Al Fin

Keep Your Options Open

2012-02-01T00:44:00.049-08:00

We like to think that things can continue on as they have done, generation after generation. Through good and bad, humans have muddled through and survived -- and even prospered in the more advanced parts of the world. But there is always a niggling of a doubt in the back of the mind: "What if this thing happens, or that? How would we survive the ultimate catastrophe?"

Abandoned Missile Silo Home
Certainly a nuclear war, a worldwide fatal contagion, or a global zombie apocalypse would all be difficult trials to endure. An ice age might push civilisation to the very brink. But Earth abides, and humans could too. In the near future, the only catastrophe that might require the complete abandonment of the planet, would be an extraterrestrial strike -- a comet, asteroid, or equivalent large scale impact.

A missile silo home such as the one above provides the convenience of an onsite rocket launch pad, with the added convenience of an on site airfield.

Space Station Fallback Option
Should a majour planetary catastrophe occur, one would certainly wish to have a convenient launch pad capable of carrying one's self and significant others. One would also need a destination in Earth orbit, where one could "freshen up" and restore one's natural sense of vigour and vitality.

A well equipped full-sized space station can make all the difference, should your home planet suddenly become uninhabitable.

Contour Crafting a Lunar HabitatBut you can bet that others will likely be thinking along the same lines of escape-to-orbit. Before long your space station could begin to look and smell like a regular refugee camp. Soon you will be thinking about moving on.

But since humans are much more comfortable on planetary surfaces anyway, you would probably already be thinking about relocating to Luna or Mars. The sooner the better, so as to claim the best real estate and avoid the land rush.

To assist your planetary habitat-building, special robotic apparatuses are being developed which will allow you to construct your Lunar or Martian habitat over a 24 hour period, using a robotic contour crafting robot.

Parenthetically, similar robotic contour crafters could also be used to build an underground missile silo home & retreat on planet Earth, if you cannot find a suitable one available. International treaties are causing such valuable properties to become scarce.

Regardless, try to keep all of your options open. Most types of apocalypse will allow you to continue to reside on the most beautiful and life-loving planet in the solar system. But some types of doom will not permit that.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Adapted from an earlier posting on Al Fin Potpourri

Open Courseware and Online Learning: A Dynamic Flux

2012-01-31T13:53:00.000-08:00

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has agreed to join Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s (MIT) OpenCourseWare community...MIT’s OpenCourseWare currently has over 250 universities onboard and the prominent members include Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore; Yale University; Peking University; Harvard Law School; University of Notre Dame; Tufts University; University of California, Irvine and Utah State University. The consortium claims to have published materials from more than 13,000 courses in 20 languages, available through its website. MIT had reportedly invited IIT to join its OpenCourseWare consortium in 2007 but IIT had apparently declined the invitation then, stating that their initiatives are still young to join the Open Source learning bandwagon, as stated by TOI. _Source

Udemy is a new addition to the list of online open courseware providers. Some courses are free, and others require a fee. Udemy provides something called "The Faculty Project" which aims to provide a wide range of free university level courses to online learners, as well as providing a technology platform for professors to create new courses.

The infographic below, from onlinecollegecourses.com, provides a quick snapshot of the rapidly changing entity known as open courseware. A year from now, the entire project is likely to have grown appreciably.

Via: Online College Courses Blog

More sites for free video courses and lectures:

Freevideolectures.com

Academic Earth

Lecturefox

LearnersTV

Some emerging tech trends for online classes

Remember: Anything that moves education toward the open source model, is probably a good thing. Anything that moves education toward increasing dependency upon government and a highly centralised, top-down sanctioning of education, is probably a bad thing.

When Public Servants Become Public Overlords

2012-01-31T08:21:00.000-08:00

The Congressional Budget Office found Monday that federal workers are compensated 16 percent more than comparable private-sector workers on average.

..."While millions of Americans continue to struggle with stagnant wages and high unemployment, government bureaucrats in Washington continue to enjoy significant advantages over those whose tax dollars finance their compensation," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) office said in reaction to the finding. _TheHill

Once new government agencies, departments, and bureaus form, they are forever. They grow and expand their mandates, jurisdictions, and budgets as quickly and widely as they can.

The US federal government will continue to expand to consume whatever the shrinking private sector can give it. Every time a US president, senator, or congressman makes a promise to supply a service to a taxpayer, he is inflating the problem by growing the government.

Federal benefits include:

More expensive health benefits.

Both a defined-benefit and defined-contribution pension plan.

Full retirement at 56.

Retiree health benefits.

Significantly more paid leave than private-sector workers. A federal employee with three years on the job receives all 10 federal holidays, 20 paid vacation days, and 13 sick leave days per year.

Federal employees enjoy job security irrespective of the state of the economy. Since the recession began, federal employment (not including the Postal Service) has risen by 230,000, or 12 percent. Federal employees are almost never fired for poor performance.

Federal employees demonstrate with their actions that they receive better compensation in the public sector than in the private sector: They quit their jobs at one-third the rate of private employees.

Policy Concerns

Taxpayers should not sacrifice so that federal employees can enjoy better pay and benefits than they could hope to receive in the private sector.

Many federal employees retire in their late 50s, collect their pension and retiree health benefits, and then take a second job in the private sector. Taxpayers should not have to subsidize this double-dipping.

The General Schedule does not connect pay and performance. Workers automatically receive step and grade increases in pay whether they work diligently or not. It is almost impossible to fire an underperforming federal employee. This reduces the productivity of federal workers. _Government Pay Is Inflated

We know that government does not create wealth or prosperity, and yet we sit by as government balloons and bloats itself in ways that disrupt and destroy genuine wealth creating, productive entities in the private sector.

The US government is a bloated and somewhat consolidated — but antagonistic — block of catering services, which prepare US taxpayers and private concerns to be eaten by fat, unscrupulous, and well-connected party-goers of the lifelong vulture persuasion.

One does not expect either competence or benevolence from such entities. One merely tries not to be utterly consumed before one is dead.

Global Cooling: A Return to the Age of a Frozen Thames?

2012-01-30T00:37:00.002-08:00

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century. _DailyMail

A Frozen Thames During Little Ice Age DailyMail

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.
We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

...According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.

However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid. _DailyMail

Using the Livingston and Penn Solar Cycle 25 amplitude estimate, this is what the solar cycle record is projected to look like:
Slowing Sun, Cooling Climate WUWT
And, yes, that means the end of the Modern Warm Period. _WUWT David Archibald

Normal Temperature Fluctuation Daily Mail
This graph indicates what global temperatures have done since 1997. Rather than shooting skyward as the "hockey stick" graphs of IPCC fame predicted, temperatures have rather plateau'd, and may be trending downward.

400 Years of Sunspots DailyMailIt is too early to predict whether the sun is approaching a multi-decadal "Dalton Minimum" type decline in activity, or whether it may be on the verge of a more extended "Maunder Minimum" type decline. The difference between the two could be quite important, and solar physicists and astronomers are beginning to take notice.

On the global climate front, ocean scientists are already beginning to note that improved ocean heat content measurements are failing to confirm high priced computer climate models.

WUWT Ocean Temps Diverge From Model Predictions
Because ocean temperatures exhibit a "thermal flywheel effect," ocean temperatures can continue to gradually warm for some time after incoming solar energy has declined. Water, with a 4X higher specific heat than air, takes longer to reverse a temperature trend.

Of course there is a lot more going on with the climate than solar cycles. But thanks to the impressive solar changes that we are witnessing, we may be closer to seeing who the big boss of the climate truly is.

But since many hundreds of billions of dollars in carbon taxes, carbon trades, carbon reparations, and carbon hysteria oriented research are at stake, do not expect the orthodoxy of climate alarmism to take all of this lying down, frozen Thames or no frozen Thames.

How Obama Could Help US Energy: Get His Energy Starvationist Government Out of the *&%# Way!

2012-01-29T00:11:00.000-08:00

Without his nose growing visibly, the President claimed the government was behind the technological advances that led to the current shale gas boom, and even suggested that he might take credit for the rise in domestic oil production. In fact, Mr. Obama's administration has hampered and castigated oil companies at every turn. In the light of the hysterical grandstanding over the BP Gulf spill (whose impact proved to be greatly exaggerated), it was ironic indeed to hear the President now declare a great opening up of offshore exploration.

The industry has responded to attacks by becoming more innovative and productive. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, between 2007 and 2010, U.S. oil production grew from 5.1 million barrels a day (mbd) to 5.5 mbd. The agency predicts domestic production will hit 6.7 mbd by 2020, helping take imports down to 36% of domestic usage in 2035 from 60% in 2005. So much for peak oil. Meanwhile, the EIA also predicts that by 2016, thanks to the shale boom, the U.S. will be a natural gas exporter. _NatPost

In other words, the US oil & gas sector has grown and prospered despite Obama's agenda of energy starvation. Imagine how much healthier US energy and US industry would be without vicious governmental harassment and regulatory handicapping.

After taking credit for prosperity that has occurred despite everything he could do to shut it down, Mr. Obama goes on to promote the green energy scams which are helping to kill Europe, and which will certainly destroy any economy foolish enough to depend upon them.

One wonders if the President has the slightest clue about the flagging state of the wind and solar industries in Germany, or that what is boosting China's alternatives industry is government subsidies ... from other countries.

The President announced a plan to devote huge swathes of public land to the development of clean energy to power "three million homes." He also apparently committed the Navy to buying a chunk of this power, as if it weren't expensive enough to guard the Strait of Hormuz.

Mercantilist alternative energy strategies represent - as Jimmy Carter famously suggested - the "moral equivalent of war." The problem is that it is war on one's own economy. At least, with his partial ceasefire against the oil industry, President Obama is now only shooting himself in one policy foot rather than both. _NatPost

Obama says he is promoting clean oil technologies, and takes credit for the economic success of technologies which he has tried to kill, but more intelligent people can see through his endless crap. Obama's ongoing (although publicly undeclared) war against coal, oil sands, oil shale kerogens, shale oil & gas, advanced nuclear power, arctic oil, offshore oil, etc. etc. amounts to a total policy of energy starvation -- relentlessly pursued by the EPA, NRC, Interior Department, and a score of other agencies and politically controlled bureaucratic entities.

Warren Meyer: Obama Deserves No Credit for US Oil & Gas Boom

Master Resource: Did the Government Invent the Shale Gas Revolution?

US President Obama Misrepresents His Own Record on Oil & Gas in Televised Speech

Previously published on Al Fin Energy blog

China's Skyscrapers of Doom?

2012-01-28T09:37:00.001-08:00

In a recent blog post, Brian Wang described an exciting new mass-production method for building skyscrapers more quickly and efficiently, recently developed in China. China has been rapidly boosting the number of high-rises in its cities, even before this development. Now it seems likely that skyscrapers will be rising above Chinese cities more rapidly than ever.

Is this a good thing for China, or does it portend the approach of an economic collapse for the celestial kingdom?

Amid the ongoing bubble watch in China’s real-estate sector, new research Wednesday showed the mainland is home to more than half of the world’s skyscrapers currently under construction.

Barclays Capital said that China is now flashing some of the telltale signs of a bubble on its Skyscraper Index, which is designed to track the correlation between tall buildings and an impending financial crisis.

Slightly over half of the 124 skyscrapers due to be completed in the next six years are in China, according to Barclays, which cited its own in-house research and website Skyscrapernews.

The construction binge will increase the number of skyscrapers in Chinese cities by 87% the report said, noting that the average height of buildings under construction is also increasing.

Barclays analysts said the frenzied activity in these lesser-known cities amounted to “evidence of the expanding building bubble,” adding that its Skyscraper index has acted as barometer of widespread misallocation of capital that can see instances of excesses dating back to before the Great Depression. _Marketwatch

Barclay's suggests that an economic collapse could occur in China as early as 5 years from now, if the past performance of "the skyscraper index" is any guide.

