Will I ever stop doing The Compact?
Well . . . I’ve actually started buying some new stuff when the big picture outweighs searching out the used. For example, I no longer want to be storing my food in plastic containers. This has meant that in addition to the couple scores of Goodwill Pyrex leftover containers, I splurged on a brand-spanking-new set. But in concordance with my conscious spending mindset, I noted that Pyrex is manufactured in the U.S. using union labor, plus the cardboard packaging was 100% recyclable!
I don’t think I will ever stop being part of The Compact, as my life has greatly bettered and my bank account has mysteriously plumped. And the plastics? Don’t miss them a whit!
What more could a girl ask for?
Gretchen Rubin is the author of the new book, The Happiness Project, an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy. On her popular blog she recounts her adventures and insights as she grapples with the challenge of being happier. Aristotle, Samuel Johnson, Oprah, Benjamin Franklin, the Dalai Lama, Martin Seligman ... she considers it all.
...Here are some highlights from her blog, the Happiness Project:
I’m surprised I hadn’t known about kaizen before. The Japanese term kaizen is an approach of using small steps of continuous improvement to bring about change. Instead of pursuing radical changes – which are ambitious, difficult, and often don’t succeed – you take small, comfortable steps. Maurer points out that although kaizen developed in a business setting, it also applies to individuals.
His example: after telling his patient Julie about the importance of taking time for herself and getting exercise, instead of giving the standard (and unrealistic) advice that she spend thirty minutes a day on aerobically challenging exercise, he said “How about if you just march in place in front of the television, each day, for one minute?”
Carl Kasell has been delivering the news on Morning Edition since its very first broadcast. After 30 years, he's stepping away from the newscast to focus on other duties at NPR.
Talking with NPR's Renee Montagne, Kasell looked back on a career that has included stints as a local DJ; the announcer of game show Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! and as the magician who dared to saw Nina Totenberg in half.
Kasell anchored the first newscast on Morning Edition, back in 1979. He's been a constant ever since — for many listeners, the voice coming through the radio at first light.
What is Cheat Offsetting?
When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.
Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.
Can I offset all my cheating?
First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating
This family is in the White House: [picture of the Obamas].
...Yes, he makes me crazy. Yes, I wish he was more like Dennis Kucinich and less like Bill Clinton. But he is exactly what he said he was during the campaign, in spite of all of Glenn Beck’s delusional smears to the contrary. He’s a Corporate Centrist and a pragmatist, not a progressive messiah. He’s going to do things in (maddening) incremental babysteps, not using the sweeping change we were sort of expecting.
These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the 'alien' cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become 'race traitors,' and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
...
Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He's becoming alien and he can't go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he's hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a "cure" for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.
...Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don't need to hear more about my own racial experience. I'd like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I'm doomed to see the same old story again and again.
A Pentagon-appointed task force, in a report released this month, pointedly criticized the military’s efforts to prevent sexual abuse, citing the “unique stresses” of deployments in places like Camp Taji. “Some military personnel indicated that predators may believe they will not be held accountable for their misconduct during deployment because commanders’ focus on the mission overshadows other concerns,” the report said.
That, among other reasons, is why sexual assault and harassment go unreported far more often than not.
...By the Pentagon’s own estimate, as few as 10 percent of sexual assaults are reported, far lower than the percentage reported in the civilian world. Specialist Erica A. Beck, a mechanic and gunner who served in Diyala Province in Iraq this summer, recalled a sexual proposition she called “inappropriate” during her first tour in the country in 2006-7. “Not necessarily being vulgar, but he, you know, was asking for favors,” she said.She did not report it, she said, because she feared that her commanders would have reacted harshly — toward her.
“It was harassment,” she said. “And because it was a warrant officer, I didn’t say anything. I was just a private.”
...“A woman in the military is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq,” Representative Jane Harman, a Democrat from California, said at a Congressional hearing this year, repeating an assertion she has made a refrain in a campaign of hers to force the military to do more to address abuses.
