category. And the economic record certainly doesn’t support the notion that superlow taxes on the superrich are the key to prosperity. During that first Clinton term, when the very rich paid much higher taxes than they do now, the economy added 11.5 million jobs, dwarfing anything achieved even during the good years of the Bush administration. So Mr. Romney’s tax dance is doing us all a service by highlighting the unwise, unjust and expensive favors being showered on the upper-upper class. At a time when all the self-proclaimed serious people are telling us that the poor and the middle class must suffer in the name of fiscal probity, such low taxes on the very rich are indefensible.

January 17, 2012

The LDS Church has again joined with dozens of other faiths in its “defense of marriage” as exclusively between a man and a woman, arguing that the move to legalize gay marriage may infringe on religious rights. There are “grave consequences of altering this definition,” a group of 39 religious leaders, including LDS Presiding Bishop H. David Burton, wrote last week in an open letter ... to all Americans which states that “the promotion and protection of marriage — the union of one man and one woman as husband and wife — is a matter of the common good and serves the wellbeing of the couple, of children, of civil society and all people.” All people? Other signers included Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals; Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, Catholic archbishop of New York; and Nathan J. Diament, executive director for public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. These leaders worry about a "broad range" of church-state legal conflicts that would arise by altering the civil definition of marriage. Every law “where rights depend on marital status — such as employment discrimination, employment benefits, adoption, education, health care, elder care, housing, property, and taxation — ” the letter said, “will change so that same-sex sexual relationships must be treated as if they were marriage.” According to their “reasoning”, any refusal by religious organizations “to treat a same-sex sexual relationship as if it were a marriage,” the leaders warned, would mark them and their members “as bigots, subjecting them to the full arsenal of government punishments and pressures reserved for racists” which, based on the content of the letter and the LDS church’s systematic actions against the gays and lesbians, is an accurate description of what they are. Also check this out.

January 12, 2012

Utah is barely passing when it comes to education according to Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report. The report grades states on a number of measures, from student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to support offered to teachers. Utah ranks 42^nd in the nation, down from 41^st a year ago and 38th in 2010. Utah scored dead last for its per-pupil spending. Overall, Utah earned a D+ for school finance. Utah’s best grade was only a B-, for its academic standards, student assessments, and school accountability. But it earned a D+ on the much more important rate of students proficient in math and reading as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Utah received demerits for a graduation rate that declined by 7.4 percent from 2000 to 2008 and a widening achievement gap for students in poverty. The Quality Count report also docks Utah for not discouraging teachers from teaching subjects outside their fields, not paying teachers on par with similar occupations, and not having a state-funded program to reduce class sizes. Brenda Hales, state associate superintendent of education, said the report overlooked several things the state is doing to improve teaching. The report gave Utah a D in that area, but Hales is confident Utah deserves an A. She has no data for that assessment, but she knows it’s true. No wonder things are so bad.

January 9, 2012

Advocate Magazine has named Salt Lake City the gayest city in America:
While those unfamiliar with the Beehive State are likely to conjure images of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, far-less-oppressive-than-it-used-to-be Salt Lake City has earned its queer cred. There are more than a half-dozen hot spots for men and women, including the eco-friendly nightclub Jam (JamSLC.com), though the sustainable bamboo flooring is perhaps less of a draw than the packed dance floor. The Coffee Garden (878 South 900 East) is a gathering spot for those looking for a caffeine fix, the Sundance Film Festival brings LGBT film buffs to screenings downtown, and lesbian-owned Meditrina (MeditrinaSLC.com) is a true wine bar — yes, you can get a drink in this town.

The Twin Cities were only 7^th. Eat your fabulous hearts out. This is the response of the Salt Lake Tribune’s cartoonist:

January 6, 2012

Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. Even Bill Clinton did it. American life has been built on the faith that anyone can rise from humble origins to economic heights. At least that’s the dream we’ve all been sold. However, much current research concludes that Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at Stockholm University, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints. Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes. Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths. By emphasizing the influence of family background, the studies not only challenge American identity but speak to the debate about inequality. While liberals often complain that the United States has unusually large income gaps, many conservatives have argued that the system is fair because mobility is especially high, too: everyone can climb the ladder. Now even conservatives recognize the lack of upward mobility. Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for president, warned this fall that movement “up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America.” Nice sentence, Rick. National Review, a deeply conservative magazine, wrote that “most Western European and English-speaking nations have higher rates of mobility” than the United States. Even Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who blusters that overall mobility remains high, recently admitted that “mobility from the very bottom up” is “where the United States lags behind.” Liberal commentators have long emphasized class, but the awareness of conservatives is new. “It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.” One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. So, don’t believe the hype: current evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile.

