Author: dtrend

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Let the asteroid mining begin

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No, this isn’t a joke. A group of billionaires are going to launch a fleet of starships to mine asteroids. Then still in space they will make what they mine into stuff using 3-D printers. As Wired Science tell the story:

“Last year was thick with audacious private spaceflight company unveilings, including the announcement from Planetary Resources, Inc. of their plans to mine relatively valuable platinum group metals from asteroids. With the formation of Deep Space Industries, it seems that 2013 could see a new crop of private space companies with lofty goals.

“We are about prospecting, exploring, harvesting, extracting, and manufacturing based on the resources of space,” said Rick Tumlinson, founder and chairman of DSI, during a press conference on Jan. 22. Tumlinson has been an ardent space advocate for many years, helping foundMirCorp, which brought space tourist Dennis Tito to the International Space Station. Continue reading “Let the asteroid mining begin”

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Billions for the world’s schools?

Globally speaking, not much money goes to schools. Which is too bad since so many other issues can be traced back to education. How about a billionaire like Bill Gates taking up global education?

“This week, business leaders are gathering in Davos to debate global priorities at the World Economic Forum” reports Al Jazeera.  The forum declares itself to be “committed to improving the state of the world”. So why isn’t education higher up on the agenda?imgres-2

“On the face of it, there should be little need to make the business case for education. It is intrinsically tied to all positive development outcomes. Economic growth, health, nutrition and democracy are all boosted by quality schooling. If all children in low-income countries left school with basic reading skills, poverty would fall by 12 percent – and that’s good for business. The private sector benefits directly from an educated, skilled workforce. Continue reading “Billions for the world’s schools?”

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Jailbreak the Binary

Tired of that nasty M/F gender thing? How about all binary thinking?

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A new Google Chrome app will replace any gender-specific pronoun with a neutral one and will deal with a lot of other words as well.

We installed “Jailbreak the Binary” and tested in out by searching the words “woman” and “man,” coming up with the following hits: “Person (Wikipedia),” “People.com,” “Top 99 People of 2013,” “People’s Issues, Advice and Personal Stories,”, “People’s Basketball”…  Okay, so you get the idea. Then we tried the words like “maid,” “father,” and, once again, no gender whatsoever. And when we went to look up one of our favorite newsgroups, “Feminist Philosophers,”  the search yielded the correct link, but translated it as “Androgynous Philosophers.”

We think it’s great someone came up with this. The only problem is that you need to remember to turn the thing off when you need to return to the gendered world. The description from Google reads:

View the world without gender.

Based off of “Jailbreak the Patriarchy” by Danielle Sucher, but with gender neutral pronouns and as many gender neutral other words as well.   Takes all instances of ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘he’, ‘she’, and as many other gendered words and swaps them for gender neutral versions.   When ‘OFF’ is displayed on the icon then the extension is off.

Find it at: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jailbreak-the-binary/mmdlclbfhplmbjfefngjbicmelpbbdnh

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Sasha and Malia to make history

“That’s how it goes with kids. You hardly notice how fast they’re growing up, then suddenly big sis is nearly as tall as Mom and the little one is a tween, gently sassing Dad.” You have to hand it to Huffington Post for this entry about something other than the most obvious headlines. As the story continues:

“On the inaugural platform again four years later, a more mature Malia Obama, 14, and Sasha, 11, smiled, sometimes giggled, and chatted with their cousin Avery Robinson as they awaited their father’s arrival. Sasha bounced on her feet a bit as if chilly; later at the parade she danced in her seat to the beat of passing drummers. Malia, rivaling her mother’s 5 feet 11 inches, looked poised in calf-high black boots. Like any girls their age, they whipped out their smartphones in the reviewing stand to take photos.imgres-4

“Both daughters appeared relaxed and oblivious to their global TV audience, unaffected by their rare status, unfazed by the fuss over their father. Continue reading “Sasha and Malia to make history”

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Selling the Shootings

Finally someone is talking about this.  No, not talking about the shootings. Instead we have found a thought piece about the mushrooming “discourse” about the shootings.