At least 10 percent of the victims in the last year were men, a reality that the Pentagon’s task force said the armed services had done practically nothing to address in terms of counseling, treatment and prosecution. Men are considered even less likely to report attacks, officials said, because of the stigma, and fears that their own sexual orientation would be questioned. In the majority of the reported cases, the attacker was male.
But this is shortsighted. Educators should stop thinking about how to repress the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media and start thinking about how to channel that energy away from causing trouble and toward getting more out of their classes. After all, it's not as if most kids are investing commensurate energy into, say, their math homework. Why not try to start bridging the worlds of Facebook, YouTube, and the classroom?
...How can teachers bring social networking into the classroom? For starters, students could talk about what they're doing on Facebook and company, map out the ways they're making connections with one another, and share videos and software they've created. Once the conversation gets going, teachers could figure out whether some kids were being left out and find ways to increase those students' media literacy and bring them into the fold. Teachers can manage the project by selecting the best content and conversations, and incorporating it into other parts of the curriculum. If a student created an entry on Wikipedia for a local band or sports team, other students could work on revising the entry and building it into a larger local history project. The audience for school projects need no longer be one hurried teacher.Schools could also find students like the ones who made the stairwell dance videos and get them to produce a school-sanctioned video with a better subject—the re-enactment of a literary or historical scene, for example. This isn't as simple as a teacher saying, "Why don't you write a poem about your frustration, rap it on video, and put it on YouTube?" Instead, a teacher could assign students the task of filming a scene from The Scarlet Letter in the stairwell, identifying the dynamic of shaming in the novel, and writing about how it might be playing out in their Facebook news feeds. In math class, students could develop statistical models and graphs of the patterns of information flow in their social networks. To understand how advertising works, students from different backgrounds and with different online habits could compare what's being hawked to them. And for a school journalism project, teams of students could aggregate other students' narratives from blogs, Facebook, and Twitter and compile a real-time collective analysis of the state of their educational union.
What the researchers found was a clear correlation between inflexible bodies and inflexible arteries in subjects older than 40. Adults with poor results on the sit-and-reach test also tended to have relatively high readings of arterial stiffness. In short, the study concluded that “a less flexible body indicates arterial stiffening, especially in middle-aged and older adults.” No such correlation was found in those under 40, even when gender and fitness were considered as factors.
... How it is that stiff muscles in the back and legs are linked to stiff tissues near the heart is an issue that hasn’t been fully elucidated, Mr. Yamamoto says...
What is surprising are some early indications that increasing your flexibility might somehow loosen up your arteries, too.
...Mr. Yamamoto and his colleagues are currently conducting an ambitious study to determine just how and whether stretching directly affects the arteries. The results won’t be available for some time. Until then, Mr. Yamamoto says, it’s best to consider your flexibility (or lack thereof) as a marker of your probable arterial elasticity. “If you can touch your toes in the sit-and-reach test, your flexibility is good,” he says.
Throughout the nation, cities rely on religious institutions to shelter homeless families on a rotating basis. While no one doubts that moving from congregation to congregation is better than sleeping in a car, rotating shelters are criticized as denying children a sense of place.
“They are very disruptive to a child’s development to move all the time,” said Barbara Duffield, policy director for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.
...All of the adults at Winter Nights who were interviewed said they did not mind moving from place to place, but critics contend that the merry-go-round model is designed from the perspective of the volunteers.“People are trying to do the best they can,” said Barbara Poppe, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the federal response to homelessness.
But, Ms. Poppe said, the moveable shelter “is not a stabilizing environment” for children.
“The best solution is to get them into an apartment as quickly as possible,” she said, adding that congregations could pay the first month’s rent.
“If there is no housing available, Ms. Poppe said, homeless families are better served if they can “stay in the same place and have their own room and have volunteers come to them.”
But doing good is never simple.
