2012 | proper manky

August 31, 2012 by proper manky

August 2012 Oddments

Sundry items of interest dredged up from the profundity of the interwebs during the month of August:

[July 2012 Oddments]

Economics

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the global trade in coffee and tea. Among commodities, the $80+ billion international coffee market is sometimes said to trail only that of oil. Coffee is an essential source of revenue for many countries, with Burundi making more than half of its export earnings from the crop. Coffee is a strictly tropical crop that is consumed largely in the temperate belt, which is one reason why it figures so prominently in international trade statistics. Most exporting countries are relatively poor whereas the main importers are relatively wealthy. [link]
How do Americans spend their money? And how do budgets change across the income spectrum? Poor, middle class and rich families spend similar shares of their budgets on clothing and shoes, and on food outside the home. But poor families spend a much larger share of their budget on basic necessities such as food at home, utilities and health care. Rich families are able to devote a much bigger chunk of their spending to education, and a much, much bigger share to saving for retirement. [link]

Science and Technology

For the 2012 Olympic Games, Speedo has created a “racing system” called Fastskin 3 that combines suit and goggles and cap working in synergy to reduce drag and improve performance. The company called on experts in kinesiology, biomechanics, fluid dynamics and even a sports psychologist, who suggested a blue-gray tinge on goggle lenses to instill a sense of calm and focus. They tried the “Six Thinking Hats” method of brainstorming, a green hat for creative ways to attack a problem, a black one to look at the feasibility of those ideas. They “reverse brainstormed,” picturing how to make a swimmer go as slow as possible with oversized goggles and a suit compressing the body so parts stuck out, creating drag. [link]
Extensive research in a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started. In field after field, when it came to centrally important skills—stockbrokers recommending stocks, parole officers predicting recidivism, college admissions officials judging applicants—people with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with very little experience. (From a comment: “Some people have 3 years experience 10 times.”) [link]
‘Agnotology’, the art of spreading doubt (as pioneered by Big Tobacco), distorts the scepticism of research to obscure the truth. Areas of academic life have been tainted by the practice, but some scholars are fighting back by showing the public how to spot such sleight of hand. [link]
Modern Indo-European languages – which include English – originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago. Researchers used methods developed to study virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose. Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages – the more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree. The trees could also predict when and where the ancestral language originated confirming the Anatolian origin. [link]
The behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived. This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly. It turns out that harvester ants behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Researchers found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability. A forager won’t return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off. [link]
Satellites tracking the extent of the sea ice found that it covered about 1.58 million square miles, or less than 30 percent of the Arctic Ocean’s surface. That is only slightly below the previous record low, set in 2007, but with weeks still to go in the summer melting season, it is clear that the record will be beaten by a wide margin. Parts of the Arctic have become like a giant Slushee this time of year. The amount of sea ice in the summer has declined more than 40 percent since satellite tracking began in the late 1970s, a trend that most scientists believe is primarily a consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases. A time will come when the Arctic will be completely free of ice in the summer, perhaps by the middle of the century. By itself, the melting of sea ice does not raise global sea levels, because the floating ice is already displacing its weight in seawater. But the sharp warming that is causing the sea ice to melt also threatens land ice, notably the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting at an increasing rate. Melting land ice does raise sea levels. [link]
In one of the Mars rover’s first images of Mount Sharp, scientists have spotted what is called an “unconformity.” The term refers to an evidently missing piece in the geological record, where one layer of sediment does not geologically neatly line up with that above it. Images from orbit had indicated that the lower foothills of Mount Sharp consisted of flat-lying sediments rich in “hydrated” minerals, formed in the presence of water, but that layers above seemed to lack the minerals. Now, the rover’s Mastcam – which provided the new colour panorama image – has taken a picture of the divide, showing sediments apparently deposited at a markedly different angle from those below them. Similar deposits on Earth can arise due to tectonic or volcanic activity. [link]
Google reflects what is, over all, a male-driven engineering culture. Mr. Page values product people like himself over business people, they say, and at Google, as at many technology companies, product engineers tend to be men. The number of women working in professional computing jobs dropped 8 percent, to 25 percent of the total, between 2000 and 2011 while the number of men climbed 16 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. [link]