It usually takes a bit of time for such a retrospective analysis to take place, but we live in a faster world. Today in Truthout, William Rivers Pitt  looks at the war-of-positions we’ve all been

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witnessing, and his thoughts are excerpted briefly below:

“A few hours before President Obama and Vice President Biden unveiled their proposals for gun reform in America, the National Rifle Associationlaunched a preemptive strike on the president’s children. To wit: an NRA-sponsored television commercial claimed that, because Sasha and Malia get armed guards in school and your kids don’t, Mr. Obama is an elitist hypocrite. Continue reading “Selling the Shootings”

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Holly’s incredible journey

20well-cat-tmagArticleYes, Holly the cat found her way home, covering 200 miles in two months.

No one can figure out how the indoor housecat pulled it off.

Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach, reports the New York Times

“’Are you sure it’s the same cat?’ wondered John Bradshaw, director of theUniversity of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, ‘the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.’ Continue reading “Holly’s incredible journey”

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North Korea’s arithmetic

A new initiative was launched recently to teach statistics to university students and government workers in North Korea, a country with an authoritarian government that many researchers in the region think issues the fewest, and least reliable, statistics in the world. The Pyongyang Summer Institute in Survey

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Science and Quantitative Methodology began with about 250 students last summer, taught by 13 instructors from the U.S. and Europe, reports the Wall Street Journal.  “Soon, organizers hope to have 30 instructors, about 250 university students and 100 North Korean government workers, taught in classes hosted by the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the country’s first private university, opened in 2010.

“’Capacity building in the area of statistics is helpful to governments everywhere because quality data collection leads to informed policy decisions Continue reading “North Korea’s arithmetic”

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What’s worth learning

We’ve heard a lot of criticism of schools in recent years – in recent decades for that matter.

Ideologues blame teachers, administrators, funding sources, and even kids for deficiencies. Writing in today’s Truthout, Marion Brady takes a different tack, looking at outdated views of what counts as knowledge, of what is worth learning. Her opening paragraphs are excerpted below:

“The evidence is inescapable. Millions of kids walk away from school long before they’re scheduled to graduate. Millions more stay but disengage. Half of those entering the teaching profession soon abandon it. Administrators play musical chairs. Barbed wire surrounds many

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schools, and police patrol hallways. School bond levies usually fail.Superficial fads—old ideas resurrected with new names—come and go with depressing regularity. Continue reading “What’s worth learning”

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Violence as disease

The idea that violence is contagious doesn’t appear in the Obama administration’s gun control plan, nor in the National Rifle Association’s arguments. But some scientists believe that understanding the literally infectious nature of violence

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is essential to preventing it. Today’s Wired Science carries a piece that says

“To say violence is a sickness that threatens public health isn’t just a figure of speech, they argue. It spreads from person to person, a germ of an idea that causes changes in the brain, thriving in certain social conditions.

“A century from now, people might look back on violence prevention in the early 21st century as we now regard the primitive cholera prevention efforts in the early 19th century, when the disease was considered a product of filth and immorality rather than a microbe.

“It’s extremely important to understand this differently than the way we’ve been understanding it,” said Gary Slutkin, Continue reading “Violence as disease”

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Be careful what you technologically wish for

Everyone thinks the recent availability of 3-D printers is a great thing. Well, not everybody.

What if do-it-yourself fabricating was a ruse to allow manufacturing to be transferred from sweatshops into homes? Writing recently in Le Monde, Johan Soderberg reflects on the positive and negative implication of this emerging technology: “Recently, electronic machines capable of producing objects, functioning as three-dimensional printers are available to the general public. They arouse enthusiasm in a vanguard that sees the seeds of a new industrial revolution. But supporters of these DIY tools technology often forget the story that they were born.imgres-1

“It would be the industrial revolution of the twenty-first century: what previously had to be purchased in store may now be made at home using tools such as a laser cutter, a 3D printer, a CNC Continue reading “Be careful what you technologically wish for”

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Tacoma wins again

imgres“Tacoma was the right blend of the right size and had the factors we looked for in the criteria,” Matthew Breen, editor of the The Advocate and the man behind this year’s list, told weekends on All Things Considered host Jacki Lyden.

