Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems

"Human alteration of Earth is substantial and growing:
--Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action;
--the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution;
--more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined;
--more than half of all accessible surface fresh water is put to use by humanity;
--and about one-quarter of the bird species on Earth have been driven to extinction.
By these and other standards, it is clear that we live on a human-dominated planet."

Childhood stress and diminished working memory: a simple explanation for the cycle of poverty?

Some new studies seem to simplify the cognitive reasons children have a hard time escaping from poverty.


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I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told
Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition
How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain


THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use—the digits of a phone number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading and for solving problems. Entry into the working memory is also a prerequisite for something to be learnt permanently as part of declarative memory—the stuff a person knows explicitly, like the dates of famous battles, rather than what he knows implicitly, like how to ride a bicycle.

Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail. As they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.

Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s volunteers were 195 participants in a long-term sociological and medical study that Dr Evans is carrying out in New York state. At the time, the participants were 17 years old. All are white, and the numbers of men and women are about equal.


Stress in the city

To measure the amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life, the two researchers used an index known as allostatic load. This is a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; the concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and the body-mass index, a measure of obesity. For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class. Moreover, because Dr Evans’s wider study had followed the participants from birth, the two researchers were able to estimate what proportion of each child’s life had been spent in poverty. That more precise figure, too, was correlated with the allostatic load.

The capacity of a 17-year-old’s working memory was also correlated with allostatic load. Those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle.

These two correlations do not by themselves prove that chronic stress damages the memory, but Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg then applied a statistical technique called hierarchical regression to the results. They were able to use this to remove the effect of allostatic load on the relationship between poverty and memory discovered originally by Dr Farah. When they did so, that relationship disappeared. In other words, the diminution of memory in the poorer members of their study was entirely explained by stress, rather than by any more general aspect of poverty.

To confirm this result, the researchers also looked at characteristics such as each participant’s birthweight, his mother’s age when she gave birth, the mother’s level of education and her marital status, all of which differ, on average, between the poor and the middle classes. None of these characteristics had any effect. Nor did a mother’s own stress levels.

That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain. Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the “remodelling” of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.

Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same circumstances on their own children.

Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s study does not examine the nature of the stress that the children of the poor are exposed to, but it is now well established that poor adults live stressful lives, and not just for the obvious reason that poverty brings uncertainty about the future. The main reason poor people are stressed is that they are at the bottom of the social heap as well as the financial one.

Sir Michael Marmot, of University College London, and his intellectual successors have shown repeatedly that people at the bottom of social hierarchies experience much more stress in their daily lives than those at the top—and suffer the consequences in their health. Even quite young children are socially sensitive beings and aware of such things.

So, it may not be necessary to look any further than their place in the pecking order to explain what Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg have discovered in their research into the children of the poor. The Bible says, “the poor you will always have with you.” Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg may have provided an important part of the explanation why.

Dating A Banker Anonymous

If only guys didn't think investment banking was the way to attract pretty women, maybe we'd have avoided this whole financial mess.

Women: it's urgently time to prefer guys working to end poverty and unburden the planet!




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Dating A Banker Anonymous

Are you or someone you love dating a banker? If so, we are here to support you through these difficult times. Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. So if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life, lighten your heart with laughter and email your stories


DABA Girl: A charming and successful woman (imagine Tina Fey’s wit and Zoe Cruz’s ambition) who’s looking for a man who can keep up.


FBF: Finance guy Boyfriend (the G is silent), a DABA Girl’s significant other. Their work spans the gamut from investment bankers at Goldman Sachs, to private equity analysts at Morgan Stanley, to hedge fund guys at any of those companies whose name could easily be mistaken for a high school mascot, to traders on the floor or upstairs, to commercial real estate men and to the occassional corporate lawyer. He is ambitious, well-dressed, over caffeinated, may or may not have a social conscious (but will attend every charity ball regardless), exudes confidence even when touting a trade he’s only 50% sure of, and had serious throw-down in the bedroom BR.


