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POPS'Beer goggles' are real - it's official As well as changing perceptions of attractiveness, alcohol also encourages us to engage in behaviour we would otherwise avoid. In a study by Robert Leeman of Yale University students reported they were more likely to engage in risky sexual acts after drinking - which could be due to alcohol lowering our inhibitions through a direct effect on the brain or by providing a convenient excuse for such behaviour.
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POPSMost Ethical Destinations? Worried about your travel footprint? Want to support tourism in a developing country but don't want to support bad environmental practices or human rights abuses? Check out this list of "most ethical destinations" compiled by ethicaltraveler.org.
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POPSAmateur spies gassy 'cosmic ghost' Some people get to name an object. Even fewer get to name a new class of object. Now we'll have people scanning the skies for Voorwerps. One day we might even discover what they are. I wonder if they come in different colours?
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POPSEconomic Models Predict Obama Win by 'Decent Margin' After years and years of claiming to be the fiscally responsible party, the GOP's cred on economic issues has tanked. The "trickle down" economics that Republicans have adopted since Reagan have turned out to be a bust, mostly because it's a bass-ackward idea that wealth moves down the economic ladder, not up. It was always a welfare program for the wealthy and that's never been so apparent as it is today. So McCain's only hope is that lunatic mathematics magically begins working before now and Nov. Frankly, I don't think there's much chance of that.
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POPSThe Arrogance of Uneducated Liberals An acquaintance of mine says PhD stands for "piled higher and deeper". I know a lot of purportedly highly intellegent and educated people who don't have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot. But I'll grant these "mental giants" one thing - - they have boundless quantities of pomposity and arrogance. Some fo the qualities possessed by the divine candidate, B. Hussein Obama
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POPSClimate 2008
In the history of science there have been only a few issues which have mobilized the attention of scientists and policy-makers alike as the issue of climate change currently does. The release of the 4th Assessment produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the summer of 2007 has put the reality of human-induced global warming beyond any doubt. In addition, the high-level event on Climate Change held at the UN Headquarters, New York (24 September 2007), the thirteenth United Nations Climate Change Conference held on the island of Bali (Indonesia) on 3-14 December 2007 and the various strategies and actions plans which are being prepared and implemented all over the world, indicate that the emphasis to this topic will continue to dominate the scientific agenda for decades to come. Although the subject matter of climate change is regarded as a critical issue and sound scientific knowledge is needed in order to address the problem in a holistic way, there is a pa
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POPSTax-gree or hoarding to favour the priviledged..... It would be interesting to hear from more US socially-oriented sources re furthering education for the poor yet worthy youth of your nation and how other Nations tackle the problem.... It maybe useful too, to cast a glance at the different solutions various countries use....
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POPSResearchers Discover Remnant of an Ancient 'RNA World'
Breaker's lab solved a decades-old mystery by describing how tiny circular RNA molecules called cyclic di-GMP are able to turn genes on and off. This process determines whether the bacterium swims or stays stationary, and whether it remains solitary or joins with other bacteria to form organic masses called biofilms. Bacterial use of RNA to trigger major changes without the involvement of proteins resolves one of the questions about the origin of life: If proteins are needed to carry out life's functions and DNA is needed to make proteins, how did DNA arise? The answer is what Breaker and other researchers call the RNA World. They believe that billions of years ago, single strands of nucleotides that comprise RNA were the first forms of life and carried out some of the complicated cellular functions now done by proteins. The riboswitches are highly conserved in bacteria, illustrating their importance and ancient ancestry, Breaker said.
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POPSFacebook Never Forgets "The Internet's anonymity, long memory and free-for-all gossip culture may yet prove a poisonous cocktail. But as our generation grows older and enters public life -- thankfully, we have some time -- we'll find ourselves in a political culture that increasingly views these "gotcha" moments in context and with an eye toward forgiveness. After all, the incriminating photo, the offensive blog post, that drunken 3 a.m. e-mail -- it could have been any of us."
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POPSMapping Infectious Diseases - Realtime on the Web Some see HealthMap's wide net as an advantage. "I think this is the future direction of infectious-disease epidemiology," says Durland Fish, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, in New Haven, CT, who has previously worked with Brownstein. "This goes beyond traditional human case reporting, which we've done in the past," he says. For example, the software may pick up reports from scientists working outside the public-health arena, perhaps identifying a new animal virus with the potential to jump to humans. That could conceivably give public-health officials the power to intervene before an outbreak. "We would be able to identify where this virus is likely to emerge in humans," says Fish. "Once we get the first human case, we would know the virus has made the jump. That's presumably what happened with SARS."
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POPSA Hero from the Poverty Class Our family has admired Ben Carson for years. He didn't escape poverty and turn around to blame other poor people for not being able to do the same. Instead, he works to build the scaffolding necessary to lift others to where he is.
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POPSIs Amazon's Kindle about to Tip? hmmm...2,500 four-year universities in the U.S. The author of this article says Amazon has a long way to go. I say, that's 2,500 highly qualified "Glengary" leads to go after! I can hear Bezos now..."We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. "
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POPSLibertarian Paternalism This is a new one on me. From article: "That is not an oxymoron, they insist in their book. Rather it is a corrective to the longstanding assumption of policy makers that the average person is capable of thinking like Albert Einstein, storing as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercising the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. That is simply not how people are, they say. In reality human beings are lazy, busy, impulsive, inert, and irrational creatures highly susceptible to predictable biases and errors. That's why they can be nudged in socially desirable directions." "A nudge is thus any noncoercive alteration in the context in which people make decisions. The libertarian paternalism behind it is rooted in Thaler's lifelong fascination with the power of small, seemingly innocuous details — the arrangement of food in a cafeteria, the drawing of a small fly in the bowl of a urinal, a pattern of lines on the road — to influence people's behavior. "
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