building the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

The compound will comprise 21 buildings on 104 acres (42 ha), making it the largest and most expensive U.S. embassy in the world.

The complex is said to be heavily fortified, even by the standards of the Green Zone. The details are largely secret, but it is likely to include a significant U.S. Marine Security Guard detachment. Fortifications are to include deep security perimeters, buildings reinforced beyond the standard, and five highly guarded entrances.

(wikipedia)

words Shakespeare coined

1700 words?

http://shakespeare.about.com/library/weekly/aa042400a.htm

Subliminal smells can have powerful effects

Olfaction

Scents and sensitivity
Dec 6th 2007
From The Economist print edition


Subliminal smells can have powerful effects

IN A world where sight and sound seem to reign supreme, all it takes is a cursory glance at the size of the perfume industry to realise that smell matters quite a lot, too. Odours are known to regulate moods, thoughts and even dating decisions, which is why any serious romantic will throw on the eau de toilette before going out for a night on the town. Yet in all these cases, those affected are aware of what they are smelling. Unlike the media of sight and sound, in which subliminal messages have been studied carefully, the potential power of subliminal smells has been neglected.

Wen Li and her colleagues at Northwestern University in Chicago are now changing that. In particular, they are investigating smells so faint that people say they cannot detect them. The idea is to see whether such smells can nevertheless change the way that people behave towards others.

Dr Li's experiment, the results of which have just been published in Psychological Science, employed 31 volunteers. These people were exposed to three different odours at low concentration. One was the fresh lemon scent of citral. The second was the neutral ethereal perfume of anisole. The third was the foul sweaty smell of valeric acid. And the concentrations really were low. In the case of valeric acid, for example, that concentration was seven parts per trillion—a level only just detectable by bloodhounds. As a control, Dr Li used a mineral oil that has no detectable smell at any concentration.

The participants were asked to sniff a jar containing either one of the three odours or the scentless oil, and then press a button to indicate whether they thought the jar smelled of anything. Immediately after that, a picture of a face would appear on a screen in front of them for just over a second. Each participant was asked to rate the face's “likeability”.

Dr Li found that the odours helped shape people's judgments about the faces when their responses indicated that they had not smelled anything. When someone had been exposed to valeric acid, for example, he tended to react negatively to a face. Exposure to citral, by contrast, made that face seem, on average, more friendly. (Obviously, the same face was not shown to any given participant more than once.) Even more intriguing, however, was that when participants did consciously perceive a smell, its effect on face-perception disappeared.

What is going on is unclear. If smells can carry useful information about personality (which is possible), then the effect would be expected to be the same whether or not the chemical in question is detected subliminally. If they do not carry such information, then it is hard to see what use the subliminal reaction is. Nevertheless, it is there.

The findings do, however, demonstrate what might be a powerful method of manipulation. Indeed, Dr Li considers the potential uses to be vast. Business meetings might be made more pleasant by releasing appropriate fragrances into the air in unsmellable amounts. Conversely, fights might be started by putting people in the presence of a faint foul odour. Advertising hoardings might benefit from a little olfactory tweaking and cinema audiences could be reduced to floods of tears at the appropriate moment. The sweet smell of success might, in other words, actually be undetectable.

The sex of a child may depend on how stressed its mother is

Human reproduction

Stress city
Nov 15th 2007
From The Economist print edition


The sex of a child may depend on how stressed its mother is

A BOY or a girl? That is usually the first question asked when a woman gives birth. Remarkably, the answer varies with where the mother lives. In rich countries the chances of its being a boy are about 5% higher than in poor ones. Equally remarkably, that figure has been falling recently. Several theories have been put forward to explain these observations. Some argue that smoking plays a role, others that diet may be important. Neither of these ideas has been supported by evidence from large studies. But new research points to a different factor: stress.

Strange as it might seem, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 shed light on the enigma. Studies noting the sex of babies conceived in New York during the week of the attacks found a drop in the ratio of males to females. That is consistent with earlier studies, which revealed a similar shift in women who became pregnant during floods and earthquakes and in time of war. Moreover, a study carried out eight years ago by researchers at the University of Aarhus, in Denmark, revealed that women who suffered the death of a child or spouse from some catastrophic illness (such as a heart attack) around the time they conceived were much more likely to give birth to girls than to boys.

Taken together, these results suggest that acute stress to a woman at the time of conception shifts the sex ratio towards girls. However, Carsten Obel, a researcher at Aarhus who was not involved in the earlier study, wondered if the same might be true of chronic stress too. In a paper just published in Human Development, he shows that it is.

Dr Obel used a set of data collected between 1989 and 1992. During that period 8,719 expectant mothers were asked to fill in questionnaires that inquired, among other things, about their level of stress. Dr Obel found that the more stressed a mother had been, the less chance she had of having given birth to a boy. Only 47% of children born to women in the top quartile of stress were males. That compared with 52% for women in the bottom quartile.

Dr Obel suspects the immediate cause is that male pregnancies are more likely to miscarry in response to stress than female pregnancies are, especially during the first three months. However, that is difficult to prove. More intriguing, though, is the ultimate cause, for he thinks it might be adaptive, rather than pathological.

That is because the chances are that a daughter who reaches adulthood will find a mate and thus produce grandchildren. A son is a different matter. Healthy, strapping sons are likely to produce lots of grandchildren, by several women—or would have done in the hunter-gatherer societies in which most human evolution took place. Weak ones would be marginalised and maybe even killed in the cut and thrust of male competition. If a mother's stress adversely affects the development of her fetus (as it is likely to do) then selectively aborting boys, rather than wasting time and resources on bringing them to term, would make evolutionary sense.

That, in turn, would explain why women in rich countries, who are less likely to suffer from hunger and disease, are more likely to give birth to sons. That this likelihood is, nevertheless, falling suggests that rich women's lives may be more stressful than they used to be.

The End of the World by Archibald MacLeish

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

-- Archibald MacLeish

How to Create and Implement Healthy General Plans

How can public health advocates and city planners work together to create healthy, sustainable communities? This toolkit provides a progression of steps focused on the general plan, the key land use policy document for California cities and counties. The toolkit details a wide range of strategies, from building relationships and assessing existing conditions to creating and ultimately implementing policy language. Model health language is included to provide specific ideas for how to address health concerns through general plan policies.


How to Create and Implement Healthy General Plans
Introduction

Section I: Laying the Groundwork for Healthy Planning
Getting Started
Roles for Health Officers and Planners

Section II: Assessing Existing Health Conditions
Questions for a Baseline Community Health Assessment
Walkability and Bikeability Audits
Community Food Assessments

Section III: Writing a Healthy General Plan
The General Plan as a Tool for Change
A Separate Health Element?
Using Standards to Implement Health Goals

Section IV: Model Health Language

Section V: Implementation Plans, Programs, Policies, and Standards
Zoning, Neighborhood Plans, and Development Standards
Road Designs and Standards
Master Plans
Project Review
Taxes and Fees: Financing Healthy Infrastructure

Conclusion

Appendix: Fact Sheets - Research on Land Use and Health from Two Different Perspectives
The Health Perspective on Planning: Built Environments as Determinants of Health
The Planning Perspective on Health: Community Health as a Goal of Good Design