Je Ne Sais Finance: Those magic qualities that attract DABA Girls to their alpha male counterparts.

The stackable CityCar

Intended for the "last mile" of transportation, connecting neighborhoods to rail transit stations. Stackable, shared cars, a combination of the Smart car, the baggage carts you can rent at airports, and the bike share schemes in some European cities.


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CityCar

The CityCar is a stackable electric two-passenger city vehicle. The one-way sharable user model is designed to be used in dense urban areas. Vehicle Stacks will be placed throughout the city to create an urban transportation network that takes advantage of existing infrastructure such as subway and bus lines. By placing stacks in urban spaces and key points of convergence, the vehicle allows the citizens the flexibility to combine mass transit effectively with individualized mobility. The stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them. Similar to luggage carts at the airport, users simply take the first fully charged vehicle at the front of the stack. The City car is NOT a replacement for personal vehicles, taxis, buses, or trucks; it is a NEW vehicle type that promotes a socially responsible and more effective means of urban mobility.


The CityCar utilizes fully integrated in-wheel electric motors and suspension systems called, "Wheel Robots." The wheel robots eliminate the need traditional drive train configurations like engine blocks, gear boxes, and differentials because they are self-contained, digitally controlled, and reconfigurable. Additionally, the wheel robot provides all wheel power and steering capable of 360 degrees of movement, thus allowing for Omni-directional movement. The vehicle can maneuver in tight urban spaces and park by sideways translation. This technology is patented-pending and under design development at the MIT Media Lab.

Non-religious people less afraid of death?

An interesting article covered in the Economist.
So many people find their faith as death approaches...

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But not yet, Lord
Mar 19th 2009 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition


Religious people seem curiously reluctant to meet their maker

HOW do a person’s religious beliefs influence his attitude to terminal illness? The answer is surprising. You might expect the religious to accept death as God’s will and, while not hurrying towards it, not to seek to prolong their lives using heroic and often traumatic medical procedures. Atheists, by contrast, have nothing to look forward to after death, so they might be expected to cling to life.

In fact, it is the other way round—at least according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Andrea Phelps and her colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Religious people seem to use their faith to cope with the pain and degradation that “aggressive” medical treatment entails, even though such treatment rarely makes much odds.

Dr Phelps and her team followed the last months of 345 cancer patients. The participants were not asked directly how religious they were but, rather, about how they used any religious belief they had to cope with difficult situations by, for example, “seeking God’s love and care”. The score from this questionnaire was compared with their requests for such things as the use of mechanical ventilation to keep them alive and resuscitation to bring them back from the dead.

The correlation was strong. More than 11% of those with the highest scores underwent mechanical ventilation; less than 4% of those with the lowest did so. For resuscitation the figures were 7% and 2%.

Explaining the unpleasantness and futility of the procedures does not seem to make much difference, either. Holly Prigerson, one of Dr Phelps’s co-authors, was involved in another study at Dana-Farber which was published earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine. This showed that when doctors had frank conversations about the end of life with terminally ill cancer patients, the patients typically chose not to request very intensive medical interventions.

According to Dr Prigerson, though, such end-of-life chats had little impact on “religious copers”, most of whom still wanted doctors to make every effort to keep them alive. Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of Christianity’s most revered figures, famously asked God to help him achieve “chastity and continence, but not yet”. When it comes to meeting their maker, many religious people seem to have a similar attitude.

The Tao of Water

This guy, John Daido Loori, has taken some nice photos of water, in an exhibit called "The Tao of Water."

The bees are back in town (the latest on colony collapse disorder)

We're not as close to losing bee pollination as we could have been (whew).

Seems like commercial bees weren't getting proper nutrition, and so became vulnerable to infectious disease when intermixed like they are these days.

