taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• great set of photos from Chernobyl : scary stuff. amazing how accurate some of the Pripyat sets in Call of Duty 4 were
  (tags: chernobyl urban-decay pripyat nuclear-power accidents tragedy photos images tourism decay)

• Quantum Crypto Broken : ‘The attack is brilliant in its elegance. They essentially jam the receiver. A bright pulse of laser light is sent and it blinds the receiver, which allows the eavesdropper, Eve, to decode the same photons that Alice and Bob are decoding, and thus get their key.’ doh
  (tags: quantum-crypto crypto security via:emergentchaos science physics papers)

• Bristol Traffic: entertainment and datamining : this is actually quite a nifty idea; extending a simple “crappy parking” complaint blog with datamining opportunities, by tagging with street names, districts, license plate numbers etc. and letting the blog engine (and Google) take care of the rest
  (tags: datamining data bristol parking blogging cars driving)

Tags: accidents, blogging, bristol, cars, chernobyl, crypto, data, datamining, decay, driving, images, nuclear-power, papers, parking, photos, physics, pripyat, quantum-crypto, science, security, tourism, tragedy, urban-decay, via:emergentchaos

ZSFA — I Want The Mutt Of Feed Readers Zed recommends Newsbeuter. must take a look

We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It. having worked on a project to do just this, believe me, this is doomed. DOOMED

Science Clouds ‘compute cycles in the cloud for scientific communities .. allows you to provision customized compute nodes .. that you have full control over using a leasing model based on the Amazon’s EC2 service.’ Wonder if they’d like to give SA some time ;)

Tags: appliances, apps, atom, cloud-computing, ec2, feeds, grids, hardware, linux, news, newsbeuter, oh-dear, open-source, rss, scaling, science, software, spamassassin, tablets, techcrunch, virtualization, web, zed-shaw

I just got this missive from the new Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin:

The SCIENCE GALLERY is seeking EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST for Festival of Light projects.

Calling all techno-artists, playful scientists, renegade engineers, architects, sculptors, lighting designers, fashion designers, guerilla projectionists and inventors…

The Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin is developing a two week FESTIVAL OF LIGHT as its launching programme in January 2008 which will celebrate the art, science and technology of light through a range of installations and events in the Science Gallery and around Dublin’s city centre.

We are seeking proposals for installations, events and workshops. You can download our Expression of Interest form here. We would like this to reach far and wide so please forward this onto anyone you think may be interested in submitting!

If you would like to discuss your ides with us or would like further information prior to submitting an Expression of Interest Submission please contact Elizabeth Allen at elizabeth.allen /at/ sciencegallery.org .

I’m looking forward to see what happens with this; hope it works out well.

Tags: art, dublin, galleries, ireland, science, tcd, trinity

Via Yoz comes this great article: Zoe Williams: Being pregnant and receiving unscientific advice go hand in hand. Here’s a sample:

Listeria has been my particular bugbear ever since a midwife – that is, a trained prenatal professional who, unless I develop complications, represents the highest medical authority I can expect to deal with throughout my pregnancy – told me that I could get listeriosis, thereby brain-damaging my foetus, without knowing about it. Now, listeriosis is an incredibly serious disease, with extremely serious symptoms, taken extremely seriously by epidemiologists nationwide. Get it without noticing it? If I got listeriosis, the national papers would know about it. It would be the third outbreak that has occurred in [the UK] in the past 20 years.

Here are some other things that are wantonly untrue: pasteurisation, in fact, has nothing to do with a cheese’s ability to harbour the listeria bacteria. The bacteria that characterise different cheeses are introduced after the pasteurisation process anyway. Listeria flourishes in moist environments, so parmesan is safe where camembert isn’t, but even rinded and soft cheeses are safe once they have been cooked. But food hygiene is a much more important factor than moisture – raw fish does not come out of the sea carrying listeria, but contracts the bacteria from contact with dirty hands. Of the past two outbreaks of listeria in Britain, one was from butter and the other from lettuce (there have been other instances of product recalls, but no human contamination).

