More good stuff….

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/anna_deavere_smith_s_american_character.html

TED Talks….brilliant – a bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars

Separating the battery from the car.  Treating the battery like gasoline….someone else owns the battery and you just use it on a per mile basis.  Battery swap stations and charging stations at every parking lot would solve the problem.  Some pretty cool stuff here….

 

Not sure why this eluded the car companies?  Don’t they “want” to make money???

Sino The Times

China has launched a new English language website.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/

It’s interesting to me to read. The translation has that awkwardness to the diction that seems to be the hallmark of double plus good Chinese government pronouncements.

Interesting -

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

 

Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life.

 

Professor Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes. The Milwaukee Project, for example, took African-American children considered at risk for mental retardation and assigned them randomly either to a control group that received no help or to a group that enjoyed intensive day care and education from 6 months of age until they left to enter first grade.

Western aid to Africa…hurts Africans???

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/954/moyo/

Dambisa Moyo’s prescription for economic sustainability in Africa—which includes cutting off all aid within five years—might seem insane if the statistics weren’t so grim: despite one trillion dollars in western aid over the past sixty years, the economic lot of the average African has only gotten worse. Most Africans now live on one dollar per day, and sub-Saharan Africa remains the poorest region in the world. Despite a deluge of aid between the years of 1970 and 1998, poverty on the continent skyrocketed from 11 percent of the population to 66 percent, which means over six hundred million Africans are now impoverished. The average African can only expect to live to be about fifty, and half the continent’s citizens are under the age of fifteen. In addition to poverty, AIDS, corruption (half the continent is still under un-democratic rule), civil war, and genocide ravage the continent. Indeed, Africa seems constantly embroiled in a steady stream of horrors, the likes of which are not seen anywhere else on the planet. Why? Are Africans innately different from the rest of us? Nonsense, says Moyo. She blames aid.

 

What do you guys think of this?  Our current efforts have failed over and over again (maybe they were not sincere efforts – worth a debate) so maybe we are the problem.  We agree that welfare must be finite and encourage behaviors that build independence.  So why not with Western aid to Africa?  Interesting.

Income gap causes everyone to suffer; even the rich

What they find is that, in states and countries where there is a big gap between the incomes of rich and poor, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity and teenage pregnancy are more common, the homicide rate is higher, life expectancy is shorter, and children’s educational performance and literacy scores are worse. The Scandinavian countries and Japan consistently come at the positive end of this spectrum. They have the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes, and the best record of psycho-social health. The countries with the widest gulf between rich and poor, and the highest incidence of most health and social problems, are Britain, America and Portugal.

 

Richard Wilkinson, a professor of medical epidemiology at Nottingham University, and Kate Pickett, a lecturer in epidemiology at York University, emphasise that it is not only the poor who suffer from the effects of inequality, but the majority of the population. For example, rates of mental illness are five times higher across the whole population in the most unequal than in the least unequal societies in their survey. One explanation, they suggest, is that inequality increases stress right across society, not just among the least advantaged. Much research has been done on the stress hormone cortisol, which can be measured in saliva or blood, and it emerges that chronic stress affects the neural system and in turn the immune system. When stressed, we are more prone to depression and anxiety, and more likely to develop a host of bodily ills including heart disease, obesity, drug addiction, liability to infection and rapid ageing.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article5859108.ece

Financial Crisis Bailout…another great visual from Mint.

http://www.mint.com/blog/finance-core/a-visual-guide-to-the-financial-crisisthe-bailout/

Awesome….everyone should get Mint.com. It completely organizes your finances easily…and there’s an iphone app!!

I’ve heard this from multiple sources…solitary confinement is evil

 

A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

Crazy bad…note even John McCain’s evaluation of solitary:

It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

Should this be a cause to work for?

Consumer Reports for punditry – best idea of the day

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/opinion/26Kristof.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

So what about a system to evaluate us prognosticators? Professor Tetlock suggests that various foundations might try to create a “trans-ideological Consumer Reports for punditry,” monitoring and evaluating the records of various experts and pundits as a public service. I agree: Hold us accountable!

Experts get it wrong about the same amount of the time as flipping a coin get’s it right.  Lovely.  Accountability for pundits.