Health

Pot-smoking teens may become slower-thinking adults. I am not sure I quite understand the previous sentence but perhaps I’m no longer that quick on the uptake. [link]

Sport

Fandom is fundamentally a spiritual arrangement. It is a form of surrender, an agreement to live in a state of powerlessness. The only thing we control as fans is the object and ardor of our devotion. And this unilateral covenant, however absurd, constitutes a vital expression of who we really are. This is why each new indignity hurts so much, yet fortifies our bond. And this experience forms the unconscious bedrock of our identification. Those who disavow their chosen team because of losses disavow themselves. To those who don’t live by the code, this devotion seems deranged. And maybe it is. But lurking within the weeds of extreme fandom is the perpetual seed of hope. [link]

Education

Africa is today the fastest growing and second largest mobile phone market in the world. Mobiles are now streamlining education administration and improving communication between schools, teachers and parents. For example, Yoza Cellphone Stories offers downloads of stories and ‘m-novels’. Since 2010, the non-profit organization Worldreader has provided school children in a number of developing countries with access to digital books through donated Kindle e-readers. Recently, it has begun to publish the books via a mobile phone-based e-reader. Dr Maths on MXit, Africa’s largest homegrown mobile social network, has helped 30,000 school-aged children work through maths problems by connecting them with maths tutors for live chat sessions. UNESCO predicts that there will be a shift away from teaching in a classroom-centred paradigm of education to an increased focus on contextual learning, which happens informally throughout the day. There will also be an increased blurring of the boundaries between learning, working and living. Mobiles already support skills development in a range of fields including agriculture and healthcare, and provide paying job opportunities for mobile-based ‘microwork’. [link]

Republican Convention

Now that you have thrown everything and the kitchen sink at President Obama and it still hasn’t worked you are panicking. Obama’s approval ratings are still near 50% despite your best efforts to undermine the economy and America’s recovery at every step you can. You tried to hold the American economy hostage to force America into default on its’ debts, debts that YOU rang up under Bush, so you could blame it on Obama and it failed. You’ve used the filibuster more than any other Congress ever, going so far as to vote against providing health care access to 9/11 first responders. You remember 9/11, don’t you, it’s that thing you used to lie us into a war in Iraq, and then when Obama killed Bin Laden and ended the war in Iraq you told people that he hates America and wants the troops to fail. You monsters. You hate Obama with a passion, despite the fact that he is a tax cutting, deficit reducing war President who undermines civil rights and delivers corporate friendly watered down reforms that benefit special interests just like a Republican. You call him a Kenyan. You call him a socialist. [link]
The Romney-Ryan speeches were a bizarre exercise in tightroping and hair-splitting. Ryan’s speech weirdly went after the Democrats for a plan to cut Medicare that he himself had rejected for not cutting enough – and then in the same speech went after the Obama vision of society that is a “dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.” Just a lame pair of speeches, overall. They made me miss George Bush. At least the Bush/Cheney/Rove era offered a clear ideological choice – and some pretty passionate, ingeniously-delivered political theater, comparatively. Where’s the blood and guts, the bomb-‘em-till-they’re-crispy war calls? Where are the screw-the-poor tirades, the “you can pry it from my cold dead hand” guns-and-liberty crescendos? [link]
Best photo after Clint Eastwood’s rambling “speech”: [link]
The most likely outcome of the next election in the US is stalemate. Barak Obama will win reelection and the Republicans will hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives. The House Republicans refusing to budge from their collective commitment to reactionary opposition, highlights the flaws of the American system. The constitutional provisions establishing competing authorities in the US, lauded in every high school civics class as “checks and balances”, assures that the US can only be governed if the different branches of government cooperate. Can American politics be fixed? Two reforms inspired by practices in Europe can make a huge difference. One, the reign of money can be significantly reduced if television time were free to all candidates and paid political advertising were made illegal. Two, America’s state legislatures currently define the borders of electoral districts. If districts were designed, as in Britain, by independent boundary commissions rather than by partisan legislatures, the tendency toward polarization might be significantly reduced. But what is the likelihood of such reforms occurring? Sadly, things look bleak for those who prefer democracy and a more perfect Union. The probable outlook for US politics is continued paralysis and possible catastrophe. And most likely, both. [link]