In fact the three worst recorded cases of listeria since 1992 have all been in France, and were all from pork tongue in jelly, which nobody in their right mind would ever eat. Of the past 10 listeriosis outbreaks in America, only two were from cheese, and one of those was a Mexican homemade cheese. The notion that there are pregnant people out there whipping themselves into a frenzy of guilt because they have eaten some gorgonzola is just infuriating.

This patronising “pregnant women mustn’t do X” paranoia is C’s pet hate of the moment; being a (pregnant) scientist, she’s been checking them against Medline, looking into the extent of the real research these claims are based on, and generally writing them off one by one. I’ve been trying to persuade her to write a blog post about this for taint.org, so far with no luck though…

Tags: health, news, patronising, pregnancy, science, the-guardian

I’m off to Nice on vacation for two weeks, starting tomorrow — back on May 25th. See ya then!

In the meantime, and appropriately enough given that jet fuel I’ll be consuming, here’s some interesting stuff from my mate Eoin on carbon offsetting…

‘It’s a fecking minefield to figure out. There are many conflicting standards, some of which sound impressive but are useless in reality.

Steer clear of tree planting, especially outside Europe; even a well-run forestry in Europe will take decades to make any difference.

The best quality-mark appears to be the CDM Gold Standard. The Gold Standard is a recent introduction, a response to the weak, conflicting Kyoto standards and many ad hoc government ones. Gold Standard specifically excludes tree plantatations.

The following operators are the only ones I found that are Gold Standarded and also pass the bullshit smell test (which is far more stringent ;-) thanks to all who supplied links etc. — eoin

• My Climate – Seem good. run out of Switzerland. Professional vibe. Mainly projects in the developing world.
• Atmosfair – like the swiss one except smaller and German. Again, seems professional, their projects page in particular reads well. Doing a German schools project as well as developing world ones.
• Climate Friendly – Aussies. Mainly wind power, in Oz & NZ. Again seem good, have been around for a few years. Website is decent if a bit all over the place.
• Sustainable Travel International – more an eco-holidays travel agent than offsetting per se. Useful bookmark.
• Puretrust.org.uk – These guys seem good. Interesting business model. They buy high quality carbon credits, from mainly Gold Standard providers, and retire these credits. Permanent retirement, I think, though this wasn’t 100% clear on their site. So they both support the providers directly by doing business with them, and also jack up the market price by reducing supply. This supply choke isn’t something that the rest of them do, at first glance anyway. Clever idea. As the market price gets higher it will put pressure on companies to reduce their emissions, not just buy their way out of it.’

Now it’s worth noting that this is the state of play as of May 2007; it’ll definitely change pretty quickly as time goes on. Good info, though.

Tags: carbon, carbon-offsetting, ecology, green, markets, science, travel

BBC: Cocaine on ‘100% of Irish euros’:

One hundred percent of banknotes in the Republic of Ireland carry traces of cocaine, a new study has found.

Researchers used the latest forensic techniques that would detect even the tiniest fragments to study a batch of 45 used banknotes.

The scientists at Dublin’s City University said they were “surprised by their findings”.

Also at RTE, Irish Examiner, PhysOrg.com, Bloomberg.com, even at Kazakhstan’s KazInform.

This story is (of course) being played widely in the media as “OMG Ireland must use more coke than anywhere else” — in particular, in comparison with a previous study in the US:

The most recent survey carried out in the US showed 65% of dollar notes were contaminated with cocaine.

The DCU press-release has a few more details:

Using a technique involving chromatography/mass spectrometry, a sample of 45 bank notes were analysed to show the level of contamination by cocaine. …

62% of notes were contaminated with levels of cocaine at concentrations greater than 2 nanograms/note, with 5% of the notes showing levels greater than 100 times higher, indicating suspected direct use of the note in either drug dealing or drug inhalation. … The remainder of the notes which showed only ultra-trace quantities of cocaine was most probably the result of contact with other contaminated notes, which could have occurred within bank counting machines or from other contaminated surfaces.