“If the families were at one site, we would not get the active participation from volunteers,” Ms. Anderson said.
The volunteers want to remain where they are, she said: “That’s part of what makes it attractive.. They’re comfortable in their home church.”
A group of Italian researchers ran a simulation of a 160-person company with a six-level pyramid structure. Each employee was assigned a degree of competence and the researchers ran two simulations comparing different ways for competence to carry over to a new position when an employee was promoted. The simulations pitted the 'Common Sense Hypothesis' where an employee is as good at their new job as at their old one against the 'Peter Hypothesis' in which they have a random chance of succeeding in their new role. In each of these cases, the researchers tested three promotion strategies: promoting the most competent employees, the least competent employees and promoting randomly. Finally, with increased corporate efficiency as the measure of success, the researchers reached their counterintuitive conclusion.
'Promoting at random or alternating the promotion of the best and the worst employees works much better according to our calculations,' said Andrea Rapisarda, the co-author of the study and a physicist at the University of Catania, in Catania, Italy. Inc. asked a handful of CEOs and management experts whether this sort of system could work in a real company.
After all, nothing says “happy holidays” like donating in Aunt Tilda’s name to build a composting toilet in Haiti or to deworm kids in Kenya. And a deworming pill will never be regifted!
...In this column, I’m putting aside the larger, well-known aid organizations like CARE, Save the Children, Mercy Corps and Heifer International. They all do fabulous work, but today I want to bring to show-and-tell some organizations laboring in obscurity. These groups are also a reminder that the gap in savvy, creativity and effectiveness between the business world and the nonprofit sector is narrowing — in some cases vanishing.So here’s my quirky holiday list of nifty, unknown charities: (click here)
For parents like me, who hoped that a child's 21st birthday meant we could finally put our feet up on the coffee table, this is alarming news:
New research shows that our 20-somethings don't want to have a child at this time in their lives, but they aren't doing much to prevent it. And the result is that among unmarried women in their 20s, 7 of 10 pregnancies are unplanned. Seventy percent.
...We've been so busy trying to prevent our teens from having sex before they are emotionally ready and issuing dire warnings about the blighted future of a child born to them that we're unaware of how ignorant and ambivalent our clearly-not-very-grown-up children are about sex and birth control.
...Think about it. If you don't know how birth control works and you don't believe it is going to work and you think it might kill you and you think it is all in the hands of the fates anyway, how likely are you to use it?
And if you aren't really sure under what circumstances you want to have a child and if it would be sort of OK if it just happened, how likely are you to do the serious thinking required before taking this huge, family-forming step?
Increasing the number of doctors would make our health care system worse, not better, because the United States doesn’t actually need more doctors. What we do need is for primary care to reclaim its central role in the delivery of medicine, to provide the preventive care, chronic disease management and coordination of services that is lacking in so many parts of the country. Primary care doctors can help patients avoid unnecessary visits to specialists, hospitals and emergency rooms, thus lowering health care costs.
Granted, the teaching hospitals and others lobbying for more doctors would have Congress designate some of the new residency slots for family practice, pediatrics and internal medicine. But there are already plenty of residency openings in those areas that currently go unfilled. And since the amendment would not prohibit the positions going to specialists, that is who would fill them. If the past is prologue, these newly minted specialists would most likely gravitate toward cities like New York, Los Angeles and Miami, which already have plenty of doctors — and relatively poor care.
Our national problem is that primary care doctors are leaving their practices in droves, driven out by their low pay (relative to that of specialists), long hours and mountains of paperwork. Some of them go to work in emergency rooms or hospitals, others become specialists, and many simply abandon medicine. The idea that there’s a supply-side solution to this problem is a little like thinking you can fill a bucket with holes in the bottom by pouring in more water.
The birth narratives that were eventually attached to Matthew's and Luke's Gospels, were stories that were created and circulated to counter the claim of the Caesars to be divine and worthy to be called Lord. Every claim of specialness for Caesar was countered by the claim that all his titles belonged to Jesus.
