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A recent study of those who live without found that about two-thirds fall into either the “crunchy granola set” or the “religious right, ultraconservative” camp, said researcher Marina Krcmar, a professor of communication at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University. Krcmar interviewed 120 people from 62 different households who do not watch television, as well as 92 people from 35 households with TV, and described her findings in a new book, “Living Without the Screen” (Routledge, 2008).

Aversion to television, it turns out, is a common ground for the very liberal and the very conservative.

“I interviewed one guy who was 31, single, an artist living in Boston, who saw himself as countercultural,” Krcmar told LiveScience. “The next day I had an interview with a religious woman with ten children who lived in the Midwest. These people seem like they would disagree about almost everything, but if you ask them about television the things that came out of their mouths were almost identical.”

Why do people give it up?

Krcmar herself lives on the dark side, having given up television about 13 years ago.

“It’s just something I don’t want in the home – it’s a perpetual annoyance, like a gnat,” she said.

The motivations for most people who abandon TV fall into three categories, Krcmar found.

Some give it up to avoid exposing their families to the excessive sex, violence, and consumerism they feel are promoted onscreen. Others object to the medium itself, claiming television intrudes too much into their lives, interferes with conversation and takes time away from the family. Finally, some people have a beef with the power and values of the television industry and don’t want its influence in their homes.

In contrast to the average American adult, who watches three hours of television a day, non-watchers fill their time with a plethora of activities.

“Non-viewers had a greater variety of things that they did with their free time than viewers did,” Krcmar said. “It’s not just that they were reading instead of watching TV. They were hiking and biking, and going to community meetings and visiting with friends. Overall, they tend to do more of everything.”

Are they right?

Science does in fact support many non-watchers’ worst fears about TV.

“The research tends to show that increased exposure to television and violence results in greater aggression in children,” Krcmar said. “That’s a pretty consistent finding.”

Though not all children become more violent, and everyone reacts uniquely, it’s fair to say that what we watch affects us.

When parents did cut television out of their homes, they reported that their kids didn’t bug them as much for junk food and toys advertised on TV. They also said giving up television made their children easier to manage.

“It’s sort of counter-intuitive, because people think their kids would drive them nuts without TV,” Krcmar said. “But parents found that kids became very good at entertaining themselves and didn’t need to be entertained all the time by something that was lively and active. They didn’t complain about being bored.”

Downsides of life without TV

People who had relinquished television didn’t report too many downsides. Most felt satisfied getting their news from newspapers and radio, and while some people said they felt less connected to pop culture, “many adults noted that as a point of pride,” Krcmar said.

Even most kids in non-watching households seemed to agree with their parents that they were better off without the reviled medium, though a number of kids around ages 10 to 13 said they resented feeling left out when other kids talk about shows and actors on television. By the time they reached later adolescence around age 14 and 15, though, most had come full circle and said they didn’t really like TV and didn’t mind doing without.

For those who want to experience some of the benefits of life without the tube, but don’t feel ready to go cold turkey, Krcmar said she thinks good things can come just by setting limits.

“I think you can have the benefits just by having kids watch less television,” she said. “Be selective about content. You don’t go to a restaurant and let them eat anything on the menu. Instead you say choose something that’s healthy that you would enjoy.”

Eating in: Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens). Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup “entirely consistent with our mission statement.”

Around the Big House: Texas inmates produce brooms and brushes, bedding and mattresses, toilets, sinks, showers, and bullwhips. Bullwhips?

Windows dressing: In the mid-1990s, Washington prisoners shrink-wrapped software and up to 20,000 Microsoft mouses for subcontractor Exmark (other reported clients: Costco and JanSport). “We don’t see this as a negative,” a Microsoft spokesman said at the time. Dell used federal prisoners for PC recycling in 2003, but stopped after a watchdog group warned that it might expose inmates to toxins.

Back to school: Texas and California inmates make dorm furniture and lockers, diploma covers, binders, logbooks, library book carts, locker room benches, and juice boxes.

Patriotic duties: Federal Prison Industries, a.k.a. Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers’ uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have “produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)” and “wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.” In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractor MicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.

The law won: In Texas, prisoners make officers’ duty belts, handcuff cases, and prison-cell accessories. California convicts make gun containers, creepers (to peek under vehicles), and human-silhouette targets.

A stitch in time: California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria’s Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace “Made in Honduras” labels on garments with “Made in the usa.”

Open wide: At California’s prison dental laboratory, inmates produce a complete prosthesis selection, including custom trays, try-ins, bite blocks, and dentures.

Constructive criticism: Prisoners in for burglary, battery, drug and gun charges, and escape helped build a Wal-Mart distribution center in Wisconsin in 2005, until community uproar halted the program. (Company policy says, “Forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart.”)

Abramoff is already serving a nearly six-year term on unrelated charges and the new sentence will be served at the same time, meaning he will not spend any extra time behind bars once his original sentence ends in 2012.

But Abramoff will serve at least four more years in prison, even if his lawyers are successful in getting a reduction in his first sentence on charges of fraud in the purchase of a Florida casino cruise line. When his terms expire, he will have spent nearly six years in prison.

Security officials in the region have said the incursion into the tribal area of South Waziristan was carried out by US commandos dropped from helicopters.

The North West Frontier Province governor, Owais Ahmed Ghani, who is in administrative charge of the tribal areas, said in a statement: “It is outrageous … This is a direct assault on the sovereignty of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan expect that the armed forces … would rise to defend the sovereignty of the country and give a befitting reply.”

A spokeswoman for Afghanistan’s Nato-led force said she had no information about the incident.

A spokesman for a separate US-led coalition force declined to comment, referring questions to the US Central Command.

