Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, April 26, 2011.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Rainy Night In Georgia by Brook Benton
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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Will Minorities Be Left out of Health Care Law Provision?
By (ScienceDaily)
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Hospitals and physician practices that form care-coordinating networks called "Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs)," under provisions of the new health-care law could reap cost-savings and other benefits. However, experts at Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania warn that such networks could potentially be designed to exclude minorities and widen disparities in health care.
In a commentary appearing in the April 27 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a Johns Hopkins physician says that as a result of new provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, wealthy hospitals and practices may "cherry-pick" similar, wealthy institutions and groups to form ACOs, and avoid poor and minority-heavy patient populations treated elsewhere in order to lower costs and raise quality of care.
ACOs are designed to encourage patients to seek care within their own network, further accentuating the disparities between networks.
In practical terms, writes Craig Pollack, M.D., M.H.S., assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, hospitals and physician practices that treat a disproportionate share of minorities may be unable to join ACOs and fall further behind in the cost and quality of care benefits likely to occur in such networks.
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Court Hears Arguments In Data Mining Case
By Nina Totenberg
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The U.S. Supreme Court appeared split on Tuesday as it considered a case testing state limits on data mining. At issue is whether states can bar the buying, selling and profiling of a doctor's prescription records without the physician's consent.
Government regulations require pharmacies to keep records of all doctors' prescriptions. In most states, pharmacies can and do sell these records to data mining companies -— companies that in turn sell the information to drugmakers for use in targeted sales pitches to doctors.
When doctors in Vermont found out their prescription records were being sold this way, they went to the state Legislature, and the state enacted a law barring the practice.
The data miners and the pharmaceutical industry challenged the law in court. They contend it is unconstitutional because it makes it more difficult for drugmakers to identify doctors who would be good prospects for sales.
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Ezra Klein: ‘Obama, based on his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s’
By Joseph Romm
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. . .
In the climate bill debate of the past two years, Obama and the Democrats embraced Republican ideas in an effort to minimize or avoid the partisanship inherent in other approaches that had been explicitly rejected by Republicans, including a tax and a massive ramp up in clean energy funding, as I've argued.
But Klein makes an effective case that it simply didn't matter how reasonable or centrist or business-friendly a strategy environmentalists and progressive politicians pursued (or might have pursued). The Republicans simply were committed to stopping Obama from appearing bipartisan.
. . .
The underlying agenda on the Republican side, from the top down, is to frustrate and humiliate the president and the Democratic majority -- and to ensure that no legislation passes. They typically begin with a memo from Frank Luntz, outlining rhetorical tricks that will be used to mislead and anger voters, while obscuring the true content of any proposal that Democrats might consider.
. . .
So while soul-searching by environmentalists and progressives as to their failings is always worthwhile -- and frankly, I've never known an environmentalist or progressive to ever stop the soul-searching, even during the rare moments when we seem to be winning -- let's remember that all the internal soul-searching in the world won't matter one whit if the other side is led by the soul-less.
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GM: Chevy Volt Owners Averaging 1,000 Miles Between Gas Stops
By Shane McGlaun
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One of the vehicles that has made one of the biggest splashes in the hybrid and EV market is the Chevrolet Volt. The Volt is an extended range electric vehicle which uses the gasoline motor to charge the battery inside the car for longer range once it can’t go on electric power alone.
One of the things that Chevrolet has been a bit quiet on is exactly how far the vehicle can drive on a tank full of fuel when the batteries go dead on their own. To show just how far the Volt can drive on a tank of fuel, GM has called on some owners of the Chevy Volt to tell just how long they have been driving on a tank and it's a long way.
“Volt owners drove an average of 800 miles between fill-ups since the Volt launched in December, and in March they averaged 1,000 miles,” said Cristi Landy, Volt marketing director. “When the majority of miles driven are electrically, gas usage decreases significantly.”