The occasion of these remarks was the naming of Tacoma, WA, yet again, as the top pick of The Advocate’s “Gayest Cities in America.”  As NPR’s story continues, deciding factors include “criteria like the number of LGBT elected officials and whether a city has legal protections for people who are transgender and bisexual resource centers. Then the magazine adds in some tongue-in-cheek factors: concerts by Glee cast members, roller derby and gay rugby teams, and “fabulous” shopping — measured by the number of Whole Foods, West Elm and Pottery Barn stores.

“We start with a baseline of cities that have 150,000 people or more and we take all of our criteria,” Breen says. Continue reading “Tacoma wins again”

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More Asians than Latinos coming to California

Over the past decade a dramatic shift has occurred in California’s immigration demographics,  as Asian immigrants have begun to come to California faster than Latinos.

In 2001, 42 percent of immigrants coming to California were from Latin America, primarily Mexico, while 37 percent were from Asia. In 2011, 57imgres-2 percent of new immigrants were from Asia, and just

22 percent were from Latin America, reports Huffington Post.

“’This is a pretty astounding change over a short period of time,’ Hans Johnson, co-director of the Public Policy Institute of California, told the Sacremento Bee, citing census data. The demographic breakdown of California’s swearing-in of new citizens Wednesday was as follows: 450 from Asia (100 from India, 94 from the Philippines, 63 from Vietnam, 33 from China, 29 from Laos) 160 from Latin America (119 people from Mexico)35 from Ukraine to see which countries immigrants to California came from in 2011. Continue reading “More Asians than Latinos coming to California”

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Self-help books seem to work for depression

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) today announced research findings showing the usefulness of self-help books for the treatment of mental health conditions like depression.

“Patients offered books, plus sessions guiding them in how to use them, had lower levels of depression a year later than those offered usual GP care,” reports the BBC.

“The effect was seen in addition to the benefits of other treatments such as antidepressants, Scottish researchers report in the journal Plos One. Such an approach may help the NHS tackle demand for therapy, they said.

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“More than 200 patients who had been diagnosed with depression by their GP took part in the study, half of whom were also on antidepressant drugs. Some were provided with a self-help guide dealing with different aspects of depression, such as being assertive or overcoming sleep problems.Patients also had three sessions with an adviser who helped them get the most out of the books and plan what changes to make. After four months those who had been prescribed the self-help books had significantly lower levels of depression than those who received usual GP care. Continue reading “Self-help books seem to work for depression”

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Majority back Obama on guns

imgresSurvey results just in say the majority of the U.S. population supports President Obama’s wide-ranging proposals to reduce gun violence

“Americans’ immediate reaction to President Barack Obama’s proposals for new laws designed to reduce gun violence is more positive than negative, with 53% saying they would want their representative in Congress to vote for the set of proposed new laws, while 41% say their representative should vote against them,” says the Gallup organization

“These results are from Gallup polling conducted Thursday, Jan. 17, the day after Obama’s announcement. The question asked Americans about the “set” of new laws, even though in reality, to the extent the House and the Senate pursue these proposals, it could be on a one-by-one basis. The results suggest that Obama begins his campaign for passage of the laws with a majority — but not a supermajority — of the public behind him.

“The question explicitly identified the gun proposals as those that President Obama announced on Wednesday, making it not surprising to find that the strongest support for the proposals comes among Democrats and liberals, and the weakest support comes among Republicans and conservatives. Additionally, groups that traditionally lean more Democratic — nonwhites, Easterners, and those with postgraduate educations — are significantly above average in support. Continue reading “Majority back Obama on guns”

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Americans divided about corporations and government

Once again our friends at Gallup have confirmed that the U.S. population really can’t make up its mind. This time the popular polling organization reports that about equal numbers of people think that corporations and government are okay, with opinion dividing predictably along party lines. As Gallup states:

tragic-1-city-skyscrapers “Americans continue to be worried about the effects of big companies and big government, with 35% saying they are very or somewhat satisfied with the size and influence of major corporations, and 36% saying they are very or somewhat satisfied with the size and power of the federal government. Both of these levels of satisfaction are up slightly from the last two years, but significantly below satisfaction levels recorded in the early years of the last decade, when satisfaction with government was generally higher than satisfaction with major corporations.