Miscellaneous

Frequent Airline questions. Windows on planes don’t block UVA rays and the dose of UVA at 20,000 feet is a lot bigger dose than one would get on the surface of the Earth. Plane cabin humidity level is generally at 10 to 20 percent, which is lower than the typical indoor humidity level of 30 to 65 percent — so passengers are more likely to become dehydrated. Consuming alcohol in the cabin can further increase dehydration. Alcohol also decreases the ability of the brain to make use of oxygen — an effect that can be magnified by altitude. The Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report includes a “mishandled baggage rate, which combines lost, delayed, damaged and stolen bags. In May, there were 2.77 reports per 1,000 passengers. One reason there’s not Wi-Fi on every flight is that for each model of aircraft that a Wi-Fi system is to be used on, the manufacturer must get F.A.A. certification for the system, and the airline must get F.A.A. operational approval. [link]
Why do Bedouins wear black in the desert? Because black cools the same way as any other color robe (and perhaps because black doesn’t show dirt.) [link]
Researchers apparently have demonstrated that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random, or in one improvement on random promotion, randomly chose the people who will make the promotion decisions. [link]
The type of reasoning Sherlock Holmes uses is of a conjectural kind – sometimes called abductive reasoning – that can’t offer certainty or any precise assessment of probability, only the best available account of events. He does this in many of his cases, but it’s not applying this rule that accounts for his astonishing feats. If Holmes can identify an unlikely pattern in events, it’s by using what Watson describes as his “extraordinary genius for minutiae”. As Holmes tells Inspector Lestrade, the plodding Scotland Yard officer: “You know my method. It is founded on the observation of trifles.” [link]
A company owned by Ikea is planning a whole new suburb in London’s Stand East. Ikea is already selling pre-fab houses in Sweden and is apparently also getting into the discount/boutique hotel business. [link]
This article contains a critique of Facebook’s goal to make every user “totally transparent” by encouraging users to chronicle their entire life on FB, and the increasing monetization of user data which forcing uses to constantly “defend themselves against FB.” The article speculates that it is becoming increasingly harder for users to manage their FB personality and will eventually end up using it only for managing their contacts. [link]

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July 2012 Oddments

Sundry items of interest dredged up from the profundity of the interwebs during the month of July:

Economics

Mexico is the world’s largest per capita consumer (127 gallons per year) of bottled water. [link]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that “employment services,” which includes temporary labor, will remain among the fastest growing sectors through 2020. In 1989 only 1 in 43 manufacturing jobs were temporary. By 2006, 1 in 11 were. [link]
College-educated Americans are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women are growing less likely to marry at all. Unmarried mothers are now the majority of new moms under 30 and they don’t vote much. [link]
Families paid for college on average $20,902 in 2011-2012, which is down from $24,097 in 2009-2010. Parents are paying less and grants and scholarships are covering less, but student loans and work are on the rise. The most common cost-saving measures include living at home or adding a roommate, reducing spending by parents and students, students working more hours and families shifting from four-year public schools to less expensive two-year public schools. [link]
A Stanford computer scientist has predicted that within 50 years there will be only 10 universities remaining in the world. That’s probably exaggerated, but clearly the pressure is on. [link]
In the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago. In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion. [link]
Contrary to its grimy image, Detroit is playing host to a renaissance in urban agriculture with more than 1500 farms within the city limits ranging from vacant lots to a seven-acre spread on the West Side planted by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. [link]
The history of economics can be viewed rather like the regular sequence in the Peanuts cartoon strip, whereby Lucy snatches the football away every time that Charlie Brown tries to kick it. Just when economists have reached a consensus, events in the real world proved them wrong. [link]