When you consider that the Volt holds roughly nine gallons of fuel, the fact that GM claims the average Volt driver gets 800 miles between fill ups is even more impressive. That would work out to fuel economy in the area of 122 miles per gallon. Volt owners also note they only hit the gas station about once per month.
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International |
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Greece and Portugal debts worse than expected
By Phillip Inman
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Greece and Portugal are deeper in debt than previously estimated, according to official figures that show attempts to contain their financial woes have so far failed.
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The rise in the annual debt levels are a blow to efforts in Brussels to ease growing fears among investors that Greece will be overwhelmed by its financial situation and default on hits debt.
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Most economists consider a Greek default a foregone conclusion, with either some debt forgiveness or a radically longer timetable of repayments. They argue only about the timing.
. . .
"A restructuring would have legal and systemic consquences that are difficult to calculate right now but would in all probability be bigger than after the collapse of Lehman Brothers," said José Manuel González-Paramo, an ECB executive board member.
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US aims to improve quality of food aid
By (AFP)
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President Barack Obama's administration is aiming to improve the quality of food it distributes abroad as part of its foreign aid contributions, US officials said Tuesday.
Setting out specific recommendations in a new report, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) said food contributions should contain "fortified" products with certain vitamins added.
The food aid is particularly aimed at children from new-borns to two years old, as well as nursing mothers and patients being treated for HIV/AIDS.
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Russia ready to increase fuel supplies to Europe, Asia - Putin
By (RIA Novosti)
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Putin said the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant undermined trust in nuclear power generation worldwide, leading to increased demand of oil and gas.
"After the disaster in Japan it became clear that nuclear power will not develop there... which means that the demand for hydrocarbons, first of all, natural gas... will grow," Putin said.
"But in Europe, as we know, nuclear power generation also declines, and events in the Middle East do not improve the situation," Putin added.
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U.S.: Peace with Israel essential to future of Egyptian people
By Natasha Mozgovaya
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Over half of the Egpytian public want to scrap the existing peace deal with Israel, according to a new survey undertaken by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The poll measured attitudes in Egypt three months after the start of the uprising in Cairo.
The U.S. State Department said in response to the survey that "the Egyptian army has pledged to uphold international agreements forged by Egypt, including the 1979 peace agreement with Israel."
Anwar Sadat, left, Jimmy Carter, center, and Menachem Begin on the White House lawn, after signing the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979.
The State Deparment stressed that It's clear that peace is essential for the future of the Egyptian people, including peace with the Israelis, the Palestinians and all peoples in the region. The Camp David accord is a cornerstone of peace and stability in the region. President Sadat sacrificed his life for this goal; his vision and courage were critical in the obtainment of peace."
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China and US to hold human rights talks
By Michael Bristow
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When Chinese and US officials sit down to talk about human rights over the next two days, they will have plenty to discuss.
Although officials do not admit it, China has launched one of its most extensive crackdowns on dissent in years.
Government critics including lawyers, bloggers and activists have been targeted.
Some have disappeared, others have been given long prison sentences and even more have faced other forms of police pressure.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Census: More employed women have degrees
By (UPI)
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Thirty-seven percent of employed women had a bachelor's degree or higher degree in 2010, compared with 35 percent of men, U.S. Census officials say.
However, among all adults -- employed and unemployed -- age 25 and older, 29.6 percent of women and 30.3 percent of men had at least a bachelor's degree.
The data comes from "Educational Attainment in the United States: 2010," which says 36 percent of the nation's population age 25 and older left school before obtaining a degree including 15 percent of the population that didn't earn a regular high school diploma.
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Testing For Thee, But Not For Me
By Kevin Drum
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. . .
Why does Walker want to do away with the requirement that students in tax-supported voucher schools take the same tests as students in tax-supported voucher schools? That's easily explained. This is from four weeks ago:
Students in Milwaukee's school choice program performed worse than or about the same as students in Milwaukee Public Schools in math and reading on the latest statewide test, according to results released Tuesday that provided the first apples-to-apples achievement comparison between public and individual voucher schools.
