News
illconsidered | October 28, 2007 Sipping from the internet firehose...This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's GW news roundup(skip to bottom) Top Stories, Accelerating CO2 Growth, GEO-4, Mass Extinctions, Roe & Baker, Prins & Rayner, IAC Melting Arctic, California Wildfires, Catch Up Hurricanes, GHG Sources, Glaciers, Pine Island, Sea Levels, Satellites, DSCOVR Impacts, Rainforests, Corals, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts, Food vs. Biofuel, Cereal Production Mitigation, Transportation, Building, Sequestration, Geoengineering Journals, Misc.…
illconsidered | October 27, 2007If the United States continues to thumb its nose at the rest of the world in the climate change arena, this article from the EU Observer discusses what the appropriate response should be.
The article indicates that the European Union is considering taxing goods that are imported from CO2 polluting countries. In other words, the US would not be allowed the economic benefits it would gain by being a rogue nation and not controling its CO2 emissions.
Of course, there are many devils hiding in the yet to be established details, but this is clearly the right principle and may actually have a…
dmunger | October 24, 2007The way subliminal advertising is portrayed in movies and hyped in some media outlets, briefly and imperceptibly flashing a brand name during a TV show can turn people into mindless cyborgs who can't resist the urge to shop at a particular store or drink a certain brand of beer. Overhyped as these claims may be, there is a grain of truth in them -- as a recent post in Neuromarketing points out, subliminal images really can affect our preferences:
In Your Money and Your Brain, Philip Zweig describes a study conducted by psychologist Robert Zajonc almost forty years ago. Zajonc exposed a two…
illconsidered | October 21, 2007...so says the headline of a Guardian news paper report from one week ago (this has very likely been covered already in other climate blogs but I am too far behind on my blog reading to know any better!)
The school governor who challenged the screening of Al Gore's climate change documentary in secondary schools was funded by a Scottish quarrying magnate who established a controversial lobbying group to attack environmentalists' claims about global warming.
Hardly the grassroots at work here, surprise surprise. Al Gore's spokesperson hase already addressed the ruling's list of 9 "errors" in…
dmunger | October 19, 2007Here's an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds. It starts by discussing the surprising accuracy of Wikipedia.
The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are), is not due to the average quality of the edits (or mutations). Instead, it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought…
dmunger | October 18, 2007According to a report in the New York Times, frequently-used words evolve more slowly than rarely used ones:
Some words evolve rapidly, with a result that there are many different word forms, what linguists call cognates, for meanings across languages. "Bird," for example, takes many disparate forms across other Indo-European languages: oiseau in French, vogel in German and so on.
But other words, like the word for the number after one, have hardly evolved at all: two, deux (French) and dos (Spanish) are very similar, derived from the same ancestral sound.
Seems reasonable. In our travels…
dmunger | October 16, 2007You don't have to go far to hear someone say something bad about gossip. People even gossip about gossip. One good thing about gossip: it may have had some role in the origin of human speech, as John Tierney reminds us:
Language, according to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, evolved because gossip is a more efficient version of the "social grooming" essential for animals to live in groups.
Speech enabled humans to bond with lots of people while going about their hunting and gathering. Instead of spending hours untangling hair, they could bond with friendly conversation ("Your hair looks so…
dmunger | October 15, 2007The idea of a human falling in love with a creation made of steel and silicon seems rather far-fetched today -- even the most "realistic" robots seem more creepy than endearing. But people already do form attachments to their robots. People treat Roombas like pets, and soldiers form strong bonds with their minesweeping robots.
Men have purchased inflatable dolls as sex-toys for decades, and those toys are becoming increasingly realistic. Will artificial intelligence and animatronics actually make these dolls so appealing that people will want to marry them? An MSNBC report cites one scientist…
drorzel | October 15, 2007The weekend interrupted the parade of Nobel prizes, setting apart The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007, more commonly called the Nobel in Economics (even though it's a late addition). This goes to three guys in the US, including the obligatory Chicagoan: Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson, "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." As the official press release puts it:
Mechanism design theory, initiated by Leonid Hurwicz and further developed by Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, has greatly enhanced our…
drorzel | October 12, 2007(WASHINGTON, DC) On the heels of reports from Oslo that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former US Vice President Al Gore, a White House spokesman issued a statement saying that "significant uncertainty" remained regarding the recipient of the prize.
"The President feels that at this time, it's too early to say for sure whether Al Gore has won the Peace prize," said White House spokesman Scott Stencil. "The science is just not conclusive yet. The President feels that more study is needed before we agree that this honor…
drorzel | October 12, 2007The Nobel Peace Prize was announced this morning, and will be split between an international panel and everybody's favorite PowerPoint presenter:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.