However, looking at an abstract of what I think is the paper in question, Evaluation of monolithic and sub 2 µm particle packed columns for the rapid screening for illicit drugs — application to the determination of drug contamination on Irish euro banknotes, Jonathan Bones, Mirek Macka and Brett Paull, Analyst, 2007, DOI: 10.1039/b615669j, that says:

A study comparing recently available 100 × 3 mm id, 200 × 3 mm id monolithic reversed-phase columns with a 50 × 2.1 mm id, 1.8 µm particle packed reversed-phase columns was carried out to determine the most efficient approach … for the rapid screening of samples for 16 illicit drugs and associated metabolites. … Method performance data showed that the new LC-MS/MS method was significantly more sensitive than previous GC-MS/MS based methods for this application.

My emphasis. I’d guess that that means that comparing this result to banknote-analysis experiments carried out elsewhere using different methods is probably invalid — perhaps this method is more efficient at picking up ‘contact with other contaminated notes, which could have occurred within bank counting machines or from other contaminated surfaces’, as noted in the DCU release?

Tags: bad-journalism, banknotes, chemistry, cocaine, dcu, drugs, ireland, press, research, science

A great Guardian ‘Bad Science’ column by Ben Goldacre, Don’t dumb me down. An excellent article on how mainstream journalists fail miserably in their attempts to report science stories accurately, and how this fundamentally misrepresents science to society at large.

Being a geek (of the computing persuasion) who hangs out with other geeks (of various science persuasions), I would up discussing this problem myself a month or two ago. This paragraph sums up where I think the failure lies:

There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well - it’s a small middle-class world after all – and I know that until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon. Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff – people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given “science communication” chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

I’d throw in the extra step of a paper in Nature. Apart from that, in my opinion, he’s spot on.

Other disciplines don’t have this problem:

Because papers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them – that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word “biophoton” on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn’t about something being true or not true: that’s a humanities graduate parody. It’s about the error bar, statistical significance, it’s about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it’s about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.

Tags: guardian, news-media, newspapers, reporting, science

Science: in April and May, the New Yorker printed an amazing series of articles on climate change by Elizabeth Kolbert, full of outstanding research and interviews with the key players.

Unlike much coverage, it includes the expected results of climate change in the US:

Different climate models offer very different predictions about future water availability; in the paper, Rind applied the criteria used in the Palmer index to GISS’s model and also to a model operated by NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He found that as carbon-dioxide levels rose the world began to experience more and more serious water shortages, starting near the equator and then spreading toward the poles. When he applied the index to the giss model for doubled CO2, it showed most of the continental United States to be suffering under severe drought conditions. When he applied the index to the G.F.D.L. model, the results were even more dire. Rind created two maps to illustrate these findings. Yellow represented a forty-to-sixty-per-cent chance of summertime drought, ochre a sixty-to-eighty-per-cent chance, and brown an eighty-to-a-hundred-per-cent chance. In the first map, showing the GISS results, the Northeast was yellow, the Midwest was ochre, and the Rocky Mountain states and California were brown. In the second, showing the G.F.D.L. results, brown covered practically the entire country.

‘I gave a talk based on these drought indices out in California to water-resource managers,’ Rind told me. ‘And they said, ‘Well, if that happens, forget it.’ There’s just no way they could deal with that.’

He went on, ‘Obviously, if you get drought indices like these, there’s no adaptation that’s possible. But let’s say it’s not that severe. What adaptation are we talking about? Adaptation in 2020? Adaptation in 2040? Adaptation in 2060? Because the way the models project this, as global warming gets going, once you’ve adapted to one decade you’re going to have to change everything the next decade.

And how the anti-climate-change side are attempting to control US public opinion:

The pollster Frank Luntz prepared a strategy memo for Republican members of Congress, coaching them on how to deal with a variety of environmental issues. (Luntz, who first made a name for himself by helping to craft Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America,’ has been described as ‘a political consultant viewed by Republicans as King Arthur viewed Merlin.’) Under the heading ‘Winning the Global Warming Debate,’ Luntz wrote, ‘The scientific debate is closing (against us) but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.’ He warned, ‘Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming in the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.’

They’re a great synthesis. Go read the articles — part 1 (’Disappearing islands, thawing permafrost, melting polar ice. How the earth is changing’), part 2 (’The curse of Akkad’), and part 3 (’What can be done?’). They’re long, but if you’re still on the fence about this one, they’ll wake you up.