. . .
Unfortunately for voucher fans, when kids all take the same test it's way too obvious that voucher schools don't really outperform traditional schools. Nor do they outperform schools in poor neighborhoods (that's the blue line in the chart). At best, they perform about the same, and at worst they perform more poorly. Not only does this undermine the case for vouchers, but it also undermines the case that, for example, it's the troglodyte teachers unions that are holding back Wisconsin's kids. That can hardly be tolerated, so the best bet is to simply not allow comparisons to be made in the first place.
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More states moving to managed-care plans for Medicaid
By Phil Galewitz
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Lobbying battles are being fought in state capitals across the country as more than a dozen governors try to contain the cost of Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor and those with disabilities, by requiring more people to go into managed-care plans.
With billions of dollars at stake, insurance companies, hospitals and doctors are fighting over money and control.
About half the nation's 50 million Medicaid recipients are in private managed-care plans, which the states typically pay a set amount per patient each month. These plans limit patients' choices of doctors and hospitals. The other half has more freedom to choose where to go for medical care, with the Medicaid program paying a fee for each visit and procedure.
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New hearing for ex-Black Panther Abu-Jamal on death row
By (BBC)
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A US federal court has ordered a new sentencing hearing for an ex-Black Panther activist on death row for the 1981 killing of a white policeman.
An appeals court in Philadelphia said Mumia Abu-Jamal, 57, must have a hearing within six months.
He has been on death row since 1983 after his conviction in the killing of Philadelphia Officer Daniel Faulkner.
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Ford sees best profit in 13 years on green car sales
By (BBC)
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Ford has unveiled its strongest first quarter profits for 13 years, helped by increasing demand for more fuel-efficient cars.
Profits rose to $2.55bn (£1.54bn; 1.75bn euros) in the first three months of 2011, compared with $2.09bn at the same period the year before.
"Our team delivered a great quarter, with solid growth in all regions," said Ford president Alan Mulally.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
. . .
Brook Benton was the kind of recording artist that every A&R man prays will walk in the door: a singer whose style will appeal to all ages and socioeconomic groups, and one who can consistently come up with his own material so that the producer can avoid the frustrating task of having to wade through the mounds of demos and lead sheets containing bad songs presented to record companies by, in the words of legendary King Records chief Syd Nathan, "starry-eyed amateur songwriters who don't have an ounce of talent."
. . .
The crossover acceptance of Brook Benton helped bring about the soul revolution. He paved the way for other gospel-based singers vocalizing over lush string arrangements, like Ben E. King, Chuck Jackson, and Jerry Butler. There were even Benton soundalikes, such as Joe Henderson, formerly of Nashville's Fairfield Four gospel quartet. Many record buyers mistook Henderson's "Snap Your Fingers" for Brook Benton's latest hit. Brook paid tribute to his background in spiritual singing with the biblical "Shadrack," which failed to chart despite considerable airplay.
. . .
Lightning struck in the studio during the session. From Charlie Freeman's magical opening guitar lick to the shimmering background chords preparing the way for Brook's rumbling bass on the first words, "Hovering by my suitcase, tryin' to find a warm place to spend the night," the listener is hooked. The story, and Brook's warm telling of it, are perfection. The singer expresses all the lonely longing Tony Joe must have felt when he put those words on paper: "Feels like it's rainin' all over the world."
In the early months of 1970, Brook Benton and "Rainy Night In Georgia" hit a home run, rising to the very top of the R&B chart and #4 pop, despite a marketplace closed to just about anything not psychedelic.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Greening the Fleet
By David Zax
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That consumers are increasingly adopting hybrids and electric vehicles is surely to be commended. Each time someone hangs up the key to a Humvee and picks up the key to a Prius, the world breathes a little easier. But you don't know the definition of "gas guzzler" until you've driven a Mack truck. Converting consumers to green vehicles is one thing. Now how about converting enterprise? How about greening the fleet?