Society

It says something about America today that emergency personnel now pride themselves in coping with mass shootings. [link]
The Brady Campaign’s list of mass shootings in America since just 2005 is 62 pages long. A disclaimer states that the list “is not comprehensive.” [link]
In the US, not surprisingly, the South is more violent than the rest of the country, by some distance. All of the U.S. regions have higher average rates of death from assault than any of 24 OECD countries. The Northeast, the least violent region in the US, still comes relatively close to the upper end of the most violent countries in the OECD group. Depressingly, Blacks die from assault at more than three times the U.S. average, and between ten and twenty times OECD rates. [link]
For the first time, women from all 204 national Olympic committees will be competing in the Summer Olympics. Saudi Arabia, Brunei and Qatar had been the final holdouts. The 529-member American delegation featured more women, 268, than men, 261. Roughly 45 percent of the 10,500 athletes taking part in the London Games will be female. All 26 sports on the Olympic program will feature female competitors. Boxing will feature female competitors in three weight classes. [link]
According to United Nations projections, the world’s population — now 7 billion — will rise to 9.3 billion by 2050 — the equivalent of adding another India and China to the world. This an optimistic scenario assumes the worldwide average birthrate, now 2.5 children per woman, will decline to 2.1. About 80% of the world’s civil conflicts since the 1970s have occurred in countries with young, fast-growing populations, known as youth bulges. Of the 2 billion or more people who will be added to the planet by 2050, 97% are expected to be born in Africa, Asia and Latin America, led by the poorest, most volatile countries. [link]
Finnish facts: Finland is now the last eurozone country to hold a triple-A credit rating. Finns drink nearly 12kg of roasted coffee ground per person per year. Finland actually has 187,888 lakes, that’s roughly one lake for every 26 people. [link]

Health

A report in the journal of the German Medical Association suggests that the side effects of some drugs, and the discomfort of certain medical procedures, may be inadvertently intensified by doctors and nurses trying to keep patients fully informed about the possible complications of a proposed treatment. The culprit behind this phenomenon is the so-called nocebo effect, a patient’s pessimistic belief and expectation that a drug will produce negative consequences. [link]
A small group of patients with HIV in France have been able to stop taking Aids drugs without any resurgence of the virus in their bodies. They were all given antiretroviral drugs to control the virus soon after becoming infected with HIV, but then stopped after about three years. The existence of people who do not become ill even though they are infected with HIV – the so-called “HIV controllers” – is already known. However, what is encouraging with the French group is that medical intervention seems to have brought about similar results. [link]
A review of studies covering over two million people found that, compared to regular daytime workers, shift workers had a 24% higher risk for coronary events, a 23% higher risk for heart attack, and a 5% higher risk for stroke. Night shift workers had the highest risk for coronary events (41%). [link]
Worldwide, there are about 6,000 mammal species, each with its own unique milk, but Americans get at least 97 percent of all their dairy products from cows (the rest is mostly from goats and sheep). Abroad, various foreigners drink the milk of the camel, the yak, the water buffalo, the reindeer, the elk, and a few other animals. Camel’s milk contains insulin and can improve quality of life for diabetics. [link]