...Just as many children feel deceived when they find out Santa is not real, many Christians feel deceived when they conclude that Jesus was not born of a virgin and that a star did not travel through the sky and come to rest over a particular place in Bethlehem.
...As a Christian, I embrace the belief that a loving God is active in the affairs of the world. I believe that Jesus from Nazareth is Lord. I believe he is Son of God. I believe he is Bringer of Peace. I believe he is Savior of the World.These are the messages so beautifully told in the birth narratives. It doesn't matter whether or not Jesus was born in Bethlehem. When the birth stories are put into their broader historic and religious context, they become masterpieces of truth-telling and a witness to the joyful life.
You may be unaware, but I am something of an amateur military historian. I have taken the liberty of sketching out the decisive battle in the War on Christmas, showing how the vast numerical superiority of The Christians was overcome by poor battlefield selection and the inferior manueverability of their heavy troops compared to the combined cavalry and light, swift infantry of Secular Islamofascism and the Liberal Jews.
All of that is a nice enough sentiment. But keeping the poor ‘close to our hearts’ can be a costly business. Many of us, for much of the time, shrink from this Christian calling, because to accept Mary's call is leave our comfort zone way behind. The life of the poor is not an idyllic life of simplicity in modern Britain. It is a constant struggle, a constant battle, a constant minefield of competing opportunities, competing responsibilities, obligations and requirements, a constant effort to achieve the impossible. For many at the bottom of our social ladder, lawful, honest life can sometimes seem to be an apparent impossibility.
...My advice in these circumstances, when people have been let down so very badly by the rest of society, is that they should not hurt anybody, and cope as best they can. The strong temptation is to burgle or rob people – family, friends, neighbours, strangers. Others are tempted towards prostitution, a nightmare world of degradation and abuse for all concerned. Others are tempted towards suicide.Instead, I would rather that they shoplift. My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.
But the question is not how do we stop the celebrations, but instead, how do we create a more inclusive culture, a climate where everybody feels included? I don't have the answer, but I can think of many ideas. As a starting point, it would be wonderful if organizations had meetings or discussions to brainstorm ideas about how to make their environments feel religiously inclusive. Simply demonstrating that this is an issue worth thinking about is one step to making people feel more included.
...Some workplaces and schools take the minimal step of including items like menorahs and kinaras in their holiday displays. But in writing this, I started to think about all the people in this country whose religions have unwisely failed to schedule a major holiday in December. Because of Christmas, December has become defined as THE holiday season. Even within Judaism, Chanukah is only of minor significance, yet it has become the most widely known and recognized Jewish holiday because it falls close to Christmas on the calendar.This is what Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe call "Christonormativity." It means that Christianity is the normative culture in the US, and we are oblivious to what that means for non-Christians. Experiencing the overwhelming sense of exclusion I feel at this time of year, I try to use this insight to understand what it feels like for LGBT people in this heteronormative culture of ours. Or for people of color in this predominantly white culture. It gives me some insight into what they experience all year round. And just as most Christians are oblivious to how non-Christians feel this time of year, my privilege allows me to be oblivious to how it feels to not be white and heterosexual.
So, my hope this holiday season is that we will all take a few minutes to stop and think about what it means to have privilege, as well as what it means to strive to be inclusive. Not everyone is made to feel that this is the "most wonderful time of the year."
It's been taught to generations that 'it is more blessed to give than to receive.' But how blessed is it when you give in order to receive?
...Experts call it "selfish giving" — when givers are looking to get back more than just the joy of giving. But where do you draw the line? When givers are giving in order to sell more lattes or enhance their resumes, is it a win-win — or is something else lost?