December 29, 2011

As the curtain greatfully drops on 2011, the year turns out to have been a remarkable exercise in cinematic repetition. So far, the top seven pictures at the domestic box office have been sequels, an alignment that appears unmatched in movie history. In terms of ticket sales the most popular seven films to date have been Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2; Transformers: Dark of the Moon; Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1; The Hangover Part II; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; Fast Five; and Cars 2. The strong opening for Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol suggests that it may well join a list that also includes Rise of the Planet of the Apes, from yet another film series, in the ninth position. If Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows or Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked gain some more traction, the year’s entire Top 10 may turn out to have been sequels (and their titles will have exhausted the well of awkward punctuation). Studio executives fed this year’s trend with a flight to financial safety that has been building for a decade. At least 10 of about 30 major studio films released in the spring-summer blockbuster season were sequels or remakes, and another three — Thor, Green Lantern, and Captain America: The First Avenger — were based on comics whose kinship with existing films allowed them to play like parts of a franchise. In 2012, much like this year, the major studios will offer about 10 sequels or “reboots” (wherein a familiar series starts again, from the top), featuring the return of proven draws like Spider-Man and the Bourne spy cycle, this time with Jeremy Renner as a new hero. As a contrast, in 1993, all 10 of the top box office performers, including Jurassic Park, Mrs. Doubtfire, and The Fugitive, were freshly conceived films, whether based on an original script or adapted from another medium. There is no place for originality when greed is most important.

December 26, 2011

After the 40-14 Denver Broncos’ loss to the Buffalo Bills Saturday, Bill Maher tweeted, “Wow, Jesus just fucked #TimTebow bad! And on Xmas Eve! Somewhere in hell Satan is tebowing, saying to Hitler ‘Hey, Buffalo’s killing them.’” I’m not a fan of Bill Maher, but I was thinking pretty much the same thing about Tebow. As you would expect, the well-deserved dig didn’t go over well with Christians. Fox Business’ “Follow the Money” host Eric Bolling got things rolling with his Twitter response: “Bill Maher is disgusting vile trash. I can’t even repeat what he just tweeted about Tebow...on Christmas Eve. .straighttohellBill.” Others of the overtly devout have even called for a boycott of HBO, the home of Maher’s show, “Real Time.” Though utterly unimportant, this little episode illustrates the two competing worldviews in the contemporary United States. On the one hand, a public figure justifiably satirizes another public figure for the inconsistencies in his very public religiousness. That is, if Tim Tebow is going to claim that Jesus guides him and helps him succeed, as he does every time he prays in public about his performance, then he is open to criticism when he throws 4 interceptions in a game. I guess Jesus was distracted or decided not to help him. But Maher made no mention of stopping Tebow from his public displays, however offensive they may be. On the other hand, you have the fascist approach that believes, and in this case also tweets, that anyone who expresses an opinion different from their own is “vile trash” and should be silenced. Couldn’t be more pleased with the level of public discourse in our great and god-fearing nation.