A company called ALTe is on the case. ALTe make something it calls a "range extended electric powertrain" (a power train is basically the parts of a car that make it go—the engine, transmission, drive shafts, wheels, and so on). ALTe's electric power train can be retrofitted on light trucks and vans, and the company has just scored a major coup: a partnership with the vehicle wholesaler Manheim, which has 130 wholesale operating sites worldwide. With this partnership, anyone who wants ALTe power trains installed in their fleet vehicles will be able to go to a Manheim location and Manheim will retrofit them using ALTe's technology.
And it's powerful technology. ALTe's power trains include a 20kWh lithium-ion battery pack, a four-cylinder engine, electric-drive motors, a generator, a hybrid-controller unit, and HVA modules, ALTe says on its website. The company claims you can get 30 miles in all-electric mode, with energy straight from the battery. After that, you can cruise another 275 miles in a charge-sustained mode before having to plug in or fill up. The battery can charge in as little as four hours, if you have a 220-volt outlet. (With a 110-volt outlet, it takes twice as long.) The conversion kit runs about $25,000 but is said to increase fuel economy between 80 percent and 200 percent.
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Responsibility for CO2 emissions debated
By (UPI)
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Lower CO2 emissions in developed countries have been neutralized by an increase in developing nations as they produce goods for trade, a U.S. study says.
. . .
The study found most of this increase was in developing countries producing goods for trade, primarily to developed countries, PhysOrg.com reported.
The disparity has many groups calling for a change in the Kyoto protocol agreement's practice of only counting CO2 emissions that are produced in-country, rather than the CO2 footprint of those products that are consumed.
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Nature's Living Tape Recorders May Be Telling Us Secrets
By Robert Krulwich
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. . .
When James the bird decided to woo Mrs. Wilkinson, he built a mound in her backyard, stood on top of it, and sang. Mrs. Wilkinson, naturally flattered, invited some human friends to listen.
According to those who were there, on one occasion James sang for 43 minutes. Because James was a superb lyrebird (that's what they're actually called), his songs included sounds he had heard in the woods and suburbs where he lived. Lyrebirds are probably the world's most gifted mimics and according to Wikipedia, James' love song to Mrs. Wilkinson included a kookaburra's laughing song, the calls of cockatoos, wattle-birds, starlings, parrots, an automobile horn, a rock-crushing machine and a jackhammer.
. . .
The birds, of course, don't "remember" where they picked up these sounds. For them it is just a noise. But scientists do wonder how old are these sounds? Lyrebirds can live 40 to 50 years.
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Strawberry grower shows how to make a profit without poisons
By Laura Fraser
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. . .
The air is scented with the first berries of the season. They're fresh and sweet, intensely red and fragrant, and firm -- not pumped up with nitrogen like most commercial strawberries. Cochran, 63, a silver-haired man with an easy manner and quietly fierce intelligence, takes evident pride in watching a visitor savor one. He was California's first organic strawberry grower, harvesting his initial crop more than 25 years ago.
"From the start, everyone said it was impossible to grow a commercial crop of strawberries without chemicals," Cochran says.
Over the years, he has proven them wrong, showing the $2 billion California strawberry industry -- which accounts for 88 percent of U.S. strawberry production, and 20 percent worldwide -- that it is economically viable to grow strawberries on a large scale without using toxic fumigants and pesticides. Cochran's success flies in the face of industry claims that farmers need to use harmful chemicals on strawberries in order to stay in business. Environmentalists and public health experts are trying to stop California from allowing farmers to apply a known carcinogen to their fields (as a replacement for another chemical that damages the ozone layer), and Cochran's big flats of beautiful berries -- and his healthy balance sheet -- are proving crucial to that fight.
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Students fight to save innovative garden-based public school in Detroit
By Tom Philpott
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When I visited Detroit last summer, I found it to be a place of extremes. On the one hand, a city buckling under the weight of decades of deindustrialization, white flight, and abandonment -- a city so gripped by economic malaise that it contained not even a single full-service supermarket. On the other, it also seemed a veritable beehive of community organizing, based mainly around urban agriculture.