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Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition


The economic crisis has contributed to a glut of bees in California. That raises questions about whether a supposed global pollination crisis is real


AT THE end of February, the orchards of California’s Central Valley are dusted with pink and white blossom, as millions of almond trees make their annual bid for reproduction. The delicate flowers attract pollinators, mostly honeybees, to visit and collect nectar and pollen. By offering fly-through hospitality, the trees win the prize of a brush with a pollen-covered bee and the chance of cross-pollination with another tree. In recent years, however, there has been alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery.

Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut.

Bee good to me

The annual orgy of sexual reproduction in the Californian almond orchards owes little to the unintended bounty of nature. Francis Ratnieks, a professor of apiculture at Sussex University who has worked on the state’s almond farms, says the crop is so large and intensively grown these days that it has greatly surpassed the region’s inherent ability to supply pollinators. Decades ago, when there were fewer almonds, farmers could rely on pollination just from the beekeepers who live in the Central Valley. Now, they have to import migrant apian labour.

Scientific AG, a firm based in Bakersfield, California, helps broker pollination deals between local almond growers and apiarists from across America. Joe Traynor, the pollination broker who founded Scientific AG, says that in the 1960s there were 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares) of groves. Today it is 700,000 acres and the industry claims it supplies 80% of the world’s almonds. In order to meet this pollination demand, more than a third of America’s beehives must be moved to California for the season. Such changes to the industry have been reflected in the prices for bee hives. In 1995 growers could rent a hive for $35. Today, says Mr Traynor, a strong colony would cost $150-200.

It is hard to pin down what has been causing honeybees to vanish. “People want it to be genetically modified crops, pollution, mobile-phone masts and pesticides,” says Dr Ratnieks, and it is “almost certainly none of those”. But he adds that such large losses to a population are not unusual in epidemics.

One explanation offered by both Dr Ratnieks and Mr Traynor is of a once-rare disease, possibly caused by the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), sweeping through colonies that have already been weakened by parasites such as Nosema ceranae, a parasitic fungus from Asia. Some have suggested that N. ceranae alone might be sufficient to cause CCD, as the fungus is believed to have been widespread since 2006, when CCD first became a problem. There is also Varroa, a parasitic mite, which has been another problem in bees for some time, and which might also transmit the IAPV. But there is almost certainly a further factor causing stress on the bees—a poor diet.

Bee-conomics

It is increasingly being recognised that managed bees need food supplements. In some places, a decline in the area of pasture land on which they can forage, the loss of weedy borders and the growth of crop monocultures mean it is hard for bees to find a wide enough range of pollen sources to obtain all their essential amino acids. In extreme cases they may not even find enough basic protein. Writing in Bee Culture this February, Mr Traynor observes that places where crops with low-protein pollens, such as blueberries and sunflowers, are grown are also places where CCD has appeared.

The suggestion is that poor nutrition has weakened the bees’ immune systems, making them more vulnerable to viruses and other parasites. Feeding bees supplements, rather than relying on their ability to forage in the wild, costs time and money. Many beekeepers therefore try to avoid it. Anecdote suggests, however, that those who do fork out find their colonies are far more resistant to CCD.

This year’s Californian bee glut, then, has been caused by a mixture of rising supply meeting falling demand. The price of almonds dropped by 30% between August and December last year, as people had less money in their pockets. That has caused growers to cut costs, and therefore hire fewer hives. There is also a drought in the region, and many farmers are unlikely to receive enough water to go ahead with the harvest. Meanwhile, the recent high prices for pollination contracts made it look worthwhile fattening bees up with supplements over the winter. That may help explain why there have been fewer colony collapses.

The rise and fall of the managed honeybee, then, owes as much to the economics of supply and demand as it does to the forces of nature. And if the nutrition and disease theory is correct, next year’s lower contract prices may see beekeepers cutting back on supplemental feeding, and a resurgence of CCD.

Bee off with you!

Despite the importance of the honeybee, none of this is evidence of a wide-scale pollination crisis or a threat that is specific to pollinators. No one has shown that colonies of wild bees are collapsing any more frequently than they used to. And while it is true that many species of butterflies, moths, birds, bats and other pollinators are in retreat, their problems are far more likely to mirror broader declines in biodiversity that are the result of well-known phenomena such as habitat loss and the intensification of agriculture.