December 16, 2011

A new survey shows Mormon women outnumber men in the LDS Church — and the gap appears to be widening, especially in Utah. Sociologists Rick Phillips, of the University of North Florida, and Ryan Cragun, of the University of Tampa, suggest it could be because Mormon men in the Beehive State are abandoning their faith at a greater rate than women. But other scholars see an array of possible reasons, including the view that more women than men join the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The report, Mormons in the United States 1990-2008: Socio-Demographic Trends and Regional Differences, relies on data culled from the American Religious Identification Survey, which is built on a large, nationally representative sample of 113,723 respondents in 1990, including 1,742 self-identified Mormons, and 54,461 people with 783 Mormons in 2008. Children were not counted in the survey. It found that 60 percent of Utah Mormons are women, up from 52.5 percent two decades ago. It also showed that the state’s Mormon majority continues to shrink, down to 57 percent, although Utah remains the only state where a religious denomination accounts for more than half the populace. Like most Christian denominations in the United States, Mormonism “has a surplus of women,” Phillips and Cragun write. “In 1990, this surplus was more pronounced among Mormons outside Utah, where 54.9 percent of Latter-day Saints were female, compared to 52.5 percent in Utah. By 2008, a dramatic shift had occurred. While the male-to-female ratio actually narrowed somewhat in most of the nation, it widened significantly in Utah. Females now outnumber males in Utah 3 to 2.” In the past, Mormon men remained tied to the church rather than lose their social standing in the community, argue Phillips and Cragun, both on the board of the Mormon Social Science Association. “However, declining Mormon majorities [in Utah] may have weakened that link, and Mormon men who lack a strong subjective religious commitment to the church are now free to apostatize without incurring sanctions in other social settings.”

December 15, 2011

Almost nine years after the first American tanks began the illegal invasion, today the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission in Iraq, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics, bankrupt both countries, and leave a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta marked the occasion with a speech in a fortified concrete courtyard at the Baghdad airport. The Bush administration began the war in 2003 to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. When that pretext was shown to be a conscious lie, the war was re-cast as an effort to bring democracy to the Middle East, another pretext that rang hollow. Iraq still has the second largest oil reserves in the world. All along, the war was about stealing Iraq’s oil. The ceremony today marked an uneasy moment of closure for the United States, with no clear sense of what has been won. But it is clear what has, so far, been lost: according to Pentagon statistics, as of last Friday, the war had claimed 4,487 American lives, with 32,226 Americans wounded in action. The number of Iraqi deaths is unclear, but it is in the hundreds of thousands, and all indications are, that number will continue to grow. Is this a great country, or what?

December 14, 2011

The world is even smaller than you thought. Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported recently that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74. The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb. The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. The findings have been posted on Facebook’s site. The experiment took one month. The researchers used a set of algorithms developed at the University of Milan to calculate the average distance between any two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users.  They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37. However, a Microsoft study in 2008, using a more conservative definition of friend, found an average chain of 6.6 people in a group of 240 million who exchanged chat messages. Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who led the study in 2008, said that network was based on people who exchanged messages, rather than those who identified as “buddies.” “When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest,” the company wrote on its blog, “a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend.” The caveat there is “Facebook user” — like the Milgram study, the cohort was a self-selected group, in this case people with online access who use a particular Web site. Though the study was by far the largest of its kind, it raised questions about definitions of terms like “friend” on Facebook. Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell and a faculty adviser to an author of the new study, said some links might be more meaningful than others. Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford who studies social networks, raised questions about the bias built into a study based on random samples. He said the study confirmed Facebook’s success in being where millions of people communicate. “It’s more evidence that they’ve been enormously successful at connecting a large number of people very well,” he said. The research underscores the growing power of the emerging science of social networks, in which scientists study the ways people interact by crunching gigantic sets of Internet data and how it has drawn people more tightly together, for better or worse.

December 13, 2011

The notebooks in which Sir Isaac Newton worked out the theories on which much classical science is based have been put online by Cambridge University. More than 4,000 pages have been scanned, including his annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, containing Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Newton wrote mainly in Latin and Greek, the scientific language of his time, and was reluctant to publish. The university plans to put almost all of its Newton collection online. The papers mark the launch of the Cambridge Digital Library project to digitize its collections. Check out this video. Really, really cool.