It's not hard to see why the city's community leaders have settled on urban ag. It takes two devastating problems -- a surfeit of abandoned land, a lack of grocery stores -- and turns them into, respectively, a resource and an opportunity. Abundant land can be used to grow high-quality fresh food, which which will then find a ready market among a citizenry that relies heavily on liquor stores for food shopping. I wrote up my impressions of Detroit in a broad overview and in a brief look at three especially interesting projects.
One project I visited briefly but didn't get a chance to write about was Catharine Ferguson Academy, a special public high school for pregnant girls. The school, featured in the documentary Grown in Detroit, is most famous for its large vegetable garden tended and harvested by the students. But its importance goes beyond gardening. Teenage pregnancy can be a tragic event -- it can severely limit educational and job opportunities for young women and lead to cycles of poverty and despair. The threat is particularly serious in a place like Detroit, where job opportunities are limited.
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Science and Health |
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Increase in Evidence-Based Treatments Followed by Decreased Risk of Death in Heart Attack Patients, Study Suggests
By (ScienceDaily)
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In an analysis of data from a coronary care registry in Sweden, between 1996-2007 there was an increase in the prevalence of use of evidence-based invasive procedures and pharmacological therapies for treatment of a certain type of heart attack, and a decrease in the rate of death at 30 days and one year after a heart attack for these patients, according to a new study.
Although recent population-based studies indicate a reduction in incidence, ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI; a certain pattern on an electrocardiogram following a heart attack) is still a major health issue worldwide. Over the last 15 years a series of large-scale prospective randomized trials have documented the efficacy and safety of several new treatments available for patients with heart attack. "Over the years, several generations of international and national guidelines have been presented to support the implementation of these evidence-based treatments in clinical practice," the authors write. "However, only limited information is available on the speed of implementation of these new treatment strategies and its association with long-term survival in real-life health care."
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The authors also found that over the 12 years, in-hospital complications continuously decreased. The estimated proportion of patients experiencing a new MI during hospitalization decreased from 4 percent at the start of the study period to 1 percent at the end.
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Steve Schneider’s first letter to the editor
By gavin
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. . .
It was 1971. Steve Schneider at the time was a postdoc at NASA GISS, working for the then director, Robert Jastrow (later of the George Marshall Institute). He had just co-authored the high profile Rasool and Schneider (1971) paper in Science on the radiative forcing from increasing aerosols and CO2.
His letter, which appears to be his first letter in the New York Times, was printed Sept. 16 1971. It was sent in response to a rather lame op-ed by a Eugene Guccione, editor of a mining magazine [Incidentally, this Guccione is not the Bob Guccione who edited Penthouse (despite a confusion on this point in Steve's last book)]. Because the publication of the letter came as a surprise to Jastrow, he fired Schneider over the phone while Steve was visiting NCAR in Boulder. He was rapidly reinstated after NASA management let it be known that they appreciated young scientists like Schneider doing public outreach.
. . .
Reading the Guccione op-ed (right, click for full size), it is immediately obvious that the rules for writing mendacious anti-science were discovered a long time ago. First, find some metric that you can use to indicate something is getting better – a cherry picked weather report, a pollution index in a specific town – it doesn’t really matter what, and because of the large amount of natural variability and almost infinite choice of metrics, one can always find something.
. . .
Now, 40 years later, what has changed? Jastrow’s rather impetuous management style is not something seen very much anymore, and NASA scientists are now free to voice their opinions on science or policy. Similar op-eds to Guccione’s are still appearing – if not at the New York Times, then in Forbes or the WSJ (and similar rebuttals to Schneider’s are being sent too). This is despite the fact that the science has advanced tremendously – what were just “idiotic” predictions in 1971 are now history: temperature increases throughout the planet, polar ice caps melting etc. Efforts from those so-called “environmentalists” got the Clean Air Acts passed, and in the US and Europe, the air is cleaner of sulphur dioxide than it was (but that didn’t really happen until the after the 1990s cap-and-trade legislation).
