The modern roundabout is a growing innovative wonder

New York Times - Roundabouts: Efficient or Annoying?
also
International Herald Tribune - The rise of the modern roundabout
also
Institute of Community Preservation - Roundabouts a viable alternative or going in circles?

The modern roundabout is an intersection design that is different from earlier versions of 'traffic circles' as designed in the early 1900s. Once motorists learn how to use them, they decrease pollution at the intersections, increase traffic flow through intersections, and, surprisingly, calm traffic at them as well. They are also cheaper to maintain (no traffic lights required) and reduce motor vehicle accidents and injuries/deaths considerably.

Gene ACTN3 is better predictor for success in power and speed sports than race is... sort-of

Slate - White Men Can't Jump?

An article that contains some analysis and some new information, but mostly seeks to establish that race or racial background is not as accurate as genes are in predicting power and speed performance. The test is for a gene ACTN3 that could be either RR, RX, or XX. The more R, the higher correlation in excelling in sport competition that values power and speed. Roughly, African-Americans have a frequency of RR at .6, and European whites have .36. The problem is that in some sports, say, NBA basketball, African-Americans represent roughly 80% of the playing time and demographic, showing they are over-represented based on gene frequency averages. The same could go for Olympic sprinters, almost all of whom are west African in descent. There are confounding factors here that could be related to culture, upbringing, perceived opportunities, etc. The conclusion is that racial categories are too crude to explain sporting success, and that genes should be considered one of the causal factors instead.

Expensive placebo more efficacious than cheap one

ABC News - 'Expensive' Placebo Work Better than 'Cheap'
also
Journal of the American Medical Association - Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy

The article in the popular press expanded the methodology reported in JAMA, and pulled in other opinions and work from some other related scientists. The study here gave people a fictitious pain medication that was really a sugar pill prior to administering a serious of increasing voltage electric shocks. Half the group was told they had an expensive $2.50 pill, the other half was told they had a 'discounted' pill (perhaps manufactured in China) for $0.10. Both groups reported feeling less pain after they took the pill, but many more in the group with the expensive pill reported a reduction in pain (roughly, 85% vs 61%). The expectation of greater value in a pricier pill is theorized as making the difference; a broader conclusion is that culture, advertisements, your doctor's attitude will play a role in the efficacy of your prescription.

Brain Scanners are still far away from providing useful diagnoses

Wired Magazine - Brain Scans as Mind Readers? Don't Believe the Hype

This article explores a few different places where brain scans like fMRI and EEG are being used in businesses, from personalized brain scans (costing over 3K) to companies trying to make a business out of fMRI lie detectors. The problems with the brain scanning devices is as follows: though they find statistical correlations between clinical diagnoses (depression, anxiety, excessive anger) and brain activity, there are still those with the diagnosis who have none of the relevant brain activity, and there are those with relevant brain activity without any diagnosis. What the science finds is statistically significant correlations, but not type-type correlations. So there are plenty of outliers, those who exhibit all the symptoms of depression who don't have the relevant brain activity, and those who report no problems with depression who have the relevant brain activity. A proposed fair way of determining brain scan success is to have a blind-detection process: to look at brain scans and make diagnoses that jibe with clinical ones. This work has yet to succeed. The one place where this kind of work is especially promising is in lie detection. A kind of super-lie-detector might be the fMRI, which tries detects the extra brain work needed to lie. One company posts a 90% success rate.

I-Bankers, trained to believe they are the best, are barely contrite

New York Magazine - The Autumn of the I-Banker

(See also: Vanity Fair - Profiles in Panic for a less interesting reporting on the state of retail to the super rich and how the super rich are coping financially.)