Tags: adaptation, chance, change, climate, drought, giss, index, model, rind, science, water

Science: in passing — this came up elsewhere, and it’s worth copying here, too (for reference).

The question was: how much should publicly-funded researchers be required to disclose – should they be allowed to generate ‘closed-source’ solutions at the taxpayers’ expense?

In the US and world-wide, there used to be a tradition that government-funded research should be made open to all, since if it was funded from public taxation, the fruits of that taxation should go back to the public. However, 25 years ago, the US enacted the Bayh-Dole Act, in which:

• Universities were encouraged to collaborate commercial concerns to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federal funding.
• It was clearly stated that universities may elect to retain title to inventions developed through government funding.
• Universities must file patents on inventions they elect to own.

So in other words, the government has dictated since 1980 that government-funded research should not produce open-source or public-domain solutions, necessarily, as the results of research are to be considered private-sector profit-generating centers for the host universities. Naturally, cash-strapped universities have imposed internal regulations to maximise revenue from their research staff.

The implications for whatever ‘the next BSD TCP/IP stack’ may be are obvious.

Tags: copying, expense, funding, government, public, question, reference, research, science, taxation, tradition

Ireland: Worth watching for european software-patent watchers, Forfás, Ireland’s ‘national policy advisory board on enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation’ are running a series of monthly seminars on ‘Intellectual Property’ in association with Licensing Executives Society Britain and Ireland.

This one looks quite interesting — 10 June: ‘Patenting Software – The Current State of Play’, Author Barry Moore, of Hanna Moore & Curley, patent attorneys.

Interested parties can attend with pre-registration, or wait to download the mp3 at Forfás’ website, apparently, along with the rest of the lecture series. (No sign what the license is on those files, though ;)

Tags: board, enterprise, european, forfs, ireland, policy, science, series, technology, trade, worth

Meta: Back. Not even ‘mini-tornados’ at Dublin Airport can keep me away — although it gave it a damn good try, with a 3 hour delay, a missed connection, and an overnight stay in Chicago. Arggh.

Mail: I generally leave the laptop at home when on vacation, to do some proper winding down. Not sure it was a great idea this time, since I was joe-jobbed by some pretty extensive spam runs recently, resulting in over 30,000 bounces sitting unread in my email when I got back.

Thankfully, Tim Jackson’s bogus-virus-warnings.cf SpamAssassin ruleset (with a few updates) got most of them, with only a few hundred getting past. I should really hack on making those more complete, but some of the bounces are really obscure; along the lines of ‘Hi from J Random Luser, Esq.! I no longer use this address because it gets too much spam! Please send to this new one instead: jrluser98@example.com!’, generally without any obvious identifying headers that indicate it’s an autoresponse.

Sigh — each of those messages is just utterly random, and I can’t see much recourse but to come up with some nasty phrase-based content filtering rules, which I was hoping to avoid. But 29,500 hits isn’t bad ;)

I’m not sure they’d be suitable yet for use as default SpamAssassin rules, since they now generally just match any kind of bounce message, not specifically joe-job or virus-forgery blowback. But that suits me just fine — I can live without bounces, as long as I don’t have to suffer the bounce blow-back.

Science: Good news from New Scientist — they’re opening up their archives! NS has consistently the best science journalism around, and I’ve been a subscriber for years. But until recently, they had a lousy approach to their website — most of the useful stuff, like the archives, were walled-off, subscriber-only features; a classic case of missing the Clue Train. Well, here’s an archive search for ’spam’ — pretty impressive, and most of the short articles are available in full, with only the full text for features and opinion pieces requiring a login.

In addition, they’ve added a massive batch of RSS feeds. Sadly, no full article text excerpts, however. But still — getting the clue, eventually — this way they may actually get links on the web, in place of the mangled and chinese-whispered versions of their articles republished in the UK newspapers…

Ireland: Due to monopolistic pricing of Irish GIS data, consumer GPS maps of Ireland’s road system are appalling, and this page collects a few great demos — for example, MS Autoroute quintuples the distance from Galway to Roundstone! That’s a major tourist route, BTW. I knew it was bad, but not that bad…

Anyway, I’m still waaay behind, but slowly catching up.