Overview:
Some have traced the Christmas tree back at least as far as the Prophet Jeremiah who wrote the book Jeremiah in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). Opposition to the Christmas tree was strong in past centuries. The early Christian Church in the third century strictly prohibited the decoration of their houses with evergreen boughs. The decorated Christmas tree only caught on in the mid-19th century. Modern-day opposition continues: some condemn the Christmas tree because they believe it to be a Christian symbol; others condemn it because they believe -- incorrectly -- that the custom of cutting down a tree, erecting it in the home and decorating it is a Pagan custom. 1 For many people today, it is primarily as a secular symbol of hope for the New Year and the future return of warmth to the earth. Its future is assured in spite of opposition.
Getting presents to all the good little boys and girls every Christmas is a monumental task for Santa Claus — and it's led some children to question how he does it.
In The Truth About Santa: Wormholes, Robots and What Really Happens on Christmas Eve, author Gregory Mone explains the elaborate systems that make it all possible.
If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg can't figure out his social networking site's privacy settings after they were ripped open earlier this month, what hope is there for the rest of us?
For a brief window of time, the whole world had an opening to check out (and get screen grabs) of Zuckerberg's previously private Facebook photos, in which the young CEO is seen, as Valleywag describes, 'shirtless, romantic, clutching a teddy bear, and looking plastered.'
Clearly, breaking the law can get you in real trouble, but blindly following orders and engaging in illegal or unethical activities on the job can wreak havoc on your career and possibly hurt other people.
Take Barbara, a Denver-based senior underwriter for a major mortgage company.
Over a two year period, she was asked by her manager to sign off on home loans for individuals that she knew were not worthy of loans because of their questionable credit and employment backgrounds.
...Workers in a host of sectors are feeling pressure to compromise their ethics standards, or break the law, according to Patricia Harned, president of the Ethics Resource Center, an independent research organization. Among the top industries where this is seen are entertainment, hotel and food services, transportation, retail, and healthcare, just to name a few.“There is no question that supervisors and management have a tremendous amount of influence on employees’ decisions on how they handle tough situations,” Harned says.
...Barbara, the underwriter from Colorado, went to her HR department and the company launched an investigation. The manager that asked her to sign off on bad loans was subsequently fired, and new policies were implemented to prevent similar situations.Looking back, she says, she would have reported the problem earlier.
Physicians should no longer automatically opt to perform a cesarean section in the case of a breech birth, according to new guidelines by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada.
Rather than fighting to keep my Facebook profile private, I plan to open it up to the public – removing the fiction of intimacy and friendship.
But I will also remove the vestiges of my private life from Facebook and make sure I never post anything that I wouldn't want my parents, employer, next-door neighbor or future employer to see. You'd be smart to do the same.
We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place for intimacy with friends.
Often the victims lose control of their accounts after clicking on a link “sent” by a friend. In other cases, the bad guys apparently scan for accounts with easily guessable passwords. (Mr. Marquess gamely concedes that his password at the time was “abc123.”)
...Social networks have become prime targets of such programs’ creators for good reason, security experts say. People implicitly trust the messages they receive from friends, and are inclined to overlook the fact that, say, their cousin from Ohio is extremely unlikely to have caught them on a hidden webcam.
While he broke the law by having sex with an underage girl, the police report says the victim was “not forced to commit any act” nor “did she ask him not to commit any act.”
“My daughter was a willing participant,” [the mother] said.
Freeman never returned to high school after going to jail.
This year 60 people have applied to change their sex in Sweden. Most gender-reassigned people achieve a better life through their surgery, but a new study shows that the risk of attempted suicide and psychological problems remains high, Dagens Nyheter reports.
“For most transsexual people, their life improves, but it’s not easy immediately after the operation,” Cecilia Dhejne, a scientist and doctor at Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge, told the newspaper.
...But the researcher believes that the majority of gender-reassigned benefit from surgery, a thesis backed up by another new study from Lund. With 60 participants,the study shows that nearly all had a better life five years after their operations. Their work situations, relationships and sex lives had all improved.