In a fantastic article for those of us who are on the outside looking in, this is a sharp, focused picture about the culture, mindset, and fatal flaws of Wall Street traders, some hedge fund managers, and others who were considered the 'masters of the universe'. The story begins and ends following a young trader who was making a decent salary (but not one of the super rich) at Lehman. After being fired, he took a job with 'the government', helping them to understand and regulate the mortgage banking business he just left. He believes they need him, as he has understanding of the 'real world'. The article moves between various interviews, how I-bankers believed they were the smartest people in the world, at the pinnacle of the food chain-- looking down on their college peers, government stooges, even the commercial bankers like Bank of America (hence Merrill Lynch employees who kept their jobs are angry at having to look up to BOA). Their prevailing philosophy is they they help the world by making money. Someone needs to shoulder the burdens of wealth and the i-banks need saving because 'the river flows down from the mountain'. Part of the irony exhibited here is that the wealthy lived on leveraging their own portfolios in order to get loans-- taking loans for houses and other big-ticket items using their company's stock as collateral. Now that their stock is useless, they too look like subprime borrowers. 'Leverage was their superpower'. The last part of the article nails home the point, from the [probably unintentional] double entendre: "I'm happiest when I'm making money" to the very end:
"If I had it to do all over again, you know what?" he says. "I would’ve lost more. I would’ve been bigger."

New theory on yawning: it cools the brain

Discovery News - The Yawn Explained: It Cools Your Brain

A new theory on yawning as a biological function (not a social function e.g. the contagious yawn) in parakeets shows that they take in large amounts of air when it is cooler than the body. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation tend to heat some centers of the brain, thus explaining yawning in those cases. Yawning upon waking has been associated with raising states of arousal, but also perhaps facilitating transitional brain states.

The internet might be changing the way we think

The Atlantic - Is Google Making Us Stupid?

see also: Facebook and Bebo risk 'infantilising' the human mind

Though not an outright op-ed or opinion article, it is short on anything other than anecdotal evidence and historical analogy. The anecdotal evidence is taken from the author himself and other various academics, writers and literature buffs-- they report having less patience with deep, sustained reading and instead find themselves 'skimming' or flitting between various texts, through hyperlinks, mainly on the internet. The internet is becoming the 'universal medium', the place where other media is going, e.g. newspapers, books, music, movies, TV. As it does, it changes those media, adapts it to the intellectual expectations (hyperlinks) and advertising models (banners, sidebars) the web already has. A recent study by a British university suggests that users on research sites infrequently read the entire article they're looking for, often skip around, looking for 'quick wins'. The article also has some excerpts from other recent books and articles that talk about this phenomenon. The historical analogy part of the article discusses the invention of writing, the printing press, the clock, the typewriter-- all technologies that changed how we interacted with the world and, also, how we did our thinking. The prognosticators were often right-on when predicting the losses of value we would incur, and often missed the great positive aspects of the various technological developments. There is also a discussion of Google's business philosophy and how it might be considered similar to Fredrick Taylor's development of a streamlined, no-wasted-movement industrial management system for factory workers. What Taylor did for physical movements within industry in the early 1900s, is the internet, led by Google, going to do for our thinking? This is considered a loss in valuable mental capabilities.

Truly devestating war in the Congo is a capitalist resource war

Seattle PI - A war more deadly than Iraq
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CommonDreams.org - Activitsts Slam World's Groteque Indifference to DR Congo
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Newsweek - How to Stop the Killing in Congo
finally
Seeking Alpha - OM Group Should Continue to Gain on Cobalt's Strength

The first article is from early 2008, giving the figures of 5.4 million dead in the Congo since 1998, the largest death through warfare since the WWII. Terrorism of the local population, specifically mentioning sexual terrorism of women, is rampant. The poverty in the Congo is completely undeserved-- it is incredibly resource rich with cobalt and coltan, yet the profits from the mining goes to the mining companies and the warlords who control the area, funding the war.

The second article talks about the terrible raping that women in the Congo are suffering from, and the lack of any interest of the developed world in stopping it. Surgeons work nearly 18 hours a day to repair the various internal injuries that hundreds of women sustain daily. The sexual terrorism is used to control territory by warlords who take the local resources, most notably coltan but also copper, tin, lumber, diamonds, cobalt. The coltan is often shipped to other countries that produce it, then sold again, a way of laundering the 'blood coltan' that is used in cell phones, DVD players, computers, digital cameras, etc. so that it appears to be 'conflict-free'.