Here is more on the skyscraper index of doom from an article published on Al Fin almost one year ago:
Chinese government officials believe high-rises "show their progress in terms of urbanization and modernism," spur wider development by boosting investor confidence, and symbolize "a city's desire to become modern and international," says Chiow, a Chinese-American based in China for the past 15 years. _USAToday_via_ImpactLab

Lawrence showed that in almost all cases the initiation of construction of a new record-breaking skyscraper preceded major financial corrections and turmoil in economic institutions. Generally, the skyscraper project is announced and construction is begun during the late phase of the boom in the business cycle; when the economy is growing and unemployment is low. This is then followed by a sharp downturn in financial markets, economic recession or depression, and significant increases in unemployment. The skyscraper is then completed during the early phase of the economic correction, unless that correction was revealed early enough to delay or scrap plans for construction. For example, the Chrysler Building in New York was conceived and designed in 1928 and the groundbreaking ceremony was conducted on September 19, 1928. "Black Tuesday" occurred on October 29, 1929, marking the beginning of the Great Depression. Opening ceremonies for the Chrysler Building occurred on May 28, 1930, making it the tallest building in the world. _Mises

Table 1: World's Tallest Buildings

Completed	Building	Location	Height	Stories	Economic Crisis
1908	Singer	New York	612 ft.	48	Panic of 1907
1909	Metropolitan Life	New York	700 ft.	50	Panic of 1907
1912	Woolworth	New York	792 ft.	57	——
1929	40 Wall Street	New York	927 ft.	71	Great Depression
1930	Chrysler	New York	1,046 ft.	77	Great Depression
1931	Empire State	New York	1,250 ft.	102	Great Depression
1972/73	World Trade Center	New York	1,368 ft.	110	1970s stagflation
1974	Sears Tower	Chicago	1,450 ft.	110	1970s stagflation
1997	Petronas Tower	Kuala Lumpur	1,483 ft.	88	East Asian
2012	Shanghai	Shanghai	1,509 ft.	94	China?

If large buildings are constructed due to high utilisation and strong demand for space, they can be very profitable over their lifetimes. But if a skyscraper is constructed as a symbol or monument to the "greatness of a nation's political structure," the building may remain the empty prayer of a cargo cult.
China is building 44% of the 50 skyscrapers to be completed worldwide in the next six years, increasing the number of skyscrapers in Chinese cities by over 50%, says Andrew Lawrence, an Asian property analyst at investment bank Barclays Capital.

China is already host to six of the 15 tallest, completed buildings in the world, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

..."The appetite in China for high-rises, in the last five years and the next five, is bigger than ever before in the history of building," says Silas Chiow, China director for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the U.S. architectural firm, founded in Chicago, responsible for the Burj Khalifa.

The firm is currently engaged in 50 China projects, including the tallest buildings in eight separate cities.

Chinese government officials believe high-rises "show their progress in terms of urbanization and modernism," spur wider development by boosting investor confidence, and symbolize "a city's desire to become modern and international," says Chiow, a Chinese-American based in China for the past 15 years. _USAToday_via_ImpactLab

China is already full of "ghost cities," "ghost housing projects," "ghost office complexes," and "ghost shopping malls."

There is no denying the huge number of people living in China -- many of whom could use better and larger living and working space. But the economic structure of Communist Chinese society is rife with the mal-allocation of resources and enterprise. Corruption permeates the culture, driving much of the "road to nowhere" construction frenzy. Too much of the GDP-inflating construction is of a shoddy nature -- certain to collapse far sooner than projected lifetimes suggest.

Will the "Skyscraper Index" prove prophetic for Potemkin China of the cargo cult, or will the middle kingdom defy the curse of the world's tallest buildings?

More on skyscraper index:
From Mises.org
From CNN here and here

China's empty skyscrapers and office buildings

Amazing satellite images of some of China's ghost cities

World's loneliest shopping mall

More: And just in case you are still thinking that China may be ready to lead the world, perhaps you should think again:

We hear constantly how China's economy has "leapfrogged" other nations and now ranks third in the world — still behind the U.S. — with a total GDP of $3.3 trillion. The truth is more complex.

China has 1.3 billion people. So you're spreading that economy among one-sixth of the world's humanity. As the chart shows, China's economy on a per-person basis — the real measure of success — doesn't even come close to ours. The average American produces over $42,000 a year in goods and services; the average Chinese produces $2,800. That's an enormous gap in productivity.

Moreover, in its recent rankings of economic freedom, the Heritage Foundation put China 135th out of 179 countries. The U.S., even with all its current problems, ranks ninth. Who's the leader?

Citizens in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai live a privileged existence, well-documented by the Western media. Deep inside rural China, however, hundreds of millions live in near-absolute poverty. This isn't a country ready for global economic leadership.

China's economic success has been driven by mercantilist policy of beggaring its own people in the interest of building up massive trade surpluses. Its foreign currency holdings now total $2.9 trillion, and most of that is in U.S. Treasuries and other dollar-denominated assets. That's China's hole-card in talks with the U.S. _IBD

Source

China's ongoing construction boom may be evidence of an economic bubble getting ready to burst. Or it may be possible that China is wealthy enough to be able to afford this massive misallocation of resources into an "infrastructure to nowhere," and not pay a significant price. Time will tell.

Cross-posted from an article originally written for Al Fin Potpourri

How the Global Climate Cabal is Destroying Scientific Integrity

2012-01-27T03:32:00.003-08:00

Climate Gate Facts

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically. _WSJ

Science is under assault from within by climate grifters and from without by climate opportunists.

Dedicated climate blogger Tom Nelson is on the front lines of the fight to expose the climate grifters, and to attempt to rescue science from the new dark ages of politically enforced neo-Lysenkoism being forced upon it by special interest groups which have a great deal of money and power on the line.

Tom Nelson Climate Gate Archives

Climategate Archive Watts Up With That

"One of the darkest periods in the history of science":

Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long.

But as wisely noted by both P. T. Barnum and Abraham Lincoln,

You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.

As an increasing number of highly qualified scientists slowly began to realize that the “climate science” community was a facade—and that their vitriolic rebuffs of sensible arguments of mathematics, statistics, and indeed scientific common sense were not the product of scientific rigor at all, but merely self-protection at any cost—the veil began to drop on what has already become clear as the greatest scientific fraud in this history of mankind.

This is one of the darkest periods in the history of science. Those who love science, and all it stands for, will be pained by what they read below. However, the crisis is here, and cannot be avoided. _Assassination Science

The whole episode would be laughable if not for the devastation that it is dealing to the funding and administration of science and science journalism, and to the economic sectors that intersect with the carbon hysteria orthodoxy -- such as energy. The threat of a massive multi $trillion redistribution of funds from Europe, North America, and other advanced regions to the kleptocracies of the third world -- via the corrupt United Nations infrastructure -- is no laughing matter, either.

The Rocket Men of Private Space: The Future, Finally?

2012-01-26T14:29:00.000-08:00

Rocket Men and Futurists
Ever since Albert Gore Jr. took control of NASA funding in the 1990s, the US space agency has been on the decline, in terms of human exploration of space. Mr. Gore helped shift the emphasis of NASA funding over to climate research, and paybacks to powerful campaign backers -- shunting funds away from the type of programs that space enthusiasts wanted to see.

With the coming of President Obama, NASA is really and truly passing the baton of manned space travel and exploration to private entities -- and none too soon! Below are excerpts from a Reason Magazine article profiling the "Rocket Men," the men who are opening the new frontier of private space:

The Daredevil: Elon Musk

Musk, a Stanford grad school dropout who was born in South Africa, made his fortune—estimated at $670 million—as one of the founders of the online payment site PayPal. Then he founded Tesla Motors, where he led development of an all-electric sports car.

After the space shuttles were retired, NASA was forced to start paying Russians to ferry Americans and their gear back and forth to the International Space Station, at about $63 million per seat. Musk says SpaceX can do it for one-third the price. The added risk of throwing humans—or as Musk refers to them, “biological cargo”—doesn’t seem to worry him.

The Mogul: Richard Branson

Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson isn’t a rocket scientist, but he knows a good publicity stunt when he sees it. The Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million in private money for the first nongovernmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft twice in a two-week period, brought a burst of public attention to the commercial space race in 2004. Branson quickly snapped up the rights to the winning vehicle, SpaceShipOne, and the team that went with it, including famous aviation whiz Burt Rutan.

Since then Virgin has been working on SpaceShipTwo, which would carry two pilots and six passengers a few miles above the Karman line (the generally accepted threshold 62 miles up that separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space) to check out the view and enjoy a brief period of weightlessness. Charging $200,000 per person (with a $20,000 deposit, please) Virgin Galactic already has 450 people signed up to fly as soon as the technology is ready and the regulatory hurdles have been cleared....

In August, NASA announced that it would be purchasing a full suborbital flight from Virgin, with an option for two more, to carry research payloads as part of the Flight Opportunities Program, a government initiative designed to “foster the development of the commercial reusable suborbital transportation industry.” The price for those three flights is a bargain at $4.5 million, about 1 percent of the cost of a single (orbital, to be fair) shuttle mission. Virgin was just one of seven companies to cut similar deals with NASA, but as is his wont, Branson grabbed the headlines.

The Dark Horse: Jeff Greason

“The technology that we’re missing is capitalism,”... at an April TEDx conference in San Jose. “The same thing that makes things work in every other arena of modern life.”

...Insiders see XCOR as an underrated rival to flashy players like Branson and Musk. XCOR has taken a gradualist approach, flying a succession of small but ever-larger rockets, including the aptly named EZ-Rocket. The current Lynx model is a two-seater that allows horizontal takeoff and landing but only goes up 38 miles, leaving the goal of outer space for the next generation rocket. But that distinction may not matter if Greason becomes the first entrepreneur to fly a paying customer on a rocket he built himself. At $95,000 for the Lynx’s single passenger seat, this small company is also offering the cheapest ticket on the market.

The Prize Giver: Peter Diamandis

Peter Diamandis is the chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, the nonprofit organization that dreamed up the Ansari X Prize—$10 million for a reusable suborbital launch vehicle—and is now offering prizes for everything from better oil spill management technology to rapid sequencing of human genomes. Richard Branson snagged the first winner, SpaceShipOne, to form the basis of Virgin Galactic’s program. But just as important, from Diamandis’ perspective, were the 25 losers. Collectively, the teams spent more than $100 million in pursuit of the prize. And that was precisely the idea.

The Hotelier: Robert Bigelow

Robert Bigelow knows hotels. He owns the Budget Suites of America extended-stay hotel chain here on Earth. But after a long rocket ride, when you need a place to crash—just figuratively, of course—Bigelow is your man. His Las Vegas company, Bigelow Aerospace, has launched two experimental orbiting modules, Genesis I and Genesis II, into space since its founding in 1996. Bigelow already has spent well over $200 million of his own money and says he’s ready to drop another $300 million on his quest to be the final frontier’s first hotelier and commercial real estate baron....

Bigelow isn’t just another space entrepreneur, he is also a client. Cheap, safe rockets are a crucial part of any plan to build while aloft. It’s big and empty up there, for the most part, so materials have to come from Earth. Bigelow sent up his test modules on Russian Dnepr rockets but has made no secret of his desire to use rockets from an American company for crew and cargo as soon as they become available.

The Rocketeer: John Carmack

The mascot of John D. Carmack’s rocket company is a cartoon armadillo wearing goggles and a scarf. It’s an oddly warm and fuzzy choice for such a nerdy founder. Armadillo Aerospace is the part-time venture of the lead programmer of Doom, Quake, and other 3D graphics-intensive video game megahits.

It’s also the leanest of the companies described here. Before he started Armadillo Aerospace, Carmack had very little experience in building spaceships, but his company went on to scoop up a couple of prizes that NASA was offering for building lunar landers while simultaneously working on suborbital (and eventually orbital) rockets. Armadillo’s strategy is physically different from those of most of its competitors, featuring a rapidly evolving form that adhered to Carmack’s credo to try out lots of options and abandon failures quickly—pretty much the opposite of NASA’s modus operandi. _Read the full article at Reason Rocket Men

Robert Zubrin: How Much Is An Astronaut's Life Worth?

There are a lot of valuable resources and real estate outside the Earth's atmosphere. The first human $trillionaire is fairly likely to earn his first $trillion via off-planet enterprises. Perhaps that is what attracts so many billionaires to space ventures.

Whatever US President Obama's reasons for opening part of the NASA budget to private space companies, the move is likely to spur a great deal of momentum toward a more economical and sustainable approach to space launch, space travel, space exploration and exploitation, and eventually space colonies. If only he would begin to shunt all of the NASA climate hysteria research funds to more productive private sector use!

Radical Future of Food

2012-01-26T00:34:00.009-08:00

Food, farm and water technologists will have to find new ways to grow more crops in places that until now were hard or impossible to farm. It may need a total rethink over how we use land and water. So enter a new generation of radical farmers, novel foods and bright ideas.

Algae

....Algae are at the bottom of the food chain but they are already eaten widely in Japan and China in the form of seaweeds, and are used as fertilisers, soil conditioners and animal feed. "They range from giant seaweeds and kelps to microscopic slimes, they are capable of fixing CO2 in the atmosphere and providing fats, oils and sugars. They are eaten by everything from the tiniest shrimp to the great blue whales. They are the base of all life and must be the future," says Edwards.

Artificial meat

It looks like meat, feels like meat and it is meat, although it's never been near a living, breathing animal. Instead, artificial or "cultured" meat is grown from stem cells in giant vats.

...Much of the research into artificial meat is being done in Europe with scientists in Holland and Britain developing edible tissue grown from stem cells in laboratories. But while the first artificial hamburger could be developed next year, it might taste of nothing at all...studies show that artificial meat wins hands down in the environmental stakes, using far less water, energy and land.