The pre-dawn raid took place in a village across the border from a US base at Shikin in Afghanistan’s Paktika province.

“Troops came in helicopters and carried out action in three houses,” a village shopkeeper, Gul Nawaz, told Reuters.

Witnesses told the BBC Urdu service that troops entered the house of a local tribesman, opened fire and threw a bomb in the house.

The Sahara Forest Project, which is already running demonstration plants in Tenerife, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, envisages huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP), a technology that uses mirrors to focus the sun’s rays, creating steam to drive turbines to generate electricity.

The installations would turn deserts into lush patches of vegetation, according to its designers, and do away with the need to dig wells for fresh water, an activity that has depleted aquifers across the world.

Charlie Paton, a member of the team, and the inventor of the Seawater Greenhouse, said the scheme was a proven way to transform arid environments. “Plants need light for growth but they don’t like heat beyond a certain point,” he said.

Above certain temperatures the amount of water lost through leaves’ stomata rises so much plants stop their photosynthesis and do not grow. The solar farm planned by the project runs seawater evaporators, pumping damp, cool air through the greenhouses. This reduces the warmth inside by about 15C, compared with the temperature outside.

At the other end of the greenhouse from the evaporators, water vapour is condensed. Some of this fresh water is used to water the crops, some for cleaning the solar mirrors.

“So we’ve got conditions in the greenhouse of high humidity and lower temperature,” said Paton. “The crops sitting in this slightly steamy, humid condition can grow fantastically well.”

The designers said that virtually any vegetables could be grown in the greenhouses. The demonstration plants already produce lettuces, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. The nutrients to grow the plants could come from local seaweed or be extracted from the seawater.

Michael Pawlyn, of Exploration Architecture, based in London, worked on the Eden Project for seven years and is now part of the Sahara Forest team. He said that the Seawater Greenhouse and CSP provided substantial synergies for each other. “Both technologies work extremely well in hot, dry, desert locations. CSP produces a lot of waste heat and we’d be able to use that to evaporate more seawater from the greenhouse. And CSP needs a supply of clean, de-mineralised water in order for the [electricity generating] turbines to function and to keep the mirrors at peak output. It just so happens the Seawater Greenhouse produces large quantities of this.”

Paton said the greenhouse produced more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants inside, so some of the water could be released to the outside, creating a microclimate for hardier plants such as jatropha, a crop that can be turned into biofuel.

The cost of the Sahara Forest Project could be relatively low as both CSP and Seawater Greenhouses are proven technologies. The designers estimate that building 20 hectares (nearly 50 acres) of greenhouses combined with a 10MW CSP scheme would cost about €80m (£65m).

Paton said groups in countries across the Middle East, including in UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, have expressed interest in possibly funding demonstration projects.

He said use of Seawater Greenhouses could reverse the environmental damage done by the glasshouses already built in places such as the desert region of Almeria, southern Spain, where, constructed over the past 20 years to grow salad crops, they now covered more than 40,000 hectares.

Paton said: “They take water out of the ground something like five times faster than it comes in, so the water table drops and becomes more saline. The whole of Spain is being sucked dry. If one were to convert them all to the Seawater Greenhouse concept it would turn an unsustainable solution into a more sustainable one.”

Pawlyn said: “In places like Oman they’ve effectively sterilised large areas of land by using groundwater that’s become increasingly saline. The beauty of the Sahara Forest scheme is that you can reverse that process and turn barren land into biologically productive land.”

Neil Crumpton, an energy specialist at Friends of the Earth, said the potential of these desert technologies was huge. “Concentrated solar power mirror arrays covering just 1% of the Earth’s deserts could supply a fifth of all current global energy consumption. And 1 million tonnes of sea water could be evaporated every day from just 20,000ha of greenhouses.”

Governments should invest in the technologies and “not be distracted by lobbyists promoting dangerous nuclear power or nuclear-powered desalination schemes”, Crumpton added.

It paints a picture of all three branches of the defence forces hamstrung by a lack of staff and poor equipment.

In the report, the Army said while land forces were “partially” prepared for low level conflicts, it was not equipped to meet higher threat situations, even though it had managed to send a company to Afghanistan.

The report said: “Deficiencies in command and control, firepower, and compatible protection and mobility for combat service support elements would impair effectiveness in conventional military operations, and the more challenging peace support operations.”

The Air Force had “insufficient personnel” to meet crew levels and was only “partially prepared” for complex maritime air operations. In the Navy, few of the ships managed to get out to sea as much as planned.

The HMNZ Endeavour spent 50 days at sea out of an expected 100-120 days, HMNZS Te Kaha 99 days out of 140-160, and the HMNZS Canterbury only 95 days out of 140-160.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said yesterday that the e-mails, as well as tapes and recordings of interviews for a book about Ellison called “Softwar,” were willfully withheld. Ellison and Oracle knew the material was potentially relevant to claims that they made false statements about the company’s 2001 second-quarter financial results and problems with a software product, Illston said.

“The court believes it is appropriate to infer that the e-mails and the Softwar-related materials would demonstrate Ellison’s knowledge of, among other things, problems with the Suite 11i, the effects of the economy on Oracle’s business and problems with defendant’s forecasting models,” Illston said.

As a penalty, Illston said the jury in the case will be instructed to assume that Ellison knew about the problems. Illston also said she would take that assumption into account when deciding whether to rule in favor of investors on their claims and Oracle’s requests to throw the case out. The trial is scheduled to begin March 30.

…

Investors claim that Redwood City, California-based Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, improperly booked millions in sales in 2001 and that Ellison knew about the problems and sold $900 million company stock before they were disclosed to investors.