Tags: airport, bounce, delay, dublin, hour, meta, science, spam, spamassassin, try, use

Antarctica: I’m obsessed with the wierd collision of out-of-control bureaucracy, strategic-interests-disguised-as-science, and normal life in a way off-normal place, that is the US Antarctic program. It’s fundamentally a microcosm of what future space exploration bases will be like — lots of high-faluting science talk, quite a bit of ‘making sure we have a strategic foothold’ reality, and people getting on with life in one of the most amazing places they can.

Via MeFi, Sandwichgirl.com is a great journal site describing her life way down under — full of great little tidbits like describing Antarctica as ‘the island’, ie. ‘we are all taking bets to see how long it will be before he’s kicked off the island’.

It’s great, although thoroughly overloaded from all the attention right now.

File alongside Big Dead Place and The Symmes Antarctic Intelligencer — highlight:

‘Once you shelter one magic elf, you gotta shelter ‘em all’, says NSF Representative Jack Hjorth. ‘I’ve seen it before. Pretty soon all science comes to a standstill and you’re runnin’ a magic elf halfway house.’

Tags: antarctica, bureaucracy, collision, elf, island, life, place, science, shelter, way, wierd

eVoting: Are you an academic, or do you know any academics, working in the field of computer science in Ireland? If so, you should consider signing, or collecting signatures, on
this ICTE statement. It’s eminently reasonable — ’since computers are inherently subject to programming and design error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering, we join with (the ACM) in recommending that a voter-verified audit trail be one of the essential requirements for deployment of new voting systems.’ (thx for the pointer, Simon!)

Tags: academic, computer, design, equipment, error, evoting, field, icte, programming, science, statement

Spam: Gary Schrock on the SpamAssassin-talk notes:

… that study that’s being talked about in an email doesn’t exist. There’s something in the Trends in Cognitive Science journal about it, that discusses why that email is actually as readable as it is. I’d try to pass on the knowledge, but while I may work in a lab that does psycholinguistics, that doesn’t mean I understand it enough to pass it on. But the short story is there’s no such research at Cambridge.

(The irony here is that this was being talked about in the lab where I work earlier today, and when I mentioned this email someone in the lab was able to hand me to article from Trends. Unfortunately the journal is only available online with subscription.)

Tags: cognitive, email, journal, knowledge, lab, science, something, spam, spamassassin-talk, study, trends

Science: I’m the human genome, says ‘Darth Venter’ of genetics (Observer).

Craig Venter, the controversial geneticist who led private industry’s decoding of the human genome, has revealed a startling secret. The genome – unravelled two years ago – is his.

To the surprise of scientists, Venter has admitted that much of the DNA used by his company, Celera Genomics, as part of this decoding effort came from his cells. The news has annoyed his colleagues, who claim that Venter subverted the careful, anonymous selection process they had established for their DNA donors.

I missed this story when it came out, but it’s a biggie. Instead of mapping the genome of a scientifically-chosen representative, we have the genome of an egomaniac CEO, who spent the entire project self-aggrandizing and attention-seeking.

Just as well the publicly-funded, international Human Genome Project was around to keep them honest for the most part…

Some more choice quotes:

‘It doesn’t surprise me. It sounds like Craig,’ said Nobel laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

As to his reasons for his actions, Venter was unequivocal. ‘How could one not want to know about one’s own genome?’ he said. Neither was he fazed about accusations of egocentricity. ‘I’ve been accused of that so many times, I’ve got over it,’ he said.

Celera’s science board was not so understanding. ‘Any genome intended to be a landmark should be kept anonymous. It should be a map of all of us, not of one, and I am disappointed if it is linked to a person,’ said board member Arthur Caplan.

He added that the drive to sequence the human genome was an opportunity for personal glory as well as scientific discovery. Venter’s action emphasised the first motive.

Tags: board, celera, darth, dna, geneticist, genome, industry, observer, part, project, science

Science: A lab rat writes up a report on his participation in two psychology studies on ‘Video Game Violence’ and ‘Violence In the Media.’