Troubling though this loss of diversity is, it does not necessarily translate into a decline in the amount of pollination going on. Jaboury Ghazoul of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, writing in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2005, points out that the decline of bumblebees in Europe that has been observed recently mostly affects rare and specialised species—an altogether different problem.

Though the idea that there is a broader and costly pollination crisis under way is entrenched (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation is spending $28m on a report investigating it), the true picture is cloudier. In 2006 America’s National Academy of Sciences released a report on the status of pollinators in North America that concluded “for most North American pollinator species, long-term population data are lacking and knowledge of their basic ecology is incomplete.” Simply put, nobody knows. As for the managed bees of America, Dr Ratnieks says that “the imminent death of the honeybee has been reported so many times, but it has not happened and is not likely to do so”.

Market Researching Painting Preference

Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, of the Dia Center for the Arts, have conducted professional market research about aesthetic preferences and taste in painting, first in the U.S. and then the rest of the world.

The landscape here is the most wanted painting for U.S. residents. (Note the George Washington in the middle.)

The abstract is the least wanted.

You can see a similar pattern for other countries here.

A notable exception is Holland, where the most wanted painting was not a landscape with a mountain, a tree, and water, but instead a colorful abstract. Another argument for the Netherlands as the best country in the world...



The same guys have also developed "most-" and "least-wanted" songs. Most wanted was a cheesy R&B/rock love song; least wanted was an opera mix of hip-hop.

The Nine Nations of North America

This is derived from Joel Garreau's 1981 book The Nine Nations of North America.

Garreau argued that these nine regions demonstrate such distinctive cultural and/or economic features that they are a more relevant way of dissecting North America than the traditional (Canadian) provinces and (US and Mexican) states. Those Nine Nations were:

• New England (or New Britain, or Atlantica): comprising not just the six traditional New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut), but also the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland (including Labrador). Its capital would be Boston.

• The Foundry: the (formerly) industrial heartland of North America, covering the US and Canadian sides of the Great Lakes region and including much of the US northeast. Capital: Detroit.

• Dixie: The cultural area more or less corresponding with the secessionist Confederate States of America (1861-1865), but for example excluding western Texas, the southern tip of Florida and including southern Missouri, Illinois and Indiana and southeastern Oklahoma (known as ‘Little Dixie’). Capital: Atlanta.

• The Breadbasket: includes most of the Great Plains states (in the US) and part of the Prairie provinces (in Canada). To wit: Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, parts of Missouri, Wisconsin, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana and Texas; and on the Canadian side parts of Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Capital: Kansas City.

• The Islands: basically a federation of the Carribean – the islands and their people. I.e. also the Greater Miami area, heavily Cuban by now, and the Florida Keys. Could stretch all the way across the Caribbean Islands to include parts of Venezuela. Its capital would be Miami.

• Mexamerica: those areas in which ‘tex-mex’ culture is prominent, i.e. most of northern Mexico, and a large area in the south of the US - most of New Mexico and parts of California, Arizona and Texas. Its capital could either be Mexico City or Los Angeles. Some later maps include all of Mexico in this Nation.

• Ecotopia: A big chunk of coastal Northwest America, from Alaska via British Columbia through Washington State and Oregon to California. Capital: San Francisco.

• Québec: the only part of North America that is institutionally non-Anglophone. Capital of this French-speaking enclave would be Québec City.

• The Empty Quarter: All the other, sparsely populated areas of North America, from Northern Canada down to Utah. The name refers to the desert of the same name, occupying the lower third of the Arabian peninsula (Rub’ al-Khali in Arabic). Capital: Denver.

Baby Steps on the Moon

Here's a map of humankind's first steps on the Moon. In 2.5 hours, they covered less than a soccer or baseball field.

The rest of the cosmos is pretty unavailable for us, isn't it?