New crops

Few people have heard of Zhikang Li, but history may judge the Chinese plant breeder to be one of the most important people of the century. Last year, after 12 years' work with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, he and his team developed "green super rice", a series of rice varieties which produce more grain but which have proved more resistant to droughts, floods, salty water, insects and disease.

...Green super rice, which could increase yields in Asia enough to feed an extra 100 million people, will be rolled out in the coming years....Last year more than 350m acres – about 10% of global cultivated area, or the same area as Germany, France and the UK together – were planted with GM crops, but this mainly covered only three big foods – maize, oilseed rape and soya – most of which went to animal feed.

Desert greening

Much of the world is arid, with its only nearby water being the sea. So could a technology be found to green coastal deserts in places such as Chile, California, Peru and the Middle East using salt water?
Charlie Paton, a British inventor, has a vision of vast "seawater greenhouses" to grow food and generate power. The idea is simple: in the natural water cycle, seawater is heated by the sun, evaporates, cools to form clouds, and returns to earth as refreshing rain. It is more or less the same in Paton's structures. Here, hot desert air going into a greenhouse is first cooled and then humidified by seawater. This humid air nourishes crops growing inside and then passes through an evaporator. When it meets a series of tubes containing cool seawater, fresh water condenses and is then collected. And because the greenhouses produce more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants, some of it can be released into the local environment to grow other plants. [also see Sahara Forest]

Insects

Locusts, grasshoppers, spiders, wasps, worms, ants and beetles are not on most European or US menus but at least 1,400 species are eaten across Africa, Latin America and Asia. Now, with rising food prices and worldwide land shortages, it could be just a matter of time before insect farms set up in Britain.

Not only are many bugs rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol and high in calcium and iron, but insect farms need little space. Environmentally, they beat conventional farms, too. The creatures are far better at converting plant biomass into edible meat than even our fastest growing livestock, they emit fewer greenhouse gases and they can thrive on paper, algae and the industrial wastes that would normally be thrown away._Guardian

It is also worth revisiting the topic of "Aeroponics," a form of agriculture that requires no soil at all, can be built up in 3 dimensions, and is very thrifty with water. Aeroponics could be used on seasteads -- using "seawater greenhouse" techniques, on space stations and lunar outposts using recycled water, in polar colonies on Antarctica -- even on submarines or undersea habitats.

H/T NextBigFuture

The Udacity of Hope: Just Say No to Tenure

2012-01-25T15:42:00.000-08:00

Sebastian Thrun, a [tenured] research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. _Chronicle Higher Ed

Thrun will continue to work at Google while starting up the online learning website, Udacity, with fellow computer scientist David Evans.

One of Udacity’s first offerings will be a seven-week course called “Building a Search Engine.” It will be taught by David Evans, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia and a Udacity partner. Mr. Thrun said it is designed to teach students with no prior programming experience how to build a search engine like Google. He hopes 500,000 students will enroll. _Chronical Higher Ed

Free world-class online education sounds like a great idea, until you get around to asking, "Who will pay for it?"

Udacity looks great, and I can’t wait for it to be a revolutionary success, educating and empowering students around the world, especially in places like Africa and India, and, in those places, especially women.

...Stanford was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building a new physical campus in New York City — but it isn’t willing, it seems, to help Thrun build a free virtual campus which could reach the whole world. That’s a dereliction of its educational duty. But where Stanford has failed, surely some other elite university will step in. Thrun is taking a bold step here. Let’s hope he soon gets the support, if not of Stanford, then of some other college. Like Harvard, or Yale, or Oxford, or Cambridge. They’re exclusive places now. But they don’t have to be, in the future. _Reuters

It may be asking too much to demand that Harvard, Yale, or Oxford contribute to the seeds of their own demise. But somewhere out there, someone must be interested in fanning the flames of the education revolution. I suppose that Google may kick in a few pennies, and perhaps the Bill and Mel Gates Foundation will toss in a dime or two. But they are already helping to support Khan Academy, as well as all of their other projects.

What would be great is if some of the oil sheikhs of the Persian Gulf were to stop funding the terrorist madrasas, and start funding some positive revolutions, meant to lay the groundwork for a peaceful and productive future.

IQ Matters: Understanding Your World So As to Predict the Future

2012-01-25T07:00:00.002-08:00

Decades of genetics research have shown...that people are born with different hereditary potentials for intelligence and that these genetic endowments are responsible for much of the variation in mental ability among individuals. Last spring an international team of scientists headed by Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry in London announced the discovery of the first gene linked to intelligence. Of course, genes have their effects only in interaction with environments, partly by enhancing an individual's exposure or sensitivity to formative experiences. Differences in general intelligence, whether measured as IQ or, more accurately, as g are both genetic and environmental in origin--just as are all other psychological traits and attitudes studied so far, including personality, vocational interests and societal attitudes. This is old news among the experts. The experts have, however, been startled by more recent discoveries.

One is that the heritability of IQ rises with age--that is to say, the extent to which genetics accounts for differences in IQ among individuals increases as people get older. Studies comparing identical and fraternal twins, published in the past decade by a group led by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., of the University of Minnesota and other scholars, show that about 40 percent of IQ differences among preschoolers stems from genetic differences but that heritability rises to 60 percent by adolescence and to 80 percent by late adulthood. With age, differences among individuals in their developed intelligence come to mirror more closely their genetic differences. It appears that the effects of environment on intelligence fade rather than grow with time. In hindsight, perhaps this should have come as no surprise. Young children have the circumstances of their lives imposed on them by parents, schools and other agents of society, but as people get older they become more independent and tend to seek out the life niches that are most congenial to their genetic proclivities.

A second big surprise for intelligence experts was the discovery that environments shared by siblings have little to do with IQ. Many people still mistakenly believe that social, psychological and economic differences among families create lasting and marked differences in IQ. Behavioral geneticists refer to such environmental effects as "shared" because they are common to siblings who grow up together. Research has shown that although shared environments do have a modest influence on IQ in childhood, their effects dissipate by adolescence. The IQs of adopted children, for example, lose all resemblance to those of their adoptive family members and become more like the IQs of the biological parents they have never known. Such findings suggest that siblings either do not share influential aspects of the rearing environment or do not experience them in the same way. Much behavioral genetics research currently focuses on the still mysterious processes by which environments make members of a household less alike. _Linda Gottfredson

The general finding after over 100 years of studying intelligence and genetics, is that IQ is heritable over the lifetime to between 50% and 80%. Heritability of IQ tends to be lower in low socioeconomic groups and in very young children. As a person ages, the genes tend to influence intelligence more.

The table below is a guessing game, where you are to fill in the "country" which matches the continent and the IQ score. The table of national IQs below, should assist you in this task. Notice that African nations are not included in the game, since the national IQ scores in the game do not go below 92.

Continent/Region	Country	Average IQ
Asia		108
Asia		106
Asia		105
Europe		102
Europe		101
Asia		101
Europe		101
Europe		100
Asia		100
Europe		100
Europe		100
Europe		100
Europe		100
Europe		99
North America		99
Europe		99
Europe		99
Europe		99
Oceania		99
Europe		99
Europe		99
Europe		98
Oceania		98
Europe		98
Europe		98

Continent/Region	Country	Average IQ
Europe		98
Europe		98
Europe		98
Europe		98
North America		98
Europe		97
Europe		97
Europe		97
Europe		97
Europe		96
Europe		96
Europe		96
South America		96
Middle East		95
Europe		95
Middle East		94
Middle East		94
Asia		94
Europe		94
Asia		94
South America		93
Europe		93
Europe		92
Europe		92
Asia		92

Name the Country

A more complete table of national IQ scores from Lynn and Vanhanen summarized by Steve Sailer

This graphic displays a simplified bell curve distribution overlap for 4 generalised human population groupings.

This graphic provides a general idea as to realistic occupational expectations for individuals whose valid IQ scores fall within a particular range of values.

FourmilabThis simplified time projection from the Fourmilab website: Global IQ 1950-2050, looks at the change in average "global IQ" over time, due to differential birthrates among distinct breeding groups, possessing different IQ.

Total fertility rates by country (via the EvoandProud anthropology site). By comparing the TFRs and national IQs, one can estimate the general trend for global IQ, as a falsifiable hypothesis.

What about the "Flynn Effect?" Unfortunately, the multiple and poorly defined underlying mechanisms behind the "Flynn Effect" are not strong enough to overcome the compounding magic of differential birthrates combined with heritability of IQ.

This graphic allows you to visually compare homicide rates with both total fertility rates and national IQ. Keeping in mind the heritability of IQ, this triple juxtaposition allows for some simple falsifiable predictions as to the future of both particular nations, and of the nations which are emigration targets for the excess from low IQ, high crime, high fertility populations.

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

More: Here is an extremely optimistic look at the future of commodities, energy resources, and food. The human ingenuity of "the smart fraction" has been pushing back against the forces of depletion -- just as Julian Simon said they would do.

It is crucial to look at as many sides to the story as one can. Nothing in real life is as simple as it seems.

Living in a Fool's Paradise: Spritely Foundations of the Modern World

2012-01-24T07:17:00.002-08:00

A security researcher was able to locate and map more than 10,000 industrial control systems hooked up to the public internet, including water and sewage plants, and found that many could be open to easy hack attacks, due to lax security practices.

...Leverett used the SHODAN search engine developed by John Matherly, which allows users to find internet-connected devices using simple search terms. He then matched that data to information from vulnerability databases to find known security holes and exploits that could be used to hijack the systems or crash them. He used Timemap to chart the information on Google maps, along with red markers noting brand devices that are known to have security holes in them. He described his methodology in a paper (.pdf) about the project.

Leverett found 10,358 devices connected through a search of two years worth of data in the SHODAN database _Wired

Of course, in China and Russia, teams of hackers are paid well to find ways of exploiting security weaknesses in government and industrial infrastructure. The US NSA is on that like buzzing insects on excreta.

Your life depends upon the smooth working of industrial, commercial, governmental, and municipal infrastructure. If something mucks that up, you will suffer the consequences.

Leverett’s tool shows how easy it is for a dedicated attacker or just a recreational hacker to find vulnerable targets online to sabotage.

...“Vendors say they don’t need to do security testing because the systems are never connected to the internet; it’s a very dangerous claim,” Leverett said last week at the S4 conference, which focuses on the security of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems (SCADA) that are used for everything from controlling critical functions at power plants and water treatment facilities to operating the assembly lines at food processing and automobile assembly plants.

“Vendors expect systems to be on segregated networks — they comfort themselves with this. They say in their documentation to not put it on an open network. On the other side, asset owners swear that they are not connected,” Leverett said. But how do they know? _Wired

Here is more about the network threat to vital utilities.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is likely that you do not really want to know about the many vulnerabilities that underlie your existence. Perhaps it is best to trust the media, trust your professors, trust the things people tell you. What possible good could come from trying to look too deeply into such things as the nuts and bolts which make modern high tech civilisations possible?

And they tell us that the world can run on big wind castles in the sky and high-rise buildings covered with solar glass and solar paint. All we need in order for it all to work -- to turn the innate unreliability and intermittency of wind and solar into a rock solid foundation for civilisation -- is "the smart grid" and its ultraconnectivity. What could go wrong?

Shodan search engine

"Free Online Higher Education as a Force for Human Progress"

2012-01-23T11:19:00.000-08:00

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

...Now MIT has decided to put the two together—free content and sophisticated online pedagogy—and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the material, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much.

...The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something—you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it.

...Already, the elite Indian Institutes of Technology has announced plans to join MIT's open-education consortium. Building MITx on an open platform could make the university the global nexus of online higher education, which is the way most people are likely to access higher learning in the future. In the hunt for the best and brightest students around the globe, MIT won't need to guess who's in the top 1 percent of 1 percent—it can simply pick them out of the millions of students who will enroll in MITx. _Chronicle Higher Education

Not everyone can single-handedly use freely available materials in a way to master difficult material. Many people will need assistance with sticky concepts and mental blocks at certain points in particular courses. This need for additional coaching and tutoring will open the door to private coaching -- both personal and online, both for-profit and non-profit. An entire new industry is likely to arise to help facilitate the online education revolution that MITx is helping to spawn.

H/T Carpe Diem

A Basic Understanding of Oil

2012-01-23T00:55:00.001-08:00

The creation of oil, gas, coal, and kerogen is an ancient process, which has taken place over the eons ever since photosynthetic life first occurred in the oceans and seas. For example, did you know that the Alberta oil sands area was once part of a prehistoric sea?

Alberta's oilsands are in an area that was once part of a prehistoric sea and have yielded several important marine reptile fossils. _CBC.ca

Oil creation is a renewable process, but over quite a long time span. Gas is made more quickly and more ubiquitously under the seabed than oil, and is becoming so cheap and common as to be thought of as a nuisance in many locations.