Sadly, it seems clear that the video-game violence study will return biased results due to flawed test conditions.

Of the three games played, the most violent — a first-person shooter – was modified, either through incompetence or deliberate tweaking, to use frustrating control settings and a high level of difficulty; whereas the least violent — a sim game — was set up with all the defaults and automatic help enabled.

In my experience, frustration, in any task, has a direct correlation with anger levels. So a frustrating game, violent or not, will probably give more aggressive responses in a violence measurement — hence the FPS game above will almost definitely be cited as ‘inciting violent emotions’.

Bad scientists! No doctorate!

PS: hmm, I wonder if the paper will document the exact configuration
of the games?

Linux: Happy birthday, KDE! I love it. Most recent discovery: the excellent support for printing in KDE 3.1 using the kprinter GUI.

Tags: game, kde, lab, media, participation, psychology, rat, report, science, video, violence

Science: EU broadside at GM firms’ ‘lies’ (Ananova):

‘They tried to lie to people, they tried to force it upon people … it is the wrong approach and we simply have not accepted that and European citizens have not accepted it. You simply cannot force it upon Europe.

‘So I hope they have definitely learned a lesson from it and especially when they now try to argue that this will try to solve the problems of starvation in the world. After all, why didn’t they start with such products, so they could prove to the world that this was exactly what they were interested in doing?

‘It will solve starvation among shareholders, but not the developing world unfortunately.

That’s the EU Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, launching a broadside against ‘US biotech companies’, accusing them of ‘forcing’ unsuitable GM technology onto Europe.

Ouch.

It’s interesting to note that much of their biotech companies’ tactics seem to work well in the US, but overseas, the tactics play out predominantly as blatant strong-arming, astroturfing support, and being ‘economical with the truth’, as the phrase goes.

Some rethinking of their strategy might be helpful — although really, IMO, some thought as to how to make their products relevant to consumers, instead of money-spinning for their shareholders, might work best of all. Making some moves towards the much-vaunted ’solving starvation in the developing world’ might just be the best way to that.

Tags: ananova, approach, broadside, cannot, commissioner, environment, force, lesson, science, starvation, world

Science: Fantastic article in New Scientist volume 180 (4 Oct 2003), covering how science is beginning to identify the keys to a happy life, and perform studies measuring people’s happiness.

That’s a subscribers-only link unfortunately, but I’ll excerpt a few choice snippets:

First off, money:

Can money buy happiness? The short answer is, yes – but it doesn’t buy you very much. And once you can afford to feed, clothe and house yourself, each extra dollar makes less and less difference. … In the past half-century, average income has skyrocketed in industrialised countries, yet happiness levels have remained static (see Graph). It seems absolute income doesn’t make much difference once you have enough to meet your basic needs. Instead, the key seems to be whether you have more than your friends, neighbours and colleagues.

Looks:

First the bad news: good-looking people really are happier. When Diener got people to rate their own looks, both with and without make-up, there was a ’small but positive effect of physical attractiveness on subjective well-being’.

But don’t compare your looks with what the media puts out:

In a new study, Laurie Mintz and her colleagues from the University of Missouri-Columbia found that women who saw advertisements featuring lithe and flawless young models for just one to three minutes rated their own bodies more negatively and showed an increase in depression. Mintz was alarmed how quickly the women’s self-esteem was undermined. And she believes people are becoming more dissatisfied as new technology allows the media to create ever more unrealistic images.

Mintz recommends less drastic steps to contentment: avoid unrealistic media images; understand that such pictures are airbrushed and ‘Photoshopped’ to perfection; appreciate your body for what it does rather than how it looks.

Friends:

It is hard to imagine a more pitiful existence than life on the streets of Calcutta or in one of its slums, or making a living there as a prostitute. Yet despite the poverty and squalor they face, such people are much happier than you might imagine. ‘We think social relationships are partly responsible,’ says Diener.

And a global comparison:

The latest global analysis of how levels of satisfaction and happiness vary from country to country shows that the most ’satisfied’ people tend to live in Latin America, Western Europe and North America. Eastern Europeans are the least satisfied.