December 11, 2011

The past decade has been the hottest on record, according to a report released in November. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UN's weather agency, blamed rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for a trend which has seen 13 of the 15 warmest years on record occur since 1997. According to WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud "Concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have reached new highs. Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming and this warming is due to human activities." The WMO said 2011 would likely end as the 10th warmest year since record-keeping began in 1850. 2011 was influenced by an especially strong La Nina event, a phenomenon driven by cooler than average sea temperatures in the Pacific and frequently tied to extreme conditions in Asia, Africa and South America. A La Nina – the opposite of an El Nino event – tends to have a cooling effect on average global temperatures. 2011 has been the hottest year in which a La Nina occurred. This year's La Nina was linked to flooding in Thailand, drought in eastern Africa and the southern United States, and recent incedibly high winds that damaged much of the west coast and intermountain west. Elsewhere, Arctic sea ice shrunk to its lowest volume on record this year– some 4,200 cubic kilometers. By surface area, ice dropped about 35 percent below the 1979-2000 average to arrive at its second-lowest point. The record-low was set in 2007. According to the report, “We are very rapidly approaching levels consistent with a 2-2.4 degree Centigrade rise in average global temperatures which scientists believe could trigger far reaching and irreversible changes in our Earth, biosphere and oceans." Concentrations of the main greenhouse gasses blamed for climate change were growing more rapidly than during the 1990s. Carbon dioxide rose by 2.3 parts per million (ppm) in the sapce of a year to reach 389 ppm in 2010. That compares to an annual average rise of 1.5 ppm during the 1990s.

December 10, 2011

2010 census data show that 49.1 million Americans are below the poverty line — in general, $24,343 for a family of four. An additional 51 million are in the next category, which is termed “near poor” — with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That is, one in three Americans — 100 million people — is either poor or perilously close to it. As for all of that inspirational, up-by-their-bootstrap talk you hear on the Republican campaign trail, over half of the near poor in the new tally actually fell into that group from higher income levels as their resources were sapped by medical expenses, taxes, work-related costs, and other unavoidable outlays. The worst downturn since the Great Depression is only part of the problem. Before that, living standards were already being eroded by stagnating wages and tax and economic policies that favored the wealthy. Conservative politicians and analysts are spouting their usual denial. Gov. Rick Perry and Representative Michele Bachmann have called for taxing the poor and near poor more heavily, on the false grounds that they have been getting a free ride. In fact, low-income workers do pay up, if not in federal income taxes, then in payroll taxes and state and local taxes. Robert Rector, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation says that the “emotionally charged terms ‘poor’ or ‘near poor’ clearly suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist.” Heritage has its own, very different ranking system, based on households’ “amenities.” According to that, the typical poor household has roughly 14 of 30 amenities. In other words, how hard can things be if you have a refrigerator, air-conditioner, coffee maker, cellphone, and other stuff? The rankings ignore the fact that many of these are requisites of modern life and that things increasingly out of reach for the poor and near poor — education, health care, child care, housing and utilities — are the true determinants of a good, upwardly mobile life, what “the American Dream” was supposed to be. Government surveys analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicate that in 2010, just over half of the country’s nearly 17 million poor children, lived in households that reported at least one of four major hardships: hunger, overcrowding, failure to pay the rent or mortgage on time, or failure to seek needed medical care. A good education is also increasingly out of reach. A study by Martha Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, showed that the difference in college-graduation rates between the rich and poor has widened by more than 50 percent just since the 1990s. Yeah, this really is the greatest country in the world.

December 8, 2011

Most of us don’t know much about our great-grandparents. Mormons probably know more than most people because of the emphasis on genealogy. But even Mormons don’t have access to much information about them. I’m doing some research on my great-grandfather Russell and his aunt, and even though they were both public figures for a while, there isn’t a lot of information about them, especially personal information. What there is consists of a few photographs, what they wrote, and what a few others wrote about them. But that absence of information is something that will be forever changed as a result of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of digital content the average person can now produce in a lifetime. Our descendants will have at their fingertips a deep digital archive of information that we created ourselves. That's one of the things the social media revolution means: most of us can easily produce, are producing, a digital legacy whether we intend to or not. The quantity of content we're producing, and technology's ability to make sense of it, continue to expand exponentially, so that, it will inevitably become possible to much more fully recreate our lives. For example, the average Facebook user shares 90 pieces of information per month, ranging from status updates, to photos, to videos, to links to a trail of the places they've been. Over the course of a lifetime, that's a tremendous amount of personal information and insight into how a person thinks, how they act, and whom they interact with, while all of that data is being indexed in the cloud. And social media, still just a decade old, will continue to evolve and offer far more robust ways of interacting and projecting ourselves digitally. If we take advantage of the digital tools that are blossoming all around us, our descendants can come to know us far better than we have been able to know our ancestors. I, for one, think that is wonderful.