Nature & Environment

The guillemot, a black and white bird of the northern seas, is apparently monogamous but regularly unfaithful. [link]
The extinction rate of species today is alarmingly high with some 30 % of amphibians, 21 % of birds and 25 % of mammal species at risk. The fight against desertification is also being lost, with the percentage of degraded land area rising from 15 % in 1991 to 24 % in 2008. [link]
Scientists have bioengineered the world’s first artificial jellyfish made from heart cells of rats and silicone, with the heart cells giving it pumping action and the silicone an elastic structure that enabled motion. Scientists then covered the membrane with a protein arranged in the same pattern as a jellyfish’s muscle assembly. An electric zap brought the jellyfish alive. By better understanding muscular pumps, scientists hope that this “silicone cyborg” may one day lead to new therapeutic devices, such as pacemakers, made from organic substances. [link] [video]
To many people “vanilla” is synonymous with “plain” or “boring”, but real vanilla, which comes from orchids of the genus Vanilla that are native to Southeast Mexico and Guatemala, is the second most expensive spice after saffron. Not surprisingly, by one estimate, 97% of the vanilla used today is artificial, usually derived from wood fibers. With the discovery of hand pollination, vanilla cultivation spread beyond its native soils, with Indonesia and Madagascar now accounting for over 50% of global production. [link]
The surface of Greenland’s massive ice sheet has seen unprecedented melting this month that took place over a larger area than has been detected in three decades of satellite observation. Melting even occurred at Greenland’s coldest and highest place, Summit station. The thawed ice area jumped from 40% of the ice sheet to 97% in just four days from 8 July. [link]
An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan recently broke away from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland. It’s not clear that this “calving event” is a consequence of the increased atmospheric warming that’s been taking place over Greenland in recent decades, but it’s certainly more likely to take place as a consequence of that warming. The Petermann glacier’s margins have now retreated to a point not seen in the last 150 years. [link]
The arctic wilderness is facing pollution threats as oil and gas companies are moving in while the ice is melting far faster than predicted. Global temperatures have risen 0.7C since 1951. In Greenland, the average temperature has gone up by 1.5C. Its ice cap is losing an estimated 200bn tonnes a year as a result and global powers are beginning to look to the region also for minerals, fish, sea routes and tourist potential. The consequences for the planet will be grim. Without the white brilliance of the ice to reflect sunlight back into space, it will warm even more. [link]
Shark mating behavior is so violent that it often leaves a female with her skin raw or bleeding. Female nurse sharks will stay in shallow water with their reproductive openings pressed firmly to the sea floor. Otherwise they risk falling prey to roaming bands of males who will take turns inserting their claspers into her. A litter of fifty pups will have anything from two to seven fathers. A number of shark species even practice oophagy, or uterine cannibalism. Sand tiger fetuses eat each other in uteri. A female sand tiger gives birth to a baby that’s already a meter long and an experienced killer. Speaking of killing, there were 75 verified shark attacks (or encounters, as marine biologists prefer) world-wide last year, and 12 fatalities. Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year. [link]
As I already suspected, careless laziness is a way to help a family prosper. [link]

Language

Language extinction is happening faster than species extinction (1 per 14 days). Over half of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken on the planet may disappear by the end of the century. Eighty percent of the endangered languages are African. Eighty percent of the world’s population now speak just 1.1% of its languages. [link]
German word of the month: Vermorgung. Lit. ‘morningization’, aka procrastination. [link]

Odds and Ends

Ernest Hemingway’s first cat, Snowball, was given to him by a ship’s captain and was six-toed. His former home in Key West, Florida, currently houses nearly a hundred descendants of Snowball, about half of whom are polydactyl — an inadvertent lab for inbred genetic mutation. [link] Also: [link]
Tango originated in the working class districts of Buenos Aires in the late 19th Century, but it has also conquered Finland. A five-day festival has been going for nearly 30 years and attracts over 100,000 tango-mad Finns. The Finnish version is slower and simpler – melodies taken from old Finnish and Russian waltzes are weaved throughout. The accordion replaces the Argentine bandoneon. The dance is also different. No fancy flicks of the legs from the women but the Finns dance closer, bodies pressed firmly together. [link]
Parsley loves garlic, and their marriage rarely fails to be a happy one. Very finely chopped parsley combined with very finely chopped raw garlic is known in French cuisine as persillade. Add some finely grated lemon zest to the basic persillade mix and you get the Italian gremolata. [link]

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