Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
November 22nd, 2010Via: New York Times:
On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?
By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.
He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.
On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”
Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”
Ireland to Seek EU-Led Bailout as Lenihan Works to Avert Bank ‘Collapse’
November 21st, 2010Via: Bloomberg:
Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said Ireland will apply for a bailout as it sets itself up to be the second euro member to seek a rescue from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
“I will be proposing to my colleagues that they should formally apply for a program,” Lenihan said in an interview with state broadcaster RTE in Dublin. “The banks were too big a problem for the country. The key issue all the time for the government is to ensure that we do not have a collapse of the banking sector.”
Into the Abyss: The Diving Suit That Turns Men Into Fish
November 21st, 2010I had thought that the liquid breathing system depicted in The Abyss was purely fictional. According to the developer of the system in the piece below, U.S. Navy SEALs were using such a system in the 1980s.
Via: Independent:
Humans have proven themselves remarkably adept at learning to do what other animals can do naturally. We have taught ourselves to fly like birds, climb like monkeys and burrow like moles. But the one animal that has always proven beyond our reach is the fish.
The invention of scuba diving has allowed us to breathe underwater but only at very shallow depths.
Thanks to our inability to conquer the bends, diving below 70m still remains astonishingly dangerous to anyone but a handful of experts. Ultra-deep diving is so lethal that more people have walked on the moon than descended below 240m using scuba gear.
Now an inventor in the United States believes he has solved the riddle of how to get humans down to serious depths – by getting us to breathe liquid like fish.
Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe “liquid air”, a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.
…
Liquid ventilation might sound like science fiction – it played a major role in James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi film The Abyss – but it is already used by a handful of cutting-edge American hospitals for highly premature babies.
Children born before 28 weeks have huge difficulties breathing, often because their lungs are not developed enough to comfortably adjust from the liquid environment of the womb to inhaling gaseous air. Immature alveoli, the final branchings inside the lung that feed oxygen into the blood, lack vital surfactants which stop the tiny cavities sticking together when we breathe out.
In response doctors have begun experimenting with highly-oxygenated PFCs with remarkable success.
Professor Thomas Shaffer, a paediatrics specialist from Delaware, has experimented with liquid breathing since the late 1970s. He spent much of his early career testing various animals in oxygenated PFCs.
Place a mouse in oxygenated liquid and instinct immediately kicks in as the animal flounders wildly. Everything the mouse has ever learned screams at it to avoid inhaling a solution it thinks will kill it.
Yet when we drown there comes a moment when the instinct not to breathe liquid is overridden by a stronger instinct to take in one last breath. It is a desperate final attempt to get oxygen into the blood. If the liquid we are in contains oxygen molecules that happily cross from the solution into our blood stream, life will return. After all, it is not water that kills us when we drown. It’s our inability to take oxygen from the water that condemns us.
By the mid-1990s, Shaffer and a handful of doctors had begun using liquid ventilation techniques on premature babies and were stunned by the results.
“A lot of the children I see have less than a 5% survival rate,” he explains. “But when we get them on to liquid breathing we see close to 60% going on to lead fully healthy lives.”
The technique remains rare, however, because of a chronic lack of investment.
…
Shaffer has previously experimented with animals and PFCs at depth and found the technique to work. “I have personally put mammals down to a simulated depth of 1000 feet and then decompressed them in half a second and they have no decompression sickness,” he says.
The US Navy Seals also reportedly experimented with liquid ventilation in the early 1980s according to Shaffer who says he met a former Seal turned doctor that was on the team.
“This paediatrician never really revealed why they were doing it,” he explains. “Other than going very deep I don’t know what the point was. But they tried it. The Navy pushed them to the point where they did it several times a week.”
Being so much more viscous than air, liquid is difficult to breathe. Some of the Seals reportedly developed stress fractures on the ribs cause by the sheer force of trying to get a liquid in and out of the lungs.
TSA Pat-Down Leaves Traveler Covered in Urine
November 21st, 2010Via: MSNBC:
A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.
Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”
On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”
Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”
Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”
Could Millionaires Fleeing the U.S. Cause a Wildcard Economic Event?
November 21st, 2010For years, I’ve received emails from people who want to move to New Zealand. Some young, some old. Some well off, some not so well off.
Over the last month or so, three millionaires have emailed me about moving to New Zealand.
The three people who emailed me were all going to invest their way into New Zealand. In case you don’t know, millionaires can make “investments” in New Zealand to, in effect, buy different types of residence visas. New Zealand Immigration calls these “Business Visas.” Depending on the type of arrangement and the age of the applicant, between NZ$750,000 and NZ$10 million is required.
It’s one thing for me to leave the U.S., with my meager savings, boxes of books and already old clothes (not much, in other words), but what happens if large numbers these wealthy people leave the U.S., pulling millions of dollars out of U.S. banks and moving it… elsewhere?
It worries me that I heard from three of these people in such a short period of time. What does that mean, in terms of the bigger picture? Might this be a leading indicator of something to come? I started to wonder if this flow of wealthy people out of the U.S. represents a sort of wildcard threat to the U.S. economy. Is there a way to know how much money is leaving the U.S., and at what point it places the system in jeopardy?
I know, many of you are thinking, “Who cares if a few fat cats flee the U.S.?”
Well, in case you haven’t noticed, a tiny number people have most of the money in the U.S. The absurd U.S. ponzi scheme depends on these wealthy people leaving their funds in U.S. institutions. One of these people leaving the U.S. (and taking their money with them) would be like thousands or tens of thousands of “normal” people pulling their money out of the banks.