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Budget Cuts Shutdown SETI's Alien-Seeking Telescopes
By Eyder Peralta
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If aliens come calling, we might not hear them.
The San Jose Mercury News reports that the SETI Institute — the one made famous by the movie Contact — has put its program to find alien life on hold. In an April 22 letter SETI sent to significant supporters, Tom Pierson, SETI's CEO announced that beginning this week, the Allen Telescope Array "has been placed into hibernation due to funding shortfalls for operations of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) where the ATA is located."
. . .
Scientific American reports that SETI would have liked to use the radio telescope array to listen in on any radio waves coming from the extra solar planets found by Kepler. They report SETI is not the only institution that listens for alien life, "but it is probably the instrument most committed to the task."
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CDC: Not so easy to buy healthy food
By (UPI)
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Parents trying to buy health food for their children face many challenges, a report by U.S. health officials say.
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Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia scored at or below the national average on an index that calculates the number of food retailers selling healthy foods, the report says.
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"Childhood obesity has tripled over the past 30 years," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, says in a statement. "This report underscores the need to make healthier choices easier for kids and more accessible and affordable for parents."
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Alcohol can make a monkey out of us
By GrrlScientist
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. . .
Researchers captured 1000 vervet monkeys from St. Kitts island, kept them in a social group and conducted research on their drinking habits. They found that the monkeys' drinking behaviours were remarkably similar to humans' . . .
For many years, alcoholism in humans was thought to be purely a learned behaviour -- the result of environmental factors. But more recent studies indicate that in humans, the tendency towards alcohol addiction has a genetic component: it tends to run in families. Research has found three regions on the human genome that may be linked to alcoholism. Unfortunately, since these areas contain up to 300 genes, it may be some years before specific "alcohol genes" are identified.
I think it is interesting that, despite living in a tropical paradise, without any economic problems or deprivation, this video clearly documents that some monkeys still become alcoholics. Additionally, this video shows how vervet monkeys' alcohol use mirrors that of humans, suggesting that they too, have a genetic component. Further, human and vervet monkey DNA shares an 84.2% similarity. So even though it is difficult to study humans' genetics and patterns of alcohol consumption, researchers can study vervet monkeys. So research is ongoing in these monkeys to better understand their patterns of alcohol use and abuse -- valuable since scientists can carefully control the monkeys' environment and the monkeys can be selectively bred so researchers can better understand the effects of particular genes on behaviour.
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IQ tests measure motivation - not just intelligence
By (BBC)
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Intelligence tests are as much a measure of motivation as they are of mental ability, says research from the US.
Researchers from Pennsylvania found that a high IQ score required both high intelligence and high motivation but a low IQ score could be the result of a lack of either factor.
Incentives were also found to increase IQ scores by a noticeable margin.
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Technology |
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Woman says she was cheated by online lover
By (UPI)
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An Illinois appeals court has ruled a woman who says she was victimized by an online hoax can sue the Chicago-area housewife who posed as a man.
Paula Bonhomme says Janna St. James of Batavia, Ill., not only claimed to be Colorado volunteer firefighter Jesse Jubilee James, she posed as his 6-year-old son, his sister and about 20 other relatives and friends, the Chicago Tribune reported Monday. Bonhomme sued, charging fraudulent misrepresentation.
Bonhomme, a California resident, met the fake firefighter on a message board for the HBO Western drama "Deadwood" with St. James encouraging the bogus online relationship. Bonhomme spent about $10,000 on gifts for "James" and his family, gave up on her marriage and was preparing to move to Colorado when his "sister" told her he had died of cancer after having kept his diagnosis secret from everyone.