The anti-health care reform astroturf specialists have carpeted a new arena. Not content to just manufacture "protests" on Capitol Hill and around the country, these health insurance industry funded groups have infiltrated the popular Facebook applications Mafia Wars and FarmVille.
...Instead of asking the gamers to try a product the way Netflix would, 'Get Health Reform Right' requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep:
The study found that it was possible to predict men's sexual orientation by analysing the gender and sexuality of their contacts on the social networking site – even if the rest of the information on their profile is set to private.
...In total the researchers ran their software on 947 people who did not disclose their sexual orientation on their profiles, but it failed to accurately identify lesbians or bisexuals of either gender.
It would be foolish to draw conclusions about the real world from just one paper and from such an artificial scenario. But the findings add to a growing body of research into a phenomenon known among social psychologists as 'moral credentials' or 'moral licensing.' Historically, psychologists viewed moral development as a steady progression toward more sophisticated decision-making. But an emerging school of thought stresses the capriciousness of moral responses. Several studies propose that the state of our self-image can directly influence our choices from moment to moment. When people have the chance to demonstrate their goodness, even in the most token of ways, they then feel free to relax their ethical standards.
In 2001, Benoit Monin and Dale Miller of Princeton published a pioneering study of this licensing tendency. The study investigated whether showing a lack of bias in one situation would free subjects to express prejudice later on. They found that people who had designated a woman as the best candidate for a gender-neutral job were then more likely to recommend a man for a stereotypically masculine job. Another experiment yielded similar results with regard to race.
Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life's work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn't very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren't certain whether his computing machines would have worked.
But Doron Swade, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has proven that Babbage wasn't just an eccentric dreamer. Using nothing but materials that would have been available to Babbage in the 1840s, Swade and a group of engineers successfully built Babbage's Difference Engine — and a version is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
(AFP) – 2 hours ago
NEW YORK — New Jersey's legislature has shelved a vote planned for Thursday on allowing gay marriage in the state, media reports said.
The following minute from Twin Cities Friends Meeting was approved last month. The approval came after several months of threshing, discussion, and prayerful consideration.
St. Paul, Minn. — A group of Twin Cities Quakers has decided to stop signing marriage certificates for opposite-sex couples until the state legalizes gay marriage.
'We're simply trying to be consistent with the will of God as we perceive it,' said Paul Landskroener, clerk of the Twin Cities Friends Meeting, in an interview with MPR's All Things Considered on Monday.
Storm is a cat who does some of these things for a living. He helps Connelly train lost pet search dogs in Maryland by hiding and waiting to be found.
But training cats isn’t just for professionals — human or feline. The Michigan Humane Society has a Pawsitive Start program that uses volunteers to train cats in their shelter in useful and fun behaviors like the high-five and walking into a carrier.
“A lot of people look kind of funny at us when we say we train the shelter cats,” says CJ Bentley of the humane society. Cats need more than just playtime outside the cage to be well-adjusted in the shelter environment, she says.
Tahani Tompkins was struggling to get callbacks for job interviews in the Chicago area this year when a friend made a suggestion: Change your name. Instead of Tahani, a distinctively African-American-sounding name, she began going by T. S. Tompkins in applications.
...That seemed startling somehow, maybe because of the popular perception that affirmative action still confers significant advantages to black job candidates, a perception that is not borne out in studies. Moreover, statistics show even college-educated blacks suffering disproportionately in this jobless environment compared with whites, as that article reported.
Pfc. Jeffery Meier, who struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and drug addiction after two deployments to Iraq, got an appointment in August to see a psychiatrist at Fort Carson, Colo.
But when he arrived for his first session, he was asked to sign a waiver explaining that under certain circumstances, including if he admitted violating military laws, his conversations with his therapist might not be kept confidential. He refused to sign.
Private Meier, who is seeking a medical discharge from the Army, was given counseling anyway. But he says he never opened up to his therapist, fearing that actions taken in the heat of battle might be disclosed to prosecutors. “How can you go and talk about wartime problems when you feel that if you mention anything wrong, you’re going to be prosecuted?” he said in an interview.