But it is crude oil about which such a fuss has been made for the past 100 years or so. And a well educated person should know more about crude oil than he is likely to find in the media or on the doomer sites. This embedded book by oil insider Leonardo Maugeri is likely to fill a lot of holes in the oil education of most ordinary people.

The Age Of Oil

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"The Age of Oil" by Leonardo Maugeri is a basic-level primer on the various facets of the modern petroleum age, from past, to present, and to future. It is best to start with basic history and basic supportable facts. Then, if you wish to go out on a limb, at least you will have a solid foundation from where to start.

Where oil comes from, and a hint of where new oil may be found

Looking at changes in atmospheric concentrations of O2 and CO2 over time is another way of noting the underlying biological processes involved in making the plants and microbes that go into making fossil fuels.

Oil shale sediments were deposited on large lake beds in the US western states:

Lacustrine sediments of the Green River Formation were deposited in two large lakes that occupied 65,000 km2 in several sedimentary-structural basins in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah during early through middle Eocene time....The warm alkaline lake waters of the Eocene Green River lakes provided excellent conditions for the abundant growth of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) that are thought to be the major precursor of the organic matter in the oil shale. _geology.com

How old is the oldest oil? No one knows, since it hasn't yet been found. But some oil has reportedly been found in rock that was billions of years old. Photosynthetic life has been around almost 3 billion years, so that provides for a lot of oil creation in deep rock layers.

Geologists usually don't bother looking for oil in very ancient (Precambrian) rocks for two reasons:

Conventional wisdom insists that oil is derived almost exclusively from organic matter, and additional conventional wisdom assures us that life was exceedingly scarce on earth billions of years ago.

Any oil that was created billions of years ago would have surely been destroyed by intense pressures and high temperatures over the eons.

Yet, Precambrian oil in commercial quantities has been found in formations up to 2 billion years old (in Siberia, Australia, Michigan, for example). While some of this oil might have migrated in-to the Precambrian rocks from younger source rocks, some of it does seem indigenous and, therefore, ancient.

...Now, three Australian scientists (R. Buick, B. Rasmussen, B. Krapez) have discovered tiny nodules of bitumen (lumps of hydrocarbons) in sedimentary rocks up to 3.5 billion years old in Africa and Australia. These bitumen nodules were formed when natural hydrocarbons were irradiated by radioactive isotopes that coexisted in the ancient rocks. Futhermore, these African and Australian rock formations were never severely deformed or subjected to high temperatures. The possibility exists, therefore, that some of the earth's oldest rocks may contain substantial oil reserves. So far, no one has seriously looked for oil in Precambrian rocks because of the two preconceptions noted above. _Science-Frontiers

The planet has gone through a large number of cycles over the past few billion years. Unless you can go back through time and trace the large numbers of optimal areas for oil, gas, coal, kerogen, and bitumen formation which have come and gone, come and gone, come and gone -- and been hopelessly changed and disguised by ongoing geologic processes -- you may be easily persuaded that almost all the fossil fuels have already been found.

The "abiotic oil" concept is not discussed here because the concepts behind biotic oil are difficult enough for most people to understand. And most hydrocarbons produced in the mantle by abiotic processes are shorter chain hydrocarbons, as you might find in "wet gas." Biotic and abiotic hydrocarbons tend to mix in the crust and follow much the same routes of migration upward in many cases. But if you want a good example of quick renewable hydrocarbons, the abiotic variety might qualify.

Previously published on Al Fin Energy

A Sense of Impending Doom Settles Over Obama's America

2012-01-22T08:40:00.003-08:00

In the US of the late 1970s, Americans experienced an economic and emotional malaise which has since been associated with the Jimmy Carter presidency. Survivalism and prepperism were in full boom time, in the late days of the Carter Presidency.

After Carter left office, Americans seemed to recover their typical sense of optimism and opportunity. Survivalism and doomerism settled down to much lower levels of activity. But for those who had experienced the Carter malaise, the taste of uneasiness and foreboding remained deep, undercover.

In the age of US President Obama, that strange sense of imminent disaster has returned, and is felt even by supporters of the "hope and change" president. If Mr. Obama succeeds at being re-elected -- something President Carter was unable to do in his own age of malaise -- the sense of impending Obama-doom is likely to grow to suffocating levels.

"We could see a cascade of higher interest rates, margin calls, stock market collapses, bank runs, currency revaluations, mass street protests, and riots," [Rawles] told Reuters. "The worst-case end result would be a Third World War, mass inflation, currency collapses, and long term power grid failures."

..."Modern preppers are much different from the survivalists of the old days," he said. "You could be living next door to a prepper and never even know it. Many suburbanites are turning spare rooms into food pantries and are going for survival training on the weekends."

Like other preppers, Snider is worried about the end of a functioning U.S. economy. He points out that tens of millions of Americans are on food stamps and that many U.S. children are living in poverty.

"Most people have a gut feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, but that doesn't mean that they understand what is happening," he said. "A lot of Americans sense that a massive economic storm is coming and they want to be prepared for it." _Reuters

Of course the skankstream media pretends that this deep uneasiness has nothing to do with President Obama, or with the millions of Americans who lost hope and have been driven out of the job market since Obama took office. It fails to associate the ongoing housing and banking crisis, the high level deflation combined with low level inflation, with the Obama war against the US private sector and the Obama energy starvation agenda. The Obama-friendly media has not sounded any warning calls regarding the great shift in power from the private sector to government under Obama which threatens to destroy the fiscal foundations of government at all levels . . . Mr. Obama's all out spending spree has led to a sky-rocketing of US federal debt to unprecedented levels at an unprecedented rate, in what might be perceived by some cynical souls (at least those who had read Mr. Obama's autobiographies) as a conscious effort to weaken the world's only superpower, down to its very roots.

If Mr. Obama is re-elected, there will be no long term return of optimism, as there had been after the defeat of the malaise-laden President Carter. Most Americans sense this, and yet, an observation of the early primary and debate results of the opposition US Republican Party points to a high likelihood of re-election for the current incumbent president. Mr. Obama's opposition candidates appear to be engaged in a dysfunctional barroom brawl of dirty infighting, which to most of the voting public appears even more distasteful than the picture of the current administration being presented to them on the nightly news.

It is beginning to seem to a large cross-section of Americans that any common ground they may have once had, is now either slipping away, or being consciously destroyed by those currently in power. This growing loss of cohesiveness among those who would otherwise have united against the emotional and economic darkness descending over America, can only help one group -- the Washington DC based vultures currently picking over the scattered bones of the republic and the populace.

All of this could have happened 32 years ago, had Jimmy Carter been re-elected as US President. But 32 years ago, the majority of Americans united behind a former film star and California governor, Ronald Reagan. In 2012, it is not clear that there is anyone of sufficient grit and substance who is capable of uniting most of the people behind him ( or her).

If things continue to play out in this way, the preppers may very well have their day after all.

Girls Suck at Math; But True Grit Can Help Sum

2012-01-21T00:04:00.037-08:00

World class psychologist David Geary looked into the issue of why girls suck at math, and came to the conclusion that you cannot blame "stereotype threat" or any of the other usual suspect excuses.

There is a large body of research about why more girls aren’t at the top of the spectrum in math skills. One study in 1999 blamed poor self-image for underachievement in math among girls. The theory was popular, Geary said, “because it gives a sense that you can do something about it easily, so it’s taken off as an explanation.”

Geary, a curators’ professor of psychological sciences, and Gijsbert Stoet from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom examined 20 influential replications of the original study and found serious scientific flaws. Among the most concerning was a lack of a male control group: Researchers told girls who were getting ready to take math tests that females typically don’t do well on the exams but did not give the same message to boys who took the tests. When Geary and his team adjusted the findings based on the lack of a control group and statistical flaws in other studies, they found little to no significant effect on performance based on stereotypes. _ColumbiaTribune

There are far more males at the top end of math ability than females, and that discrepancy tends to widen during the passage through puberty, into adulthood. Most knowledgeable cognitivists understand that the male hormone testosterone plays an important role in this notable and enduring discrepancy.

But for girls who are truly determined to succeed in fields where top level math skills are needed, besides a bit of math talent, there is nothing quite like "true grit."

“Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”

...What differentiates kids who are gritty from kids who are not gritty is not just the hours of work they are putting in, (but) they’re putting the hardest kind of work in.

...Grit is also distinct from […] self-control, in its specification of consistent goals and interests. An individual high in self-control but moderate in grit may, for example, effectively control his or her temper, stick to his or her diet, and resist the urge to surf the Internet at work—yet switch careers [frequently]. As Galton (1892) suggested, abiding commitment to a particular vocation [..] does not derive from overriding “hourly temptations.” _Source

But of course, if you are practising the wrong things or the right things the wrong way, there is no amount of practise which will turn out right. Take as an example the way that some psychologists attempt to teach people about risk -- by using probability. How stupid is that? Risk is not a cerebral topic, it is visceral. If psychologists are too stupid to understand that fact, they should probably be working as janitors or parking attendants.

Here is an interesting study that looks at the effect of "make believe" personas in a virtual environment.

Video games constitute a popular form of entertainment that allows millions of people to adopt virtual identities. In our research, we explored the idea that the appeal of games is due in part to their ability to provide players with novel experiences that let them “try on” ideal aspects of their selves that might not find expression in everyday life. We found that video games were most intrinsically motivating and had the greatest influence on emotions when players’ experiences of themselves during play were congruent with players’ conceptions of their ideal selves. Additionally, we found that high levels of immersion in gaming environments, as well as large discrepancies between players’ actual-self and ideal-self characteristics, magnified the link between intrinsic motivation and the experience of ideal-self characteristics during play. _PsychologicalScience

As we approach the promise of virtual reality games and total sensory immersion environments, the ability to take on virtual identities which are either significant variations of our real selves, or even totally alien to our true selves, should prove to be a powerful learning tool -- not to mention a diagnostic and evaluative tool.

Along with grit and intelligent practise, one should also try to enhance one's own creative abilities. To that end, here is a useful infographic provided as a bonus, for no extra charge. Good luck.

Micro-Brewed Explosives: The Renewable Choice in Demolition

2012-01-20T06:07:00.000-08:00

The techniques that make synthetic biology such a powerful tool for positive innovation may be also used for destruction. The military’s new search for biologically brewed explosives threatens to reopen an avenue of research that has been closed for 37 years: biotechnology developed for use in war...Because explosives-producing microbes in themselves would not be weapons, they would not appear to violate the convention [Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention]. _Slate

It is nice to see that under President Obama, even state sponsored violence is becoming greener and more natural. But already, President Obama's enemies are questioning his wisdom by conjuring up the wicked spirit of proliferation:

The quality that makes microbes so powerful will also make them difficult to contain: A single microscopic cell, acquired by a criminal or enemy, could in principle multiply to fill a vat within a few days. _Slate

Microbial genes can be programmed to produce a wide range of products that are useful to humans. From antiquity, humans have used microbes in the production of foods and beverages. More recently, microbes are being programmed for a wider array of synthetic products.

In 2000, when Weiss gave talks in MIT's biology department, the weirdness of this biology/engineering synthesis was apparent. “When I spoke of circuits that could turn genes on and off, some probably thought I had fallen out of space,” he says. “Those days, we did not speak the same language. Now we have developed a hybrid vocabulary.”

... Weiss's goal was to build a plasmid, a custom-made DNA sequence that can be replicated easily. Knight, an electrical engineer, aimed to pare down the genome and repurpose the cell to produce things it was not originally designed to make -- plastics, say, or fuels. _Science

Weiss and Knight developed a Registry of Standard Biological Parts to assist researchers in designing programmable genetic circuits, for the custom designing of microbes. The idea is to take synthetic biology, and "put it on steroids."

Most people like the idea of using microbes to produce insulin and other life-saving drugs. Few people object to the idea of using microbes to produce fuels, plastics, and high value chemicals for industry. But die-hard enemies of President Obama cannot seem to accept his ingenious ideas for micro-brewing explosives with convenient and prolific microbes!

Picture, if you will, bombs and cruise missiles which when they reach their targets do not explode. Instead, they release a fine mist of microbes in nutrient suspension, which coat the surfaces of everything in the vicinity of the target. These microbes can then proceed to proliferate wildly, in exponential fashion. They grow. And grow. And grow.

What do these "weaponised" microbes become? Whatever you want! They could become food -- cheese or wine, for example. Or they could become biofuels if you'd rather. New age weapons designers would have their pick of a wide array of breeds of microbe.