Anyway, if little-old-Kevin on his backwater conspiracy blog heard from three millionaires who want to flee the U.S., what might we be able to extrapolate from that in terms of the bigger picture, if anything? Has some kind of tipping point occurred? Or, is this not that big of a deal?
A Vegan No More
November 21st, 2010Update: Author Receives Death Threats
—End Update—
This might be useful if you are having to go through watching someone kill themselves and/or their children on a vegan diet.
Or not.
Via: Voracious Vegan:
Many of you know that I have recently been struggling for the first time in my life with health problems. When I discovered that my problems were a direct result of my vegan diet I was devastated. 2 months ago, after learning the hard way that not everyone is capable of maintaining their health as a vegan, I made one of the most difficult decisions of my life and gave up veganism and returned to eating an omnivorous diet. My health immediately returned. This experience has been humbling, eye-opening, and profoundly transformative. To hear the whole story just keep reading…
Related:
Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie
The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability by Lierre Keith
Research Credit: JH, SP
Russia Frees Israeli Mercenary
November 20th, 2010Via: BBC:
Russia has released Israeli mercenary Yair Klein, who was sought by Colombia for his involvement in the training of paramilitary squads, reports say.
Klein, a former Israeli army soldier, is on his way to Israel, Interfax news agency reports.
In 2001, a Colombian court convicted him in absentia of training right-wing guerrilla groups.
Russia arrested him in 2007 under an Interpol warrant and later agreed to extradite him to Colombia.
But the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) forbid the extradition, on grounds that he might face mistreatment in Colombia.
Israel’s Channel 10 television showed Klein on Friday leaving a Moscow jail where he was being held.
“Klein has been freed and he is currently en route to Israel,” Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed security source as saying.
Klein was sentenced in absentia in 2001 to 10 years and eight months in prison in Colombia for assisting and training drug lords and guerrilla groups in the 1980s and 1990s.
He was found guilty of training a cadre of killers for the infamous Medellin drug cartel, a charge which he denies.
They later became the nucleus of the brutal paramilitary army known as the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), which prosecutors said carried out some of the country’s most notorious political assassinations.
He has also served prison time in Sierra Leone in 1999, on charges of smuggling arms to the rebel group Revolutionary United Front.
Colorado: Australian Twins Carry Out Suicide Pact, One Survives; Had Articles About Columbine
November 19th, 2010This reminded me of the strange case of Jane Greenhow, Stefan Bateman and Ruth Fleming from 1996:
Stefan Bateman and Ruth Fleming, both 22, were wearing the same style of black garb when they rented pistols at the range and took a few dozen practice shots Wednesday afternoon.
Then they turned the pistols on themselves–apparently counting down together so the guns would go off at the same instant, Arizona authorities said.
“Witnesses said they both fell at the same time,” said Mesa Police Sgt. Earle Lloyd. “It was ruled a double suicide.”
Another very strange case involving twins: Ursula and Sabina Eriksson.
Via: Daily Telegraph:
AUSTRALIAN twins Kristin and Candace Hermeler were carrying articles about one of America’s worst school massacres when they shot themselves in a bizarre suicide pact.
The revelation has made their transformation from cheerful best friends in a middle-class Melbourne family to an unimaginable death plot at a shooting range more difficult to understand.
As police interviewed the surviving twin, Candace, officers said a search of their bags had found magazine articles, clippings and letters related to the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.
“But there was never anything we came across to indicate that they had intended to do another Columbine,” Arapahoe County Sheriff’s office Captain Louie Perea said.
The pair turned .22 pistols, which they had rented for $20, on themselves at the Family Shooting Range in Denver, Colorado on Monday, leaving Kristin dead.
In terrible scenes, the pair fell backwards simultaneously before Candace, with blood pouring from a bullet wound in her own forehead, stumbled towards her sister’s body.
Known as Candy, the 29-year-old was “devastated, frustrated, distraught and angry at times” during a two-hour interview with police.
She repeatedly declined to say why she and her sister had shot themselves.
…
They returned to a Melbourne private school for their final two years and both completed double university degrees. Together they had travelled to Canada, San Francisco, North Carolina and had worked as nannies.
They had spent five weeks in Denver on cultural exchange visas.
One of the twins had been due to leave on Tuesday.
Their cousin Jacky Sole in Washington said the pair were raised in a comfortable, middle-class family.
“They grew up in a loving home. They didn’t lack for anything,” she said.
Another relative said: “They were close, they knew each other, loved each other.”
Captain Louie Perea confirmed the twins had made a suicide pact.
“The surviving sister has confirmed that they had planned to commit suicide together, and did in fact shoot themselves,” he said.
…
Before the shooting they chatted with other shooters.
U.S. Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research
November 19th, 2010Via: PhysOrg:
US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies, published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Fraudsters are also more likely to be “repeat offenders,” the study shows.
The study author searched the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn—and therefore officially expunged from the public record—between 2000 and 2010.
A total of 788 papers had been retracted during this period. Around three quarters of these papers had been withdrawn because of a serious error (545); the rest of the retractions were attributed to fraud (data fabrication or falsification).
The highest number of retracted papers were written by US first authors (260), accounting for a third of the total. One in three of these was attributed to fraud.
Research Credit: eo
Ron Paul: American Traveler Dignity Act
November 19th, 2010Via: Ron Paul:
My legislation is simple. It establishes that airport security screeners are not immune from any US law regarding physical contact with another person, making images of another person, or causing physical harm through the use of radiation-emitting machinery on another person. It means they are subject to the same laws as the rest of us.
Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.
Research Credit: Eileen