Newsweek discusses the resource trail in more detail: Congo sits on a probably whopping 80 % of the world's coltan reserve, yet Rowanda, which has none of it naturally, is the chief exporter. One problem was earlier in the decade when other African nations sent their own troops to the area, which devolved into forming militias and other exploitative factions. The article offers a solution through stopping the income the militias and warlords get from coltan, then getting both outside and local parties to sit for negotiations; or does the world send 100,000 UN troops?

For investors, an article about the US company OM Group, makers of products derived from cobalt, is expected to show strong profits (written as of August, 2007). Coltan is also used in the making of hybrid and electric cars. OMG imports most of their cobalt from the Congo.

Science of arousal, orgasm shows different kinds in women

Scientific American - The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

Scientific study of sexual practice is only about a half-century old, and theories about how desire and emotions are implicated in the process of arousal abound. It isn't just a case of hormone therapy and boosting testosterone, since there is a placebo effect of increasing sexual interest without any chemical treatment. Article first explores arousal, then orgasm. Studies in 2007 led researchers to conclude that women are more flexible in their sexual arousal than men. Women and men are both aroused by erotic imagery, but straight women are aroused by many types, including man-man, man-woman, bonobo-bonobo, man, woman. Men are aroused mostly by their preferred sexual partner, e.g. gay men for man-man, man, straight men for man-woman, woman. The differences in adaptive function of the female and male orgasm might be a start in explaining the differences in sensory and emotional responses between the sexes. Males primary evolutionary objective during sex is to ejaculate, while the female primary objective is less well understood, perhaps to bond the female to the partner. Studies using PET scans have revealed that at the point of clitoral orgasm the female brain goes 'silent', showing a drop of activity in the brain's self-control regions, moral reasoning, social judgment. 'At the moment of [clitoral] orgasm women do not have any emotional feelings'. Interestingly, other kinds of female orgasms induced through vaginal and cervical stimulation are implicated in rich emotional brain activity.

Torture for interrogation is unnecessary and a cause for anti-US terrorism

Washington Post - I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq

Using a pseudonym, this US Military interrogator reveals that there is a viable, practicable and successful alternative to torturing suspected militants in order to get information from them. It involves negotiation, understanding, relating and is in the unclassified sections of the US Army Field Manual. This methodology takes effort to understand the motivations of the Sunni militants and revealed the weakness in Al-Qaeda's hold over Sunni tribesmen. It also was able to locate the Al-Zarqawi. The point isn't just that this alternative to torture is effective and has proven results, but also that the methods are consistent with the best of our American ideals. Probably half of the American deaths in Iraq that took place were because of the torture or perceived degradation that the US perpetrated in places like Abu-Ghraib. When the author asked the Defense Department to review his book manuscript to make sure it did not contain any classified materials, they delayed and delayed, then finally dedacted much of the non-classified materials as well, leading him to file suit.

Poor children show less brain activity in the frontal cortex than middle-income children

Science Daily - Poor Children's Brains Activity Resembles That of Stroke Victims, EEG Shows

EEG, or electroencephalograph, involves placing a electrode-wired cap over the head of a subject to read some of the brain's electrical activity. This study used a small number (26) of 9-10 yr old children whose salient differences were socio-economic status. It found that poorer children averaged lower brain activity when processing visual stimuli and also novel stimuli. The level of brain function resembled that of some adult stroke victims who have had parts of their brains damaged. Also discussed are the possible causes for this discovery, including less language emersion, a less-enriching environment. Lastly, article pointed out that these conditions are changeable-- artistic, linguistic and logical play has been shown to increase brain function in children.

How deflation is the real enemy in this recession, as it was in the Great Depression

Forbes - What Would Keynes Do?