Very wicked weapons designers might send microbial colonies capable of assembling and detonating a nuclear weapon out of soil, rock, and junk parts. Such micro-weapon nukes may very well violate a treaty or convention. But what about microbe colonies that first disperse and grow to cover an entire city, then synthesise enough conventional explosives to destroy the entire metropolis in one fell swoosh? Military lawyers may wish to burn the midnight oil before signing off on those plans.

Regardless of eventual application, micro-brewed weapons certainly represent a new dawn in renewable military applications. Mr. Obama can be forgiven many of his more questionable decisions in the light of his enlightened choice for the Pentagon to go renewable.

Half of All Universities to Go Out of Business in 10 Years?

2012-01-20T00:43:00.000-08:00

Michael Horn, co-author with Clayton Christensen of several studies and publications on education, predicts: "I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 to 15 years half of the institutions of higher education will have either merged or gone out of business." According to Christensen, this change will not seriously threaten exclusive top-brand universities like Harvard and Yale, given the perceived high value of their brands and the connections and other extras they provide. Public universities, however, are in for a real shock. _NationalAffairs

Al Fin education analysts say that Harvard and Yale will be very much threatened by the coming revolution in education -- from K-12 through post-grad. By the time they and other overpriced palaces of mediocrity understand the hole they have dug for themselves, it will likely be too late.

But Christensen is correct when he says that US states will be devastated by the education revolution. Already forced to slash budgets and raise tuition, when the full impact of their dilemma hits them, heads will roll. A large part of the bloodshed will be caused by public sector union pension explosions and the state employee pension explosion.

As state budgets come under increasing pressure, tuition costs are likely to continue growing and services at state schools are likely to be slashed further by hard-pressed legislatures. California, for instance, hiked in-state tuition by 21% this year; over the next few years, the University of California system envisions annual tuition increases ranging from 8% to 16%. Other states face similarly grim prospects.

And the problem is only exacerbated by public universities' politicized governance structures — which, when combined with the state schools' lack of endowments to rival private universities', makes it much more difficult for public schools to adjust and innovate in response to changing conditions and competition. Those looking for signs of the coming revolution in higher education would thus be wise to keep their eyes on America's bloated public universities. _National Affairs

The article linked above is interesting, but it is largely beside the point. The reason for that is political correctness -- the author cannot come out and say what needs to be said about higher education and educational institutions in the post-modern world.

Outside of particular circumscribed areas of education -- professional schools, schools of engineering and science, business schools, etc. -- universities are no longer places of education, but are rather centres of indoctrination. Professors and administrators grasp onto tenure, bloat their own departments, assure their own futures, and to hell with students and their needs, and the long term vitality and survivability of the institution.

Affirmative action stuffs classrooms with students destined to fail bitterly. Title IX type mandates devastate economic opportunities formerly available to gifted athletes -- diverting the funds to feminist causes. Student loan debt across the US is greater than all credit card debt, and continues to grow -- although destined to burst in a huge conflagration of default.

Universities exist primarily for the vultures who feed upon failed students' carcasses. The various interlocking infrastructure of government, education, finance, and labour which have brought things to their current stage of impending doom.

The revolution could not come too soon.

Power to the Galactic Empire!

2012-01-19T11:17:00.001-08:00

How would an advanced galactic empire generate its power?

Some fraction of the radiation seething from the disk would be reflected and focused onto the power plants. Each power plant would transmit collected energy as a collimated microwave beam from a 100-mile diameter antenna. _Discovery

Discovery
A truly advanced civilisation on the Kardashev scale would harness the power of black holes to drive starships (PDF), power their industries, and gain control over both matter and time. We may have a few years to go before reaching that level.

A consortium of super-civilizations might pool resources to build a chain of power stations encircling the black hole. It would be the heart of a robust and fault-tolerant energy grid connecting numerous worlds like a fantasy scene out of the film "Tron."

However, I think it is more likely that a federation of expanding space colonies, spawned from a single mother civilization, would work together to maintain their viability. This wouldn't run into the thorny question of how two or more independent but similarly co-evolved species manage to contact each other and work out a practical energy infrastructure. _Discovery

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory believe that magnetic field lines extending a few million light years from galaxies into space may be the result of incredibly efficient energy-producing dynamos within black holes that are somewhat analogous to an electric motor....The energy in these huge magnetic fields is comparable to that released into space as light, X-rays and gamma rays. In other words, the black hole energy is being efficiently converted into magnetic fields.

Colgate and Los Alamos colleagues Vladimir Pariev and John Finn have developed a model to perhaps explain what is happening. They believe that the naturally magnetized accretion disk rotating around a black hole is punctured by clouds of stars in the vicinity of the black hole, like bullet holes in a flywheel. This, in turn, leads nonlinearly to a system similar to an electric generator that gives rise to a rotating, but invisible magnetic helix.
In this way, huge amounts of energy are carried out and away from the center of a galaxy as a set of twisted magnetic field lines that eventually appear via radio waves from luminous cloud formations on opposite sides of the galaxy. _SD

So you see, humans do not yet understand how black hole energy is converted into all the forms of energy that are propagated within and throughout the galaxy. But give us some time -- and a respite from all the energy starvationists hounding our steps -- and we just might take it to the next level.

Synthetic Diesel @ $1.19/Gal and 25,000 Gal / Acre?

2012-01-19T09:37:00.001-08:00

Joule Unlimited, a startup based in Bedford, Massachusetts, has received $70 million to commercialize technology that uses microörganisms to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into liquid fuel.

The company claims that its genetically engineered bacteria will eventually be able to produce ethanol for as little as $1.23 a gallon or diesel fuel for $1.19 a gallon, less than half the current cost of both fossil fuels and existing biofuels...The company, formerly known as Joule Biotechnologies, claimed in 2009 that its organisms could in theory produce as much as 20,000 gallons of ethanol on an acre of land in single year. Company officials now say their target is 25,000 gallons per acre, and that efficiencies they have already demonstrated take them 60 percent of the way to that goal. _MIT Technology Review

TechnologyReview
Of course we have to remember that the company is talking about both ethanol and diesel, so it is important to pin them down at each point, as to which fuel they are talking about. Can they actually make diesel for $1.19/Gal and at a rate of 25,000 Gal/acre/year? No. The company is expressing a goal for combined production of both ethanol and diesel together. Not as impressive as for diesel alone, but we should still give them a chance to explain why they are so hopeful.

In a peer-reviewed paper published last year in the journal Photosynthesis Research, Robertson and others showed that their process can achieve an overall efficiency of 7.2 percent in converting sunlight to liquid fuel. The figure is roughly seven times higher than the efficiency rate of systems that use naturally occurring microörganisms. The key to the increased efficiency, Robertson says, is that the engineered bacteria can secrete liquid fuels continuously. Nonengineered microbes produce oils that have to be harvested and refined into fuels, and the organisms have to be ground up to release the oils, so each batch yields only a single harvest.

The microbes that attain 60 percent of the company's stated productivity goal have been secreting ethanol in outdoor SolarConverters at the company's three-acre pilot plant for the past six months. To increase efficiency, Robertson says, the company will further manipulate the organisms' genetic makeup to limit all biological processes that compete with fuel production. For example, Joule has been working for several years to shut down genetic pathways that allow the organisms to keep growing. That should enable them to devote more energy to fuel production.

Robertson says that the company has just begun to optimize production in its diesel-secreting microbes, which currently yield fuel at a rate that is only 10 percent of the company's goal of 15,000 gallons per acre per year. _TechnologyReview

Full article from Photosynthesis Research detailing a planned expansion of the limits of photosynthesis

This approach to advanced biofuels does not require prime cropland, nor does it use food as a feedstock. It is not meant as a "magic bullet" replacement for all other forms of energy. It would be merely one piece of the power puzzle, as it should be.

Startups tend to exaggerate their goals and eventual capacities. But the wise investor learns to separate the boaster from the true performer. Joule has big ambitions, and is probably a decade or more before its time -- in terms of the overall energy picture.

Cheap shale gas can be converted into diesel via gasification and Fischer Tropsch (FT) catalysis much more quickly than Joule can get going, and in large quantities. Shale gas can also be converted to gasoline via Exxon Mobil's methanol to gasoline (MTG) process. And yet, in the big picture view of things, there is a place for ventures such as Joule.

But it will take a lot of time to develop. And societies must find a way to get rid of their energy starvationists along the way.

Angela Merkel: "I Picked the Wrong Century to Give Up On Nuclear Energy!"

2012-01-19T00:07:00.000-08:00

German abandonment of nuclear energy in response to the Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan could cost 1.7 trillion euros ($2.15 trillion) by 2030 if renewables replace much of the power, Michael Suess told Reuters Tuesday. That amounts to about two thirds of Germany’s 2011 GDP. If natural gas plants replaced much of the lost electrical generation, he said the estimate would be considerably lower, at 1.4 billion euros.

German legislators voted in May to eventually decommission all 17 of the Siemens-built reactors that once provided nearly a quarter of the country’s electricity. In response, Siemens announced in September that it would withdraw from the nuclear power industry. At the consumer level, the German Energy Agency (Dena) recently estimated the nuclear withdrawld could hike electric bills 20 percent by 2020. _NuclearStreet

Among the other countries opting out of nuclear power are Belgium, Switzerland, and Mexico. The costs of these plans vary _IEEE Spectrum Lite

All of this is happening at a time when the World Bank is warning of a potential global economic doomsday, originating in Europe. As the economies of Europe are hit harder, in succession, Merkel is likely to rue her rash choice.

Here is the punchline: While the Siemens estimate of the transition costs to the German economy are higher than what greens and sycophants have been telling the German government, the estimate of over a $2 trillion penalty paid by Germany is almost certainly too low. Perhaps by an order of magnitude or larger. Why? Because Siemens is only looking at the capital costs involved in converting to a nominal equivalent power capacity in renewables. It is not looking at the details where the devil resides, details which largely derive from the destructive intermittency and unreliability of wind and solar, and the much shorter lifetimes of the resource-intensive machinery of big wind and big solar..

After Fukushima, the German government jumped away from nuclear like a hysterical girl jumping from a spider or a mouse -- reflexively, and without thinking it through. If the Germans persist in pursuing this perverse green policy, the butcher's bill will be well into the $trillions and tens of $trillions, over the years. And Merkel's will be a name damned by future generations of Germans -- not the forgotten names of the greens who drove the woman to promote such a fateful choice.

Taken from a previously published post on Al Fin Energy

Obama Declares Energy Starvation: Defies His Own Jobs Council

2012-01-18T12:39:00.002-08:00

President Obama’s jobs council called Tuesday for an “all-in approach” to energy policy that includes expanded oil-and-gas drilling as well as expediting energy projects like pipelines.

“[W]e should allow more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands,” states the year-end report released Tuesday by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The report does not specifically mention the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but it endorses moving forward quickly with projects that “deliver electricity and fuel,” including pipelines. _TheHill

Meanwhile, US President Obama defies the job council and rejects one of the greatest potential provider of US jobs and prosperity -- the Keystone pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Nat Jnl

In a decision sure to re-ignite a fierce energy debate, the Obama administration was announcing on Wednesday its rejection of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline...

... A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, decried the news. “President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese,” said Brendan Buck. “The president won’t stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry also jumped on the news. "The president's focused more on the next election than on the next generation."_NatJnl

The unutterably stupid decision by the former junior Senator from Illinois is in keeping with his overall policy agenda of "energy starvation." Mr. Obama's ruling clique has sandbagged offshore oil drilling, coal mining, safe new nuclear energy reactors, oil shales, arctic drilling, various reliable methods of electrical power generation, and is in the process of putting pressure on shale oil & gas -- the one bright spot in his entire economic reign.

Mr. Obama's championing of bankrupt and unreliable green energy -- such as big wind and big solar -- exposed him as an inept and incompetent venture capitalist who likes to play with taxpayer's money for the benefit of political cronies.

Advanced economies need a huge amount of reliable and affordable energy to prosper. Mr. Obama has chosen to choke off energy supplies and starve the US private sector of its vital needs, and to harry it with ruinous regulation, taxation, mandates, and competition from tax-funded cronies.

US voters had best wise up to this president's agenda before they are all collecting government relief checks, paid in increasingly worthless Obama dollars.

More from Bob Zubrin

Obama to American people: "It's nothing personal. It's just politics, chumps."

A World With a Human Population Average IQ of 200 Points?

2012-01-17T12:40:00.000-08:00

For simplicity, imagine that instead of our current mean IQ score of 100, humans had an average score of 200. (Experts say this isn't a true "doubling" of intelligence because the IQ scale doesn't start at zero — and furthermore, the test isn't actually designed to yield a score as high as 200 — but we will set aside these qualifications for the purpose of argument.)...there's a very good chance that higher-functioning brains would help us invent technologies to fix some of our bigger problems. Haier explained that just as a team of 100 engineers is more likely to come up with a remarkable innovation than a team of 10 engineers (because there's more total brainpower working on the job), having 7 billion "geniuses" on Earth would likely lead to solutions to some currently intractable issues. _Twice as Intelligent

Image Source
Considering the reality of modern demographic change, indulging in the fantasy of a world of smarter people seems dangerously close to escapism. But if we can picture enough important benefits of having a smarter population, perhaps we can motivate ourselves enough to make it happen?