“These findings are from Gallup’s Jan. 7-10, 2013, Mood of the Nation survey. Continue reading “Americans divided about corporations and government”

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“Airocalypse” Now

imgres“Air pollution in Beijing has reached truly apocalyptic proportions,” reports today’s Asia Times.

“Last week saw the highest smog measurements for north Chinese skies since the implementation of modern monitoring methods. Vulnerable residents of the Chinese capital were advised to stay indoors, as facemasks and air filtration systems were sold in record numbers. On Monday, kindergartens and primary schools in Beijing suspended outdoor physical education classes to protect vulnerable young bodies from the noxious haze.

“The toxic air that stagnates around Beijing could be blown away by a serious rearranging of national priorities. Continue reading ““Airocalypse” Now”

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The state department’s merry pranksters

At first the story was that the Syrian government has dropped hallucinogens on insurgents.

But now it seems that U.S. State Department official might have been the ones tripping, or at least imagining things.  Countering a story appearing earlier this week in Foreign Policy about the

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mysterious properties of a substance called “Agent 15,” American officials now say the whole thing was a bit of an exaggeration. Or put in more official language, the report ”did not accurately convey the anecdotal information that we had received from a third party regarding an alleged incident in Syria.” As DangerRoom quoted the State Department, Continue reading “The state department’s merry pranksters”

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Second Amendment and “slave patrols”

imgres-1Historical memory is a funny thing. It’s always selective.

Take the current raving of the gun crowd for the sacred text of the Second Amendment, adopted in 1791. It turns out that the idea came about to help southern slaveholders keep their human “property” from getting out of line. As Thom Hartman writes today in TroughOut,

“The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says ‘State’ instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote.  Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too. Continue reading “Second Amendment and “slave patrols””

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The spy who loved me

In days gone by, vulnerability to blackmail was one of the reasons advanced for keeping LGBT people out of positions of responsibility. But global culture is remarkably variable and asynchronous. Russia Today reports that until this year the Russian Republic of Georgia had been using this technique in it’s efforts to manipulate celebrities into doing its bidding. As Russia Today states:

“Georgian prosecutors claim President Saakashvili’s military police created a network of gay agents who started relations with famous people and later used blackmail to ensure their loyalty to the authorities.

“The Georgian prosecutors’ office on

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Tuesday alleged the project involving gay agents had been instituted by the Military Police department of the Defense Ministry.Three top Military Police officers have been released on bail after appearing in court in connection with the case, the report said. The prosecutors claim the former head of the Military Police, Legis Kardava, instructed some high-placed officials of his agency to gather information on homosexual men. Specially selected gay agents seduced their victims and took them to apartments equipped with audio and video recorders where they ‘secretly and illegally recorded fragments of private lives’ of these people. After this the records were used to force the people to cooperate with the special services.

“The investigators say the provocateurs chose famous people, though no names have been disclosed. It is also claimed that the ultimate objective was to force the Georgian celebrities into demonstrating loyalty to the existing political regime, headed by President Mikhail Saakashvili. Prosecutors allowed some of the video from the case to be shown on national TV after the identities of participants were concealed. Prosecutors also stated that the gay honey trap practice existed until the latest parliamentary elections that took place in October 2012. The poll was won by opposition party Georgian Dream and recent constitutional changes ensure that Mikhail Saakashvili has very little real political power even though he will remain on his post till October this year. After the elections the new parliament declared a major amnesty and, despite Saakashvili’s attempts to veto the move,freed about 200 inmates who were recognized as political prisoners. Several officials from Saakashvili’s administration were detained and charged with abuse of power and torture. Georgian Dream’s victory allowed the return of Irakliy Okruashvili, the former defense minister who was forced into exile after he claimed Mikhail Saakashvili was involved in political assassinations.”

 

Full story at: http://rt.com/politics/georgian-law-bust-undercover-026/

 

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Difficulties in predicting violent acts

Only a severely disturbed individual marches into an elementary school or a movie theater and guns down innocent people.

But how can society stop such people in time to avert tragedy?This question now “drives the public longing for a mental health system

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that produces clear warning signals and can somehow stop the violence.And it is now fueling a surge in legislative activity, in Washington and New York,” reports a story by Benedict Carey and Anemona Hartcollis in today’s New York Times. The piece continues: Continue reading “Difficulties in predicting violent acts”