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Efficiency, Substitution and Innovation isn't All It is Cracked Up to Be
By Sharon Astyk
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About a month ago I had the privilege of spending an hour talking (on stage, in front of an audience) to my congressman, Paul Tonko, about energy issues and preparedness. What emerged from this discussion was that EVEN THOUGH Tonko is one of the best congresspeople out there on energy and environmental issues, even though he's a tremendously smart guy, even though he actually has had some real education on peak oil issues, the two of us were talking past each other in many ways. It was fascinating - I know that Tonko grasps the basic idea, but the narrative in which efficiency, substitution and innovation always come and save the day had such a powerful grip on him that the actual mathematics were secondary.
One of the things that I noticed was the biggest barrier to our talking to each other, rathe than past, was the tendency to assume that technological innovations that are not yet ready for prime time, and may never be, are just around the corner. So, for example, during a lively debate about the impact of biofuels, Tonko spoke of Cellulosic Ethanol as though it were here, and an inevitable high EROEI response. The same was true of Carbon capture and storage - and yet, at this point neither of those technologies is really fully available to us. Yet the habit of assuming that all technological shifts will "play out" and come out with net Energy returns was an underlying assumption.
Another difference, one that I think is equally common is to focus on scientific achievement and innovation as though they are sole base on which things stand, while rendering invisible the heavy natural resource base that is at least as fundamental. If you erase the history of how abundant cheap energy has made possible scientific innovation and technological progress, and think that these are purely academic and intellectual accomplishments, springing from the head of Zeus without any inconvenient dirty contact with the oil, gas and coal below, then it is easy to believe that in an era of declining resources progress will move as swiftly as before. If you choose to see the resource base below it, however, that changes that view.
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Privacy 2.0: We Are All Celebrities Now
By Linton Weeks
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. . .
"Much of our new networking occurs online, and accessibility to every remark and picture posted online has increased," he wrote. "Living life online naturally results in decreased privacy. How do we accommodate an interest in guarding privacy if our culture encourages and facilitates documenting virtually every aspect of our online lives?"
. . .
The number of "celebrities" has mushroomed, Parker says, and these days "normal people are starting to experience some of the downsides of celebrity without any of the upside." For instance, he says, it doesn't make it any easier for them to get a table at their favorite restaurant, but they do get harassed by people who know them from the Internet.
. . .
The Internet does give every person increased access to the public sphere of discourse, Tien says, "but that doesn't mean we're in the same class as real public figures."
. . .
In other words, by enjoying the convenience of digital commerce and community, we are sacrificing safety, security and privacy.
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YouTube to launch movie rental service
By Josh Halliday
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YouTube is launching a movie rental service in a partnership with Hollywood film giants including Sony and Warner Bros, to rival Netflix and Apple's iTunes.
. . .
Three of the six major film studios – Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros and Universal – have reportedly agreed licensing terms with the Google-owned video giant. Paramount, Fox and Disney have not yet committed to the plan, it is understood. The service is expected to be limited to the US for the foreseeable future.
. . .
In the US, Netflix dominates the nascent online movie streaming market. With 23.6 million subscribers, the US-only site now commands as many eyeballs as Comcast, the largest cable operator in the US. Apple's iTunes, meanwhile, offers a formidable roster of new releases to download and to rent online.
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Netflix DVD Shipments Are Decreasing for the First Time
By Brian Barrett
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Netflix has announced that they made a ton of money this quarter, sure. But they also let it be known that for the first time in the company's history, year over year DVD shipments had actually declined. Which is pretty much exactly what they want to happen. All those past shipping costs add up compared to streaming content, the bread and butter of Netflix present and future. The downside? The company's having to unload truckloads of cash to license those streaming shows, as studios try to choke the life out of it. |
Feds Drop Probe of NSA Wiretapping Whistle Blower
By Kevin Poulsen
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The government has dropped its criminal investigation of the whistle blower who exposed the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program to the New York Times in 2004, and will evidently not be filing criminal charges for the historic leak.
Thomas Tamm, a former Justice Department attorney, learned last year that government was no longer pursuing a case against him, according to Politico. Tamm had held a Top Secret/SCI clearance at the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review when he discovered the illegal NSA program and tipped off the Times. The paper held the story for a year, before breaking the news in a December 2005 article that set off a political and civil liberties firestorm that dogged George W. Bush through the end of his term, and earned the paper a Pulitzer.