"When the brain mechanisms that underlie intelligence are understood, it is theoretically possible that those mechanisms can be tweaked to increase IQ," said Richard Haier, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at the University of California at Irvine who studies intelligence. For the first time in human history, he said, "the concept that intelligence can be increased is reasonable."

...Haier believes greater intelligence, which he defines as the ability to learn faster and remember more, would be highly advantageous on an individual scale.
"Experiencing the world with a higher IQ might be more interesting for most people. They might enjoy reading more, might have a greater depth of appreciation for certain things and more insight into life," he told Life's Little Mysteries.

Furthermore, IQs of 200 would allow us to pursue activities and careers that most interest us, not just those we're mentally capable of, Haier said. We could master new languages in a few weeks, for example, or become brain surgeons.

Smarter humans would also be healthier and longer-living, the scientists said, because they'd have a better grasp of what behavior leads to these attributes.

...Even when scientists finally do discover the mechanism for ramping up intelligence, it is highly improbable that everyone would be given an immediate IQ boost. The "haves" would surely benefit from the neuroscience research more than the "have-nots," and this invites a further line of inquiry. As Hunt put it, "Suppose that in some future society, part of the population, say 10 percent, became hugely intelligent, while the rest stayed where we are now or even dropped behind a bit. What would that do to society?" _Twice as Intelligent

That is the most likely future, assuming that genuine intelligence boosting technology is perfected. Once highly intelligent people -- assuming they are emotionally balanced -- learn to cooperate in solving problems, most of them are not likely to want to baby-sit the Idiocracy. It could turn into quite a problem, but not an insoluble one.

Brain Imaging and IQ Video with Richard Haier, UC Irvine A nice overview.

Haier and Jung's Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory of Intelligence PDF

Haier and Jung et al Neuroanatomy of Creativity Abstract

Price of Oil: Economic Breakeven vs. Political Breakeven Prices

2012-01-17T08:19:00.001-08:00

The following table provided by the Bank of Kuwait gathers current reported break-even prices of major oil producing nations:

Oil Break-Even Prices
Nation	US$/Barrel
Bahrain	40
Kuwait	17
Saudi Arabia	30
U.A.E.	25
Oman	40
Qatar	30
Canada's oil sands	33

Based on the formula, profitability of these countries' oil operations are in order:

Profitability at $100/barrel oil
Nation	Break-Even Price	Profitability
Kuwait	17	488%
U.A.E.	25	300%
Saudi Arabia	30	233%
Qatar	30	233%
Canada's oil sands	33	203%
Bahrain	40	150%
Oman	40	150%

__Source

The tables above present rough estimates for economic profitability for oil production in various nations. Such numbers create a "price floor" of sorts for oil markets. But a lot more is involved than mere economic profitability. When entire nations base their budgets upon oil & gas income, another type of "breakeven" enters the4 picture: political breakeven.

Here you can see the political breakeven prices, which countries must receive for their oil in order to meet their fiscal budgetary demands. The political breakeven prices are rising almost every year now. Several oil producing nations are now dependent upon $100 per barrel oil prices now, and others are pushing to keep prices at that level just to maintain a safety margin for their governments.

Fareed Zakaria used the above logic in his predictions that oil prices must stay high -- that they cannot possibly fall much below current market prices.

But he and many others of like mind are ignoring the shadow side of global energy markets: shaky demand caused by the threatened stumbling of economies in Europe, the US, and increasingly, China. If global demand crashes, political breakeven becomes essentially irrelevant.

Peak oil theorists have generally neglected the demand side of the equation, always insisting that demand will grow exponentially, no matter what. We may soon discover whether they were right, as political peak oil threatens to show its ugly nethers yet again.

The whole house of cards is currently built upon a trumped-up demand, which originates largely in one specific country:

If something happens to collapse the bubble of demand in that country, a cascading collapse of commodities demand could very well set in around the globe. Interesting times, as they say.

More: Marginal oil, with its greater risks and higher cost of production, will exert more influence on oil prices as it moves to becoming 10% of global supply by 2035.

Of course, improved technologies will make marginal oil more affordable over time -- to the point that "marginal oil" will probably become more profitable than conventional oil in many of the oil states that have allowed their oil field infrastructure to decay, without investment or upkeep.

Week ending close of oil price at NYMX from 2006 to present

Making sense of such a fluctuating trend requires a lot of background information, along with a finely tuned intuitive sense. Several forces are at work: political, speculative, technological, supply :: demand economics, demographic trends, human nature, and even criminal interests. The balance is subject to rapid and catastrophic shifts.

Anyone who makes confident predictions in such an environment has either vested interests, solid gold insider information, or a declining mentation.

Sounding Out the Hiss of China's Leaking Bubble

2012-01-17T07:14:00.000-08:00

...in Beijing on Tuesday the mood was sombre as the government announced the country’s lowest increase in gross domestic product in 10 quarters. _FinancialTimes

If China's internal growth is stalling, that would put yet another drag on countries such as Germany and the United States, which are counting on strong exports themselves to help compensate for sluggish growth at home. _EconomicTimes

You cannot trust official economic statistics coming from the CCP government, or its regional branches. Not if you wish to protect your assets, and the assets that have been entrusted to you. More from an independent observer inside China:

So what evidence do we have that a construction slowdown may be occurring? Official data on housing starts does exist, but it’s not a reliable metric....A better approach is to look at the market for construction inputs. The clearest picture we have is for steel. According to a friend of mine who is an analyst in the steel and commodities sector, and recently completed a countrywide tour of talking to producers, sentiment in China’s steel industry is as gloomy as he has ever seen it. In November, Chinese steel output was down -8.8% month-on-month, down for the sixth month in row. More importantly, it was down -0.6% year-on-year, indicating this was more than just a seasonal or partial fall-off from the all-time highs it hit in the first half of 2011, which were driven in large part by demand for cheap rebar for construction. Apparently, the demand that drove that boom has almost entirely disappeared. Interestingly, according to one report by Shanghai Security News, steelmakers say that actual sales in 2011 failed to match official “social housing” construction data. Figures released by the China Iron and Steel Association last week indicate that steel output continued falling in December, by 3.87% month-on-month.

Not surprisingly, two things have happened. First, domestic iron ore prices have plummeted as unused stockpiles have accumulated. The China Iron and Steel Association recently announced that its iron ore price index has fallen 22% in the past four months, since the beginning of September, while iron ore inventories at Chinese ports rose to 96.8 million tons by the end of 2011, up 32% from the year before (Chinese iron ore imports were still up 10% y-on-y in December, but analysts expect buying to slow in coming months, due to flagging demand). Second, Chinese steelmakers are suffering. According to Caijing, more than 1/3 of them experienced losses in October and November, and the industry as a whole saw a net loss of RMB 920 million (US$ 146 million) excluding investment gains. The magazine said industry executives foresee an even tougher year in 2012.

Cement and glass also show a marked deceleration in growth. Cement output in November grew 11.2% y-on-y, but that represented a significant fall-off from 17.2% y-on-y expansion for the first 11 months as a whole, and the 17.3% y-on-y growth the industry saw in November 2010. Glass also saw a similar deceleration, growing 7.1% y-on-y in November, compared to 17.0% y-on-y from the first 11 months. Cement prices have been declining steadily over the past few months, a trend that Fitch projects will continue into 2012, due to overcapacity. It notes that, because of their high level of investment in building even more capacity, major Chinese cement producers are cash flow negative.

Copper presents a more unusual picture. China’s copper imports in December hit an all-time record high of 508,942 tons, up 47.7% y-on-y. However, there is little reason to believe this was driven by end user demand. Most analysts I’ve talked to believe it was primarily due to a resurgence in speculative arbitrage based on the gap between copper prices in Shanghai and London, and possibly renewed interest in using stockpiled copper as collateral for obtaining loans — both practices spurred by expectations of monetary easing. In short, the Chinese are buying copper, like homes, to trade not to use.

Of course, land is also a key construction input. I’ve already written about the dramatic fall-off in local government land sales to developers, here as well as here. Newly released year-end figures show that Beijing’s overall revenues from land sales in 2011 dropped 35.7% compared to 2010, despite robust sales in the first half of the year. Land sales revenues for residential projects plunged even more steeply, by 55.4%, while the average auction price for residential land dropped 30.5% (from RMB 7,317 per sq. meter to RMB 5,088). In Shanghai, total land sales revenues dropped 20.0% y-on-y, and average the average price of residential land plummeted 41.0%. _Patrick Chovanec

And so on . . . . A fascinating look at some of the generally unspoken numbers behind the numbers from Patrick Chovanec, Professor at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, in Beijing.

It is remarkable how many people continue to take official statistics seriously, without the slightest degree of scepticism. In the short term, it is probably easier to take everything on trust. In the long term, such an approach is disastrous.

Portions taken from an article previously published on abu al-fin

3 Dimensional Printing of Living Cells in Hydrogel Layers

2012-01-17T00:30:00.001-08:00

An optimized 3D inkjet printing process is demonstrated for structuring alginate into a tissue-like microvasculature capable of supporting physiological flow rates. Optimizing the reaction at the single-droplet level enables wet hydrogel droplets to be stacked, thus overcoming their natural tendancy to spread and coalesce. Live cells can be patterned using this process and it can be extended to a range of other hydrogels. _Advanced Materials

...Thus, it would take just under 2 hours to print a 1 cm thick tissue precursor graft and just over 5 h 30 to print a 3 cm thick kidney precursor. _Advanced Materials PDF

Swiss scientists are using a special inkjet printer to assemble three dimensional living constructs that resemble living tissues. They are still in the early stages of the research, but are achieving some interesting results.
They are working on a technique that should eventually allow them to “print” living constructs resembling human tissues in which cells can develop and interact in a coordinated and physiological manner. Their research results have recently been published in the scientific journal Advanced Materials.

“We have not yet created tissue, strictly speaking,” explains Professor Jürgen Brügger, head of EPFL’s Microsystems 1 Laboratory. “At this stage, we have essentially studied a way in which to structure biological materials in three dimensions; this research will improve cell culture and then will eventually be used as a base for creating tissues.”

...To make up a coherent whole, the cells need an environment that provides the right kinds of signals that induce very specific behavior in each of the cells – proliferation, migration, differentiation or death. In natural tissues, these signals come from molecules that make up a complex extracellular matrix (ECM). By studying the connections and communications taking place between cells and between cells and ECM molecules, the scientists were able to reconstruct this matrix and thus create a new kind of biological ink.

On a technical level, the researchers from EPFL’s two Microsystems Laboratories – under the leadership of professors Jürgen Brugger and Philippe Renaud – focused on developing a gel that could be used as a base from which the tissue could be constructed, as well as a strategy for printing droplets.

...Even though it will still be quite some time before tissue can be constructed, this technology could lead to very promising applications on the medium term. “ An exiting avenue would be to develop 3D constructs that function like human tissues and could be used as models for testing new drugs,” says Lutolf. “This is not only very interesting in a biological sense, but could also reduce the need for animal testing.” _Physorg

Learning to create life-like 3 dimensional cell cultures for research, and learning to create 3-D lab-made living tissues for replacement, are not quite the same things. But the two lines of research are likely to borrow from and contribute to each other, extensively.

Cross-posted from Al Fin Longevity

Massive Unconventional Hydrocarbon Resource Rising in Importance

2012-01-16T13:49:00.001-08:00

Methane hydrate, as the substance is known, has long been regarded by oil and gas companies as a nuisance because it can block marine drilling rigs.

Now a study by Statoil, Norway's state oil firm and a leading global gas producer, suggests it should be reclassified as a major fuel resource, with enough buried in the oceans to power the world for decades or even centuries.

"The energy content of methane occurring in hydrate form is immense, possibly exceeding the combined energy content of all other known fossil fuels," said Espen Andersen, Statoil's exploration manager in unconventional hydrocarbons, who will present his study at an energy conference next week. _Australian_via_SundayTimes

Der Spiegel

Methane, trapped in an icy cage of water molecules, occurs in permafrost and, in even greater quantities, beneath the ocean floor. It forms only under specific pressure and temperature conditions. These conditions are especially prevalent in the ocean along the continental shelves, as well as in the deeper waters of semi-enclosed seas (see graphic).