An engaging and mildly technical article drawing the parallels between the Great Depression and the current economic downturn, highlighting lack of government welfarist policies (FDIC, unemployment insurance), deflation, and stringent Federal Reserve policy as the three major factors that operated in the Great Depression. The differences between then and the current recession is that we have some government welfarist programs and the Fed seems much more pro-active and liberal with spending. But deflation is still a major risk, and the article illustrates how that is so: loans become harder to pay back, coupled with the fact that hoarding money automatically increases potential buying power. What is needed is an increase in 'velocity', or spending the dollars that we have available; the conclusion is the economy needs is government spending on goods and services. It doesn't need to buy up bad debt (this didn't work before, and it won't work now because it's merely an exchange of similar assets without adding liquidity).

Self-guided evolution in mitochondrial proteins

Princeton University - Evolution's new wrinkle: proteins with cruise control provide new perspective

Scientists have found that there are some proteins that exhibit feedback mechanisms that mutate their genetic structure, suggesting that some organic material can have some efficacy in evolution over its own level of fitness. Scientists looking at proteins that ferry electrons across the membrane of mitochondria found that nearly all of them were operating at peak efficiency; after running a mathematical analysis this outcome was so unlikely to be random that another hypothesis emerged consistent with "Control Theory", a theory about how feedback mechanisms would work. This may create a new way of looking at evolution as 'evolutionary control'. Important to note that the style of argumentation appear to be correlational: the behavior of the proteins is consistent with the feedback model.

Even the wealthy are losing money

Financial Times - Hedge funds are going down with dignity
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/69aa9b50-c33a-11dd-a5ae-000077b07658.html#axzz3gjbOxjDE

Hedge funds have relatively steep requirements on their investors: $5mil in liquid assets for individuals, $25mil for an institution. They are privately run, privately funded, and the industry manages about 2 trillion in wealth (at least it did at the start of 2007). It's now estimated that by the end of the year half of that wealth will be out of hedge funds, some of it lost by poor returns, some of it withdrawn by skittish wealthy investors. One of the problems with the funds that might ruin the chances of the industry bouncing back easily is that they set limits on how much of your own money you can get back, the timing, etc.-- the investment can be illiquid-- and this can sour investors. Because they aren't looking for a government bailout and are simply going down with the ship, John Gapper considers them noble.

Pollution is destroying the male sex

The Independent - It's official: Men really are the weaker sex

This is a comprehensive collection of various studies done all over the world that show various pollutants affecting the endocrine functioning of organisms, specifically male reproductive organs, sperm production, and in general the feminizing of males, including humans. The pollutants include food wrapping, flame retardant furniture, some plastics, and much else in the water, soil, and air. The lack of regulation and limits on pollution have affected vertebrate organisms all over the world, feminizing them, for instance making them hermaphroditic, giving them smaller or non-functioning sex organs. This includes human males as well. This could explain why heavily polluted areas are now seeing more girls born than boys, reversing the usual demographic of roughly 50/50.

'Relative Deprivation' is just fine for CEO compensation (Opinion)

Huffington Post - Amitai Etzioni: Cap Executive Pay

This opinion piece reviews two competing theories about how CEOs [I don't see why this shouldn't apply to all 'executives'] should be compensated. The conflict is cast as between the theories of Michael Jensen (Harvard) and Robert Frank (Cornell). Jensen advocates even higher executive pay for success and stiff penalties for failure. (Most corporations ignore the second part.) Frank advocates a cap on total compensation, arguing that the psycho-economic theory 'relative deprivation' would predict an across-the-board limit would be just as good for CEOs. The idea is that executive pay is largely a status symbol, most executives having no time to spend their money anyway. If the status was limited to a certain 'highest level', then CEOs would be just as satisfied with their pay. (Compare European CEOs, whose pay is much lower, but are just as satisfied because their peers' pay is also around the same amount.)

The history of the use of 'truth-serum'

Scientific American - What is truth serum?