. . .
Tamm has maintained that his leak was not illegal. And when Obama took office in 2008, the future of any prosecution seemed uncertain. While campaigning, Obama had picked up on the warrantless wiretapping as a civil liberties talking point, but he’d also voted in the Senate to legalize the program and to grant retroactive legal immunity to the telecom companies that cooperated in the surveillance. Since his swearing in, Obama’ Justice Department has prosecuted more leakers than any other in recent history.
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Cultural |
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Is Child Porn In the Eye of the Beholder?
By Martin R
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. . .
A well-dressed slender Indian man in white pants and shirt wanders past on the beach. He smiles and coos at the playing Swedish child and takes out his cell phone. My sister-in-law is already there, asks my daughter, who says no. The man pays no attention, takes the pictures anyway.
. . .
One of the beach guards soon catches up with him and takes the phone, clearly in order to flip through the photo folder. The man, by now visibly sweating and piteous, explains and gesticulates to the grim guard. Apparently there is nothing on the phone to suggest that the man is a sex tourist or pedophile, as he soon gets his phone back and slips off.
I sit back heavily on the sun bed. Conflicting emotions. I feel indignant and aggrieved - dammit, I should have thrown that phone into the sea, would have served that perv right. Uncertain - OK, he shouldn't have done that, but what if he's really just an everyday Indian guy who loves to see European kids on the beach and wanted a lovely holiday souvenir? Is that really such a big deal?
. . .
This is not actually an essay on child pornography, at least not if we take that to mean images of children being sexually abused, images that could not exist unless children had been violated, defiled, victimised. But in 2011, in Sweden, that is not the definition of child pornography. Instead there is a boundary zone between images that are OK (legitimate though potentially provocative) and such that are a crime to produce, disseminate and possess. That gray zone raises a number of difficult questions about children, art, society and sexuality. Those questions have rarely been more topical than today, and they touch upon the most personal, forbidden and sacred of issues.
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A Survivor Reflects On Chernobyl Disaster, 25 Years Later
By (Tell Me More)
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Lately the world has been following the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan with great concern and legitimate concern. But Chernobyl was of a different magnitude entirely. Radiation from the blast was carried across the former Soviet Union. The United Nations says that some 4,000 people died of cancer as a result and thousands more cases of illness have been documented.
For Yuryi Litvinov, that day, April 26, 1986, might have seemed like any other for him - then a four-year-old - but it changed his life forever. . .
MARTIN: Is it my understanding that you are also an artist, in addition - you were trained in education, but that you are a self-taught artist? Is your art in some way influenced by Chernobyl and what happened there?
Mr. LITVINOV: Yeah. After I had cancer at 21, I decided to take the artist's approach to my life. And my first painting was about Chernobyl. And I draw this painting, it's called "Chernobyl," and it has a geometric colorful pattern. And you don't really see the dates inside of it, but if you look closer you can see what it is. It's just the date of the day that it happened. You know, for me it was just an expression to say things like this happen in our lives and we go through life and we don't see it. But they have a tendency to repeat themselves again and again.
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One-third of U.S. households own guns
By (UPI)
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Almost one-third of U.S. households report having any guns in the home -- the lowest level ever since the survey began in the 1970s, a survey indicates.
. . .
However, by 2010 household gun ownership dropped to 32.3 percent of U.S. households reporting having any guns in the home -- the lowest level ever recorded by the General Social Survey.
. . .
Key factors cited by the report contributing to gun ownership decline include: the aging of the current-gun owning population, a lack of interest in guns by youth, the end of military conscription, the decreasing popularity of hunting; land-use issues that limit hunting and shooting and the increase in single-parent homes headed by women.
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![ond_wordcloud_2011-04-26](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5026/5659756051_73d1bde4ac.jpg)
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