World reserves of the frozen gas are enormous. Geologists estimate that significantly more hydrocarbons are bound in the form of methane hydrate than in all known reserves of coal, natural gas and oil combined. "There is simply so much of it that it cannot be ignored," says leading expert Gerhard Bohrman of the Research Center for Ocean Margins... _DerSpiegel

Researchers around the world are scrambling to find economical ways of recovering this vast hydrocarbon resource.
One intriguing idea for the simultaneous recovery of energy and sequestration of global warming gas is proposed by the transformation of methane hydrates to carbon dioxide hydrates with the injection of liquid CO2. Here we use molecular dynamics simulations to show that the replacement can take place without melting of the network of hydrogen-bonded water molecules. Depending on the distance to the interface between the liquid CO2 and solid clathrate hydrate, we find that the replacement occurs either via direct swapping of methane and CO2 or via a transient co-occupation of both methane and CO2 in one cavity. Our results suggest that, with a careful design of the operation condition, it is possible to replace methane from methane hydrates with CO2 in the solid phase without much change in the geological stability. _ACS Abstract

ACS
A team of American and Japanese researchers are in Alaska this month to test a new method of extracting methane hydrates from rich Arctic resources. They intend to inject CO2 into the hydrates in hopes that the waste gas will replace the more valuable methane in the ice cage, freeing up the methane for extraction and use.
This month, scientists will test a new way to extract methane from beneath the frozen soil of Alaska: they will use waste carbon dioxide from conventional wells to force out the desired natural gas.

...The test will use the Ignik Sikumi well, which was drilled on an ice platform in Prudhoe Bay last winter. Specialized equipment has been installed, including fibre-optic cables to measure the temperature down the well, and injection pipes for the CO2. “None of this is standard equipment; it had to be built to design,” says Boswell.

...During the test, the researchers will inject nitrogen gas into the hydrate deposit to try to push away any free water in the system, which would otherwise freeze into hydrates on exposure to CO2 and block up the well. The next phase is to pump in isotopically labelled CO2, and let it ‘soak’ for a week before seeing what comes back up. This will help to test whether the injected carbon is really swapping places with the carbon in the hydrates. Finally, the team will depressurize the well and attempt to suck up all the methane and carbon dioxide. This will also give them a chance to test extraction using depressurization — sucking liquids out of the hydrate deposits to reduce pressure in the well and coax the methane out of the water crystals. “We’ll continue to depressurize until we run out of time or money, and see how much methane we can get out that way,” says Boswell. _Nature

As humans devise more and better ways to utilise methane in place of crude oil, it makes sense to learn how to extract the richest reserves of methane in the crust.

We do not yet know how much of the methane resource originates abiotically in the mantle -- and thus can be theoretically seen as "renewable methane." It is likely to be substantial. And thanks to the giant tectonic plate mechanism, with ongoing subduction of organics-rich oceanic crusts under continental crusts, biogenic methane is, to a large extent, renewable as well -- on an extended time scale, and on a continuous basis. Where do you think most of these methane hydrates came from in the first place? No matter. There are a lot more where those came from.

Adapted from an article published on Al Fin Energy

Who Needs Apocalypse When You've Got Detroit?

2012-01-15T12:02:00.002-08:00

Why use explosives when you can achieve similar results through political means?

Image Source

Failure like this is not built overnight. Decades of corruption, sloth, bad hiring decisions, political cronyism and depraved indifference to the needs of the poor were required to bring things to such a pass. No doubt Detroit has a generous pension program for all the wastrels and incompetents whose combined efforts created this train wreck. These people somehow manage to protect themselves even as they blight the lives and hopes of the inner city kids they were hired to serve. _WalterRussellMead

Leftist crony policies of the US Democratic Party are on display in Detroit, Michigan. If this level of devastation were to occur almost anywhere else in the US, the place would be declared a state of emergency, placed under marshal law, and razed to the ground for reconstruction. But it is only business as usual in the poster child city of the true-blue Obamaesque world of the new US political triad: The Democratic Party, organised labour, and the mob.

It is hard to see how a city recovers when things have fallen this far. Detroit’s voters do not seem interested in good governance, either unwilling or unable to penalize incompetence at the polls; the political class spouts blue liberal slogans but appears to have the compassion and generosity of a pack of velociraptors; the city’s core institutions have been so corroded and degraded after decades of decline that there is little hope for improvement anytime soon. _WalterRussellMead

How do US Democratic Party-dominated governments respond when the going gets tough? They cut vital services.

Located [next to Detroit] in an area already plagued by high crime and widespread urban decay, Highland Park has essentially signed a proverbial death warrant by cutting public power. The city has already lost nearly half of its residents over the past two decades and is reportedly $58 million in debt -- but the elimination of its street lights basically ensures its continued downward spiral.

"How can you darken any city?" asked Victoria Dowdell, a resident of Highland Park who, along with her neighbors, must now deal with pitch-black public streets after dark. "I think that was a disgrace."

Detroit has also cut various city services over the years as it edges towards bankruptcy. Mike Shedlock from Business Insider wrote last December that "Motor City" has been headed towards financial insolvency for many years. An attempt to stave off collapse, city officials there have also cut major services like street repair, garbage collection, and police forces in some areas. _Michigan Third World America

As Michelle Obama so often tells her husband, referring to the ingrates who fail to worship the first couple of the US with sufficient adoration: let them eat cake -- if they can find it!

Okay, perhaps she only behaves as if she says such things, without actually saying them. At least in public.

Who needs apocalypse when you have Doombama?

More on turning out the lights in crime-ridden cities

More here

Adapted from an article published previously on abu al-fin

Apocalypse the Easy Way: Low Yield Nukes in Orbit -- EMP

2012-01-15T00:32:00.087-08:00

...what do you think would happen to society without power, water, food, and fuel? It’s not a pretty picture. People will begin dying off by the end of the first week, those without a minimal storage of water or those who live in regions where water is not immediately available to them. Desperation will result in a rampage of crime with hoards searching for food and water. Within several weeks, a complete civil breakdown will be underway as mass migration out of the major cities creates extremely dangerous conditions while people search for food, water, and supplies. _ModernSurvivalBlog

China Developing Electromagnetic Weapons_More Here

In addition to causing the immediate damage and failure of transformers, there is also evidence that GIC may be responsible for the onset of long-term damage to transformers and other key power grid assets. Damaged transformers require repair or replacement with new units. Currently most large transformers are manufactured in foreign countries and replacements would likely involve long production lead times in excess of a year. _EENews.net PDF

In excess of a year? After a year, it is estimated that as many of 90% of the residents of a high tech society would have lost their lives to the wide range of complications and repercussions of a long-term power outage.

EMP Commission Report 7MB PDF Download

An EMP attack is different since it only requires but one nuclear weapon, detonated 300 miles above the middle of the United States. One bomb. The launch could even be done from a container ship somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico and in that instant, the war is already over and won.

...The first few million deaths are tragically obvious. Those aboard commercial flights, and even most private flights, those in nursing homes, hospices, and hospitals. The next few million are obvious as well. Those with severe aliments requiring careful daily medication or treatment, such as those awaiting transplants, people undergoing dialysis, those with severe heart ailments both known and not yet realized.

...Our interstate highways will become nightmare paths of exile as our largely urban population tries to fan out to find food that once was shipped in. Millions could and will die on that road. Where do they get safe water? The nearby stream or river is now a dump for raw sewage since purification plants are off line.

...Within a month the next level of die off will be in full development. Those who survive the initial onset of illnesses from polluted water and food, and survive, will nevertheless be weakened, knock down a level...At what point do we begin to kill each other for food, water, shelter? At what point does a small town mobilize, barricade itself in and make clear that any who enter will be shot because there is not enough food to share

...By sixty days true starvation will be killing off millions and by 120 days mass starvation will be the norm. Those lucky enough to be in rich farm producing areas, with the knowledge of how to gather food by hand, and then preserve it, will have a temporary surplus, but even then, if they do not ration it out wisely, as did our colonial forefathers, they too will starve before the next crop is in the ground come spring... _Forstchen

Over 250 million North Americans are likely to die of various causes over the first 6 to 9 months, unless massive assistance arrives from the outside. But since the outside is likely to be at war with itself, how likely is North America to receive foreign aid? After all, it is usually North America that is the source of most foreign aid to the outside.

EENews.Net PDFDuring an overnight power blackout one hot July night in 1977 in New York City, dozens of city blocks were destroyed by fire, almost 2,000 stores were looted and vandalised, and most of the tragedy that occurred that short summer night will never be known. That is from one night without power in a modern city. Imagine 6 months to a year without power over most of an entire continent.

The map above focuses upon the most vulnerable areas in the US grid. But if advocates of the highly vulnerable smart grid have their way, the entire map will be the vulnerable area.

One reason that Al Fin Energy blog often focuses on decentralised production of power and fuels, is because of the enormous vulnerability of a massively interconnected system which has inadequate backups and a rapidly depleting supply of human capital which would be capable of instituting needed immediate repairs and workarounds.

You might think that having a lot of big solar electric plants and wind farms hooked to the grid would be helpful at such times. But no, they would make the situation even worse. Think about it a bit, and if you have any knowledge of the systems involved, you will see what I mean.

Where would the fatal strike arise? Most EMP activists are concerned about an attack from rogue states such as Iran or North Korea -- perhaps via an intermediary such as Venezuela, Cuba, or a ship-launched missile offshore. Al Fin analysts suspect that a more likely scenario involves a dual function space launch by the space services of an established space power such as China or Russia. With the simultaneous orbital placement of multiple satellites, a small yield nuclear device or two might wander off into the night to await subsequent orders to detonate in a particular orbital location. Or such a device might exist in conjunction with a conventional satellite that "fails", and is accepted as "space junk" until needed to fulfill its primary mission.

There a number of possible scenarios which would leave the target of the attack defenseless to stop the initiating event, the high altitude orbital EMP.

As the US falls more deeply into entitlement debt, makes itself more vulnerable to uneducable and unassimilable illegal immigrants, makes war on its own private sector business and commerce, cuts its defenses against foreign threat, shuts down its energy infrastructure due to faux environmental concerns, and moves closer to a catastrophic energy infrastructure of vulnerable "smart" grids paired with unreliable big wind and solar -- you may begin to see a society rotting from within. Such a society is not resilient to the type of attack and damage which is described in the links above.

Make your plans accordingly.

First published at Al Fin Potpourri

Can Codecademy Save the World?

2012-01-13T11:17:00.000-08:00

We are socializing, working, consuming, and living in a world increasingly defined by programs. Learning to code is the best way to understand what all those programs do, or even to recognize that they are there in the first place...Just a couple of years ago, I was getting blank stares or worse when I would suggest to colleagues and audiences that they learn code, or else. "Program or be programmed," became my mantra...If you know how to code, you can get a high-paying job right now, or make valuable stuff right now. You will understand more about how the world works, and become a participating member in the digital society unfolding before us...

...while learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free. _CNN Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist

Doug Rushkoff is not the first tech enthusiast to be gushing about Codecademy, and he will not be the last. You may want to go to Codecademy and try out a few exercises, just to get a feel for what is going on there.

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of critics of Codecademy who see the project -- for all its early success -- eventually coming to a bad end, like many similar projects in the past. Scott Gray worked on a very similar "free coding tutorial" project a number of years ago, and provides a number of pointed comments regarding Codecademy and computer tutorials in general. Scott also has some criticism for Khan Academy's approach to pedagogy, so he is not afraid of speaking his mind.

Before you dismiss Gray's criticisms as those of a frustrated competitor whose similar early efforts did not work out, you should probably read this extended blog posting which relates the development and evolution of Scott's ideas on teaching practises (pedagogy), and what kinds of pedagogical approaches he is offering as alternatives to Codecademy and Khan Academy.

Scott Gray's emphasis is math pedagogy using software and teacher coaching. But he comes at math from a different direction than almost all other US educators. Scott rejects the traditional formulaic (or "algorithmic") approach to teaching and learning math, in favour of a more exploratory, experimental, and individual creative "pattern-forming" approach to learning and using mathematical concepts.

The exploratory approach to math that Scott promotes in his work has a long history, and is more widely used in math pedagogy in some countries other than the US. It is an approach that trains the intuition to "feel" and manipulate the mathematics internally in a dynamic manner. The approach is certainly different to the one that Khan Academy uses, and Gray explains the difference in his two articles linked above.

As for Codecademy, Gray has other criticisms of the newly popular website which should be considered carefully. Certainly Gray is not the same sort of Codecademy booster that Doug Rushkoff seems to be.

The truth in this case would seem to be somewhere in between. Codecademy allows for some quick and easy experimentation with basic computer coding methods. But it has important limitations, which may not be clear to the novice coder at first glance. Gray provides a service by pointing out that a new coder who completes the Codecademy series is still likely to be at a loss if placed in a programming environment in the real world. Perhaps Codecademy will move beyond these limitations in the near future.

In the future we will look at some of these new trends in pedagogy (mastery learning, adaptive learning, exploratory learning etc), and attempt to predict how they will bring about particular changes in how human brains will work in the future. Changes which will make the "Flynn Effect" seem trivial in comparison.