A short article without a lot of science, giving the history of the sodium pentothal and other barbiturates that were once used in medicine. The first doctor to document things like this was looking at scopolamine, or 'twilight sleep', which seemed to put patients in a mood to give answers without having to think about them. He first envisioned its use not to extract guilt but instead to confirm people were telling the truth about their alibis. Doctors in WWII would use sodium pentothal as a therapy-- soldiers who had been injured and lost the ability to speak or remember would have a better time of it under the drug. In general, there is a lot of skepticism about the veracity of the things that come from a person's mouth while under the drug-- those drugged are also very suggestible and quite willing to say what they think the interviewer wants to hear.

A genetic placebo?

New Scientist - First 'placebo gene' discovered

Scientists gave volunteers with a social anxiety disorder a placebo 'treatment', and then made them make a public address-- something that would make them nervous. Of the respondents who reported diminished anxiety (those on whom the placebo worked), 80% of them had a particular gene which none of the others in the experiment had. The gene is partially responsible for making serotonin and also has been shown in previous studies to positively affect responses to 'fear tests'. One thing to note is that the placebo effect is not just one effect, but multiple effects, in this case a gene that reduces fear was implicated in a placebo effect meant to reduce fear.

The atmosphere of ownership and the securitization of mortgates did us in

The Nation - The House Folds: The Housing Market and Irrational Exuberance
http://www.thenation.com/article/house-folds-housing-market-and-irrational-exuberance/

In many ways, we never got past the irrational exuberance that fueled the stock market rises in the 90s. It migrated to the housing market where the culture of ownership and the American dream of owning your own home caused intelligent people to miss some clear warning signs of an impending bust. This (long) article reviews the works of Robert Shiller (Irrational Exuberance and The Subprime Solution) and Mark Zandi (Financial Shock) and compares them to an earlier housing skeptic, John Dean (Home Ownership, Is It Sound?) from the mid 1940s. Shiller argues that it was a culture of expansion, of ownership, of 'boom thinking' that was the ultimate culprit for the housing bust. Zandi focuses more on the removal of responsibility in the financial system, the passing of the bad buck from consumer to lender to investment banker to investor. In the end, article points to some of the fundamental problems in America's housing industry, one of which is that we've failed in many ways to democratize home ownership significantly in the last three decades.

Lincoln's Team of Rivals were more rival than team (Opinion)

LA Times - Lincoln and the myth of 'Team of Rivals'

This is admittedly an opinion piece by a Lincoln historian, but it describes that when Lincoln build his cabinet of rivals, there were many problems. First off, he didn't build it with friends, who were slighted by being passed over. He was continually being undermined by the various members of his cabinet, bickering with each other and vying for the next Republican nomination. Of the 4 front-runners in the 1860 primaries, 3 left Lincoln's cabinet within his first term. Eventually, Lincoln discovered that he needed to essentially rule his cabinet with an iron fist. Perhaps Lincoln's experience should be considered a more cautionary tale.

'Good' Cholesterol isn't always good

ScienceDaily - Some 'Good Cholesterol' is Actually Bad, Study Shows

HDL, High-Density Lipoproteins is considered the 'good' cholesterol, yet the HDL in people with some chronic illnesses does not reduce inflammation, like good HDL is supposed to. So now it is possible there is both 'good' HDL and 'bad' HDL.

Alternative depression treatment involves no drugs and is working

ScienceDaily - Depression Treatment: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy as Effective as Anti-Depressant Medication, study suggests

Developed in 2002 by a team of doctors to try to give effective long-term treatments to depression that didn't involve drugs, MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy) was used with a randomized sample of individuals diagnosed with depression, then compared to a control group who continued with normal treatments that included pill-medication. After 15 months, only 47% experienced a relapse, compared to the control group, of which 60% experienced a relapse. MBCT is more cost effective since it can be taught by one psychologist to groups of people, who then practice at home without supervision. It teaches meditation and cognitive skills to work through problems, not dwell on the future or the past but the present, and is mostly based on buddhist practices.