After eight years of war, children with parents in the military are reporting signs of emotional wear and tear from long and repeated deployments, a new study shows.
The study by the RAND Corporation found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in the general population. The researchers also found that the longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the more likely their children were to have difficulties in school and at home.
...Anita Chandra, the primary investigator, said she was surprised by the correlation between the months a parent was deployed and the problems reported by their children. “We thought the challenges of deployment would wane as the deployment went on,” Ms. Chandra said in an interview.
SAN FRANCISCO — A big pile of city crime reports is not all that useful. But what if you could combine that data with information on bars, sidewalks and subway stations to find the safest route home after a night out?
In Washington, a Web site called Stumble Safely makes that possible. It is one example of the kind of creativity that cities are hoping to mobilize by turning over big chunks of data to programmers and the public.
Many local governments are figuring out how to use the Internet to make government data more accessible. The goal is to spawn useful Web sites and mobile applications — and perhaps even have people think differently about their city and its government.
Action on climate, if it happens, will take the form of “cap and trade”: businesses won’t be told what to produce or how, but they will have to buy permits to cover their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So they’ll be able to increase their profits if they can burn less carbon — and there’s every reason to believe that they’ll be clever and creative about finding ways to do just that.
As a recent study by McKinsey & Company showed, there are many ways to reduce emissions at relatively low cost: improved insulation; more efficient appliances; more fuel-efficient cars and trucks; greater use of solar, wind and nuclear power; and much, much more. And you can be sure that given the right incentives, people would find many tricks the study missed.The truth is that conservatives who predict economic doom if we try to fight climate change are betraying their own principles. They claim to believe that capitalism is infinitely adaptable, that the magic of the marketplace can deal with any problem. But for some reason they insist that cap and trade — a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems — can’t work.
Well, they’re wrong — again. For we’ve been here before.
'This is not the New York legislature,' Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D. Union) declared to a large crowd of same-sex marriage advocates who gathered in front of the Statehouse shortly before noon yesterday. 'The New York legislature is dysfunctional. We're better than that. We're New Jersey.'
Proponents of the bill are urgently pushing for its passage in the next few weeks. While Gov. Corzine has said he will sign it if it reaches his desk, Gov.-elect Christopher J. Christie, who takes office Jan. 19, has said he would veto it, which means the issue would most likely be a nonstarter at least until Christie leaves office.
Anyone who has ever spent time on a dating Web site like Match.com knows that the online profile often doesn’t match the person in real life.
So when University of Texas researchers began studying Facebook friends, they expected that users also would exaggerate accomplishments and offer an enhanced version of themselves. To their surprise, they discovered that Facebook profiles typically gave an accurate and realistic impression of the user’s real-life personality.
In a nationally representative survey conducted in late September, we asked 1,125 Americans to score 21 gripes on a 1-to-10 scale, 1 meaning an experience 'does not annoy you at all' and 10 meaning it 'annoys you tremendously.'
Hidden fees scored 8.9 overall; inability to reach a human, 8.6. Mean scores for all the gripes are in the chart below.
With the new guidelines on mammography and Pap smears (short version: they're not as necessary as we thought) kicking up a firestorm of conservative idiot behavior (Fox News: 'Healthcare Rationing Begins!!!'), Barbara Ehrenreich helpfully takes to task the 'pink ribbon breast cancer cult,' an unnecessary obsession with breast cancer, that she claims has excluded legitimate women's health concerns from public debate.
Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.
...The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.
...Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.
An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. “It is not difficult to imagine,” said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people “arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones.”
Others imagined the figurines as the “Council of Goddesses.” In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.
Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in “a shared understanding of group identity.”
Patrick Stewart: the legacy of domestic violence
As a child, the actor regularly saw his father hit his mother. Here he describes how the horrors of his childhood remained with him in his adult life
The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.
When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
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