… There is plenty more about national happiness levels that has researchers scratching their heads. One of the most significant observations is that in industrialised nations, average happiness has remained virtually static since the second world war, despite a considerable rise in average income (see Graphic). The exception is Denmark, where people have become more satisfied with life over the past 30 years – no one is quite sure why.

and the effects of consumerism:

A growing number of researchers are putting the static trend down to consumerism. Survey after survey has shown that the desire for material goods, which has increased hand in hand with average income, is a ‘happiness suppressant’.

One study, by Tim Kasser at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, found that young adults who focus on money, image and fame tend to be more depressed, have less enthusiasm for life and suffer more physical symptoms such as headaches and sore throats than others (The High Price of Materialism, MIT Press, 2002). Kasser believes that people tend to embrace material values when they are feeling insecure (retail therapy, anyone?). ‘Advertisements have become more sophisticated,’ says Kasser. ‘They try to tie their message to people’s psychological needs. But it is a false link. It is toxic.’

Lots of good bits. Pity it’s subscribers-only!

Tags: article, difference, fantastic, happiness, income, life, money, new, science, scientist, volume

The Dublin Flash Mob. All went off very well, from the sounds of it. However, this picture contains some wierdness — who the hell is that guy, second from the left, who’s stolen my haircut circa 2 years ago?! Those are my sideburns, give ‘em back!

(ObSoCalJoke: they tried to organise a flash mob in southern CA, but couldn’t find anywhere with a big enough parking lot for all those single-occupant SUVs. Ba-dum-tish!)

Telecoms: The Communications Workers of America union have released some figures on Verizon’s profit margins etc. Interesting to note some figures — like they charge 4 dollars for call waiting, a service which costs them 0.82 of a cent to provide — that works out at a 48,680% profit margin, which must be nice. In addition, Verizon use ’splitters’, which result in a copper pair being unusable for DSL — just like Eircom do in rural Ireland. Interesting to note that, even after deregulation, LLU and general introduction of competition, the same problems still arise.

Science: BBC: Scientific research put under spotlight. Terrible article from the Beeb, who should know better.

Basically the article pins some of the blame for recent absurd claims of scientific breakthroughs, like the Raelian’s claims they cloned a human, on the peer review process.

What they’re missing is that, in most cases of these absurd claims, the research had not been peer reviewed — instead a press release was put out in advance. Peer review remains the most effective way to demolish bad science. However, the news media shows no sign of being willing to sit around and wait for other scientists to analyse the latest claims, before publishing them.

Spam: Salon: Meet The Spam Nazi. More on the bizarre story of the Jewish leader of a Nazi party, who now peddles ‘make penis fast’ pills.

Politics: Ian ‘Freenet’ Clarke says he’s leaving the US.

Linux: I’ve given up on blogging the SCO-v-everyone thing, it’s getting too absurd. GrokLaw is covering it much better than I could anyway. Plus: You say po-TAY-to, I say po-TAH-to.

Movies: I concur with Waider — Pirates of the Caribbean is great. Best summer blockbuster in years; Hollywood can still pull off a good big movie now and again (by using young directors it seems). Buckle those swashes! Aarrr!

Tags: article, flash, mob, peer, profit, research, review, science, spam, verizon

Wired – A Prayer Before Dying: “the astonishing story of a doctor who subjected faith to the rigors of science – and then became a test subject herself”, by Po Bronson:

In July 1995, back when AIDS was still a death sentence, psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ and her co-researchers enrolled 20 patients with advanced AIDS in a randomized, double-blind pilot study at the UC San Francisco Medical Center. All patients received standard care, but psychic healers prayed for the 10 in the treatment group. The healers lived an average of 1,500 miles away from the patients. None of the patients knew which group they had been randomly assigned to, and thus whether they were being prayed for. During the six-month study, four of the patients died

• a typical mortality rate. When the data was unblinded, the researchers learned that the four who had died were in the control group. All 10 who were prayed for were still alive.

But read on — it’s not as simple as all that…

Tags: aids, doctor, dying, faith, group, prayer, science, story, study, wired