There's long been a tradition of inviting American Nobel…
drorzel | October 11, 2007In the "Social Networks Brighten My Morning" file, I am inordinately amused to be getting status updates from a Nobel laureate on Facebook.
Speaking of Nobel laureates, the latest chunk of dynamite money was awarded this morning to novelist Doris Lessing:
"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny"
I have absolutely no idea what that means, not having read any of her books. I associate her with the class of mainstream writers who independently reinvent science fiction, and then insist that they're not…
dmunger | October 9, 2007If kids are going to be prepared for the careers of tomorrow, learning mathematics is essential. Math forms a critical foundation for work in high-tech and research careers. Even in our work on Cognitive Daily, Greta and I have found that our math knowledge has been stretched to the absolute limit (I've considered taking a brush-up statistics course to help me with some of the more numbers-heavy papers I read -- and these come primarily from the social end of psychology research).
So when kids learn the most basic concepts in mathematics, starting in elementary school and moving beyond,…
dmunger | October 8, 2007A couple weeks ago, a CogDaily commenter wondered if some of the science achievement differences between men and women might be related to the fact that boys play more video games than girls:
There are many more boys playing video games than girls. Could the mental sweat caused by video games strengthen the areas of the brain more involved in mathematics?
Good question, Lauren. As it turns out, a recent study discussed by Fernette and Brock Eide suggests you might be on to something. We've reported here that the video game Medal of Honor can increase performance on several different vision…
illconsidered | October 6, 2007"South America chokes as Amazon Burns" is the headline on an online Independent news article. Apparently the annual practice of fall burning to clear forest land so we can eat hamburgers and get fat has spun out of control this year. The world's largest forest has become a bit of a "tinder box" due to drought conditions thought to be a result of climate change.
Vast areas of Brazil and Paraguay and much of Bolivia are choking under thick layers of smoke as fires rage out of control in the Amazon rainforest, forcing the cancellation of flights.
Satellite images yesterday showed huge clouds…
dmunger | October 4, 2007Here's a fascinating video featuring split-brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga. The patient had his corpus callosum severed as a treatment for severe epilepsy. The treatment terminated nearly all communication between his brain's right and left hemispheres.
Since language is primarily processed in the left hemisphere, the patient can't name items on the left side of his field of vision (remember, the brain is "flipped" relative to the body parts it senses and controls). But he can draw pictures of them, and then he can look at the pictures and name them. (via Issues in the Philosophy of…
illconsidered | October 3, 2007So says a recent poll from PIPA. They agree on exactly what, you ask?
"Human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change" says 79% of the globe.
Nine out of ten say that action is necessary to address global warming. A substantial majority (65%) choose the strongest position, saying that "it is necessary to take major steps starting very soon."
Interestingly enough, India does not seem to share the rest of the world's opinion (not to mention the findings of the latest IPCC report) and comes in at only 49% agreement! Not good news politically…
illconsidered | October 3, 2007Arctic sea ice dropped to a record low in 2007, surpassing by a very striking margin (twenty four percent!) the previous record of two years ago.
Record Arctic Sea Ice Loss in 2007
Click here to view full image (69 kb)
Large images
Arctic, September 16, 2007 (1.3 MB JPG)
Graph of Arctic Sea Ice Decline (200 KB PDF)
This record is about the sea ice extent, or the area of ocean surface covered by ice, and does not even reflect the ice loss due to thinning of the ice pack. Factoring this thinning (up to 40% by some estimates) makes a dramatic observation even more foreboding.
While the…
dmunger | October 3, 2007Like many who follow the technology scene, I was excited about the prospect of a "$100 laptop" (now called the XO), one that could be used by kids in developing countries as a substitute for textbooks, school supplies, and perhaps even teachers.
If the software was all open-source, then the only cost would be a one-time purchase of the computer itself. A whole classroom could be equipped with all the educational supplies it needs for less than the cost of furniture. Now the computer is ready, but promises from nations to actually buy the machines have fallen through. Was the entire project a…
dmunger | October 2, 2007The name sounds so benign: what could be better than friendship? Why, friendship with benefits, of course!
But when a friendship moves from platonic to sexual, even if both partners claim they're not "romantic," doesn't the dynamic of that relationship necessarily change? It's a puzzle that's often discussed in locker rooms, chat rooms, and online forums, but according to the New York Times, hasn't been the subject of much formal study.
An article in the Times discusses one recent study on the subject, conducted by communications researchers Melissa Bisson and Timothy Levine:
[They] surveyed…