Curse Those Damned Criegee Biradicals and the Damned Clouds Too!

2012-01-13T08:02:00.001-08:00

The researchers found that the Criegee biradicals react more rapidly than first thought and will accelerate the formation of sulphate and nitrate in the atmosphere. These compounds will lead to aerosol formation and ultimately to cloud formation with the potential to cool the planet. _SciTechDaily

National Post
In light of Dr. David Whitehouse winning his bet with warminst James Annan, having been proved correct that there would be no new global warming records set by 2011, it is long past time for the IPCC Orthodoxy of Climate Hysteria to revisit its scientific theories of global climate.

In keeping with the observed lack of predicted warming over the past several years, a recent scientific discovery of natural molecules in the atmosphere which seem to exert a cooling effect suggests that the science is not at all settled, and the debate is certainly not over.

Artificial Method of Generating Clouds by Aerosol Spray
Scientists and engineers who are worried about runaway global warming -- an unlikely event, by the way -- have suggested a wide range of geoengineering schemes, including the aerosol spray seen above, and the atmospheric reflectors pictured below.

J. Storrs Hall Aerostats
But the discovery of the Criegee biradicals raises the question of whether instead of runaway warming, we should be worried about runaway cooling instead! Apparently these biradicals are generated naturally by plants -- plants which may have developed a grudge against humans based upon a long history of being eaten by them. If the plants get angry enough, who knows what they might do?

The planet seems to be in the middle of a cooling climate phase, triggered by a lull in cyclic solar activity. The CERN CLOUD study suggests as much. Even worse, the more time that goes by, the more overdue we will be for the next glacial age. And if you want to talk about global killers, global warming cannot hold a candle to massive glaciation.

What will the IPCC Orthodoxy of Carbon Hysteria do if forced to confront its own sloppy science, failed predictions, and desperate need for an overhaul of its climate theories? It really doesn't matter. Because what we will be told by our overlords is that whether it is global warming or global cooling, the solution is still the same: Transfer hundreds of billions of dollars per year from western nations to emerging and third world nations, using the UN as an intermediary and distributor of funding.

But they will still curse the damned sceptics, the Criegee biradicals, cosmic rays, and anything else that causes them undue work and revisioning. Who do these little people think they are, next to the Orthodoxy? Who indeed?

Can Humans Invent New Ways of Knowing and Discovery In Time?

2012-01-13T00:28:00.000-08:00

Michael Nielsen is a pioneer of quantum computing and a champion of open-source science. Nielsen sees the Polymath Projects -- an open online group effort by mathematicians around the world to solve interesting problems on the edge of mathematical knowledge -- as a prototype for what is possible in open-source science as a whole.
A project that I really like a lot is one called the Polymath Project, which has involved a large number of people, mostly mathematicians, from all over the world. They have started using blogs and wikis to collaborate together on difficult, unsolved mathematical problems. It’s a place where they can pool all their different types of expertise, hopefully get a conversation going, and maybe make some progress on problems that any individual amongst them might find very, very challenging. They have had some big successes. They have also had some other projects that haven’t gone so well, which is about par for the course in research. If you’re not having a lot of failures, it means you’re trying problems that are too easy. But it is exciting to see them doing this and pioneering a new way of doing research.

...By and large, [universities are] not standing in the way except through inertia. As a scientist, you build your career by publishing papers, basically. If you’re spending a lot of time doing that, it’s hard to make time to, say, share your ideas online or to share computer code online or any of the other things you might potentially be doing, even though those things have tremendous scientific value. So, in some sense, the entrenched system of reward that universities use is standing in the way of open science, but it’s not because of anything malicious on anybody’s part. It’s just that we have this established system, and it’s very difficult to get everybody to change at the same time. _Boston Review: Michael Nielsen
Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen

Nielsen's open-source group approach to problem solving and discovery is one possible answer to the daunting problem of a rapidly building data glut in science. Scientists have been aware of this problem at least since the 1960s, but it is becoming particularly acute in the 21st century:

When the datasets are so large that they become unwieldy even for the Internet, innovators are spurred to invent new forms of sharing. For example, Tranche, the system behind ProteomeCommons, created its own technical protocol for sharing terabytes of data over the Net, so that a single source isn't responsible for pumping out all the information; the process of sharing is itself shared across the network. And the new Linked Data format makes it easier than ever to package data into small chunks that can be found and reused. The ability to access and share over the Net further enhances the new economics of deletion; data that otherwise would not have been worth storing have new potential value because people can find and share them.

...the biological system of an organism is complex beyond imagining. Even the simplest element of life, a cell, is itself a system. A new science called systems biology studies the ways in which external stimuli send signals across the cell membrane. Some stimuli provoke relatively simple responses, but others cause cascades of reactions. These signals cannot be understood in isolation from one another. The overall picture of interactions even of a single cell is more than a human being made out of those cells can understand. In 2002, when Hiroaki Kitano wrote a cover story on systems biology for Science magazine -- a formal recognition of the growing importance of this young field -- he said: "The major reason it is gaining renewed interest today is that progress in molecular biology ... enables us to collect comprehensive datasets on system performance and gain information on the underlying molecules." Of course, the only reason we're able to collect comprehensive datasets is that computers have gotten so big and powerful. Systems biology simply was not possible in the Age of Books.

...The problem -- or at least the change -- is that we humans cannot understand systems even as complex as that of a simple cell. It's not that were awaiting some elegant theory that will snap all the details into place. The theory is well established already: Cellular systems consist of a set of detailed interactions that can be thought of as signals and responses. But those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them. The science of such systems requires computers to store all the details and to see how they interact. Systems biologists build computer models that replicate in software what happens when the millions of pieces interact. It's a bit like predicting the weather, but with far more dependency on particular events and fewer general principles.

Models this complex -- whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic -- often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave. At their most complex these are sciences of emergence and complexity, studying properties of systems that cannot be seen by looking only at the parts, and cannot be well predicted except by looking at what happens. _theatlantic: David Weinberger_via_J.Curry_via_WUWT

Too Big to Know by David Weinberger. Weinberger is a philosopher, author, marketing guru, and more.

In the early 1950s, psychologists of learning attempted to describe different levels of thinking and learning:

Recognizing that there are different levels of thinking behaviors that are important to learning, Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl (1956), developed a classification of levels of intellectual behaviors. This taxonomy... contains three domains: the cognitive, psychomotor and affective. The cognitive domain had six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. _ Synergy PDF

Moving up the levels from primary recall knowledge up to comprehension, application, synthesis etc. represents increasing levels of understanding and ability to interconnect and utilise knowledge in productive ways.

Here is an example of an attempt to climb up the levels of knowledge, from the field of climate science: A physicist attempts to build a mental model of the radiation balance of the Earth from basic principles. Following physicist Robert Brown's (Duke U.) logic as he tries to make sense of a complex dynamic system, may give you an idea of the process of moving from general knowledge to the early stages of understanding in science.

Nielsen and Weinberger would like to help find ways around the impasse with which modern human societies are confronted. But it is not clear that entrenched modern institutions -- academia, government, media etc -- are as willing to help. In many ways, humans that are good with their brains -- and capable of teaming up with others who are also good with their brains -- represent a significant threat to current ways of doing things, or of preventing things from getting done in many cases.

Human societies are confronted with some very serious problems which may prove to be the end of us all. For example, most governments of advanced societies are wasting time and enormous resources fighting phantom, non-existent problems such as carbon hysteria. To fight this phantom problem, they are committing their citizens to a progressive energy starvation which will inevitably handicap their societies just at the moment that they are being hit the hardest by the twin problems of debt and demographic decline. Tragically, the institutions of academia and the media appear to be solidly behind governments in this suicidal agenda.

It seems a bit futile to worry about the problems and solutions presented by Weinberger and Nielsen, when our own governments and societal institutions are busy doing us in. But in reality, humans can use the powerful networking resources of modern technologies to move beyond their governments and other institutions -- at least to an important, if limited, extent.

Consider this a wakeup call of sorts. A marvelous future waits for us, if we will only wake up and make it happen.

Solving Nuclear Waste: Accelerator Driven Transmutation Reactor

2012-01-12T07:50:00.001-08:00

A first-of-a-kind reactor system has been set up in Belgium by coupling a subcritical assembly with a particle accelerator. The work is a major step in a program to research advanced waste management.

The equipment, known as Guinevere, is a demonstration model that supports the project for a larger version that will be called Myrrha (Multipurpose Hybrid Research Reactor for High-tech Applications). It was assembled by France's National Centre for Scientific Research and is managed by the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK-CEN) at Mol, about 50 kilometres east of Antwerp. The overall project is supported by 12 other European laboratories and the European Commission.

Nuclear terminology classifies an item of equipment as in a critical state if the chain fission reaction is self-sustaining and each reaction leads on average to one more. The term supercritical means the number of fissions is increasing, while subcritical means it is decreasing and will therefore dwindle to nothing. _World Nuclear News

Symmetry Magazine: Myrrha Reference Scheme
Dangerous radioactive isotopes with long half-lives can be transmuted to elements with much shorter half-lives, using spallation neutrons. Spallation neutrons are generated when a beam of protons is accelerated into a spallation target. Neutrons, lacking a charge, do not have to overcome the "coulomb barrier", and can be much more readily incorporated into atomic nuclei to transmute one isotope into another.

(Clarification: In the early stages of this research, neutrons will be generated via Deuterium - Tritium collisions. Later iterations of the project will use the proton beam - spallation target method.)

Myrrha will be able to produce radioisotopes and doped silicon, but its research functions would be particularly well suited to investigating transmutation. This is when certain radioactive isotopes with long half lives are made to 'catch' a neutron and thereby change into a different isotope that will decay more quickly to a stable form with no radioactivity. If achievable on an industrial scale, transmutation could greatly simplify the permanent geologic disposal of radioactive waste. Myrrha can also be used to test the feasibility of lead fast reactor technology and is seen as complimentary to the Jules Horowitz Reactor, a thermal spectrum reactor under construction in Cadarache, France.

The total cost of Myrrha has been put at €960 million ($1.2 billion), with 40% of this coming from the Belgian government. SCK-CEN is looking to set up an international consortium to ensure additional financing and has completed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese Academy of Sciences focusing on Myrrha. _World Nuclear News

DLR BLogs: Myrrha Cutaway
While this European (and soon, Chinese) research is quite preliminary in terms of real world application to the nuclear waste problem, it should produce a great deal of data which will assist in designing future, waste-burning nuclear reactors.

Parenthetically, transmutation by the addition of a neutron is supposed to be behind the "cold fusion" or low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) efforts of a number of startup energy companies -- including Andrea Rossi's Leonardo Corporation, Defkalion of Greece, and Brillouin Energy. The methods being used by these startups for converting protons into neutrons is far from clear at this point.

In addition, sub-critical accelerator driven nuclear reactor designs have also been proposed for the use of thorium 232, an abundant fuel which is fertile rather than fissile -- it must be fed neutrons for conversion to fissile U 233, which spontaneously splits into smaller nuclei and more neutrons.

How Old Should Children Be Before You Teach Them to Make Pipe Bombs?

2012-01-12T00:04:00.003-08:00

According to a report in the Wednesday edition of the Lübecker Nachrichten newspaper, [a] 39-year-old teacher, who has not been named, made gunpowder together with his students who then filled pipes with the explosive. The bombs were later detonated on a nearby heath, using sparklers as detonators. The newspaper reported that the teacher built bombs with classes of fifth-grade students between 2009 and 2011. _Spiegel

The teacher in question taught fifth-grade students at a Waldorf school in Lubeck, Germany.

Here is more about Waldorf education:The central focus for the Waldorf teacher is the development of that essence in every person that is independent of external appearance, by instilling in his/her pupils an understanding of and appreciation for their background and place in the world, not primarily as members of any specific nation, ethnic group or race, but as members of humanity and world citizens. _WaldorfAnswers

After skimming the Waldorf Answers website, I confess that I was unable to find a reference to the proper age for teaching children to make pipe bombs.

Spiegel: Lubeck, Germany
Both Waldorf and Montessori schools are oriented toward a more "hands-on" and experimental / experiential approach to education, than is the case for a conventional western education. This is also the case for the very daring curriculum devised by John David Garcia.
Full Garcia early childhood curriculum here.

Knowledge is power. Competence is power. Creativity is power. Clear discernment of reality is power. The best educational approaches seek to instill in students not only knowledge, but competence, creativity, and discernment. Successful graduates of such programs are likely to be quite powerful -- and quite dangerous to any given established order. The more petty and corrupt the established order, the greater danger to the establishment are well-educated young people.

In the age of radical religious terrorism (originating principally within Islam at this time), it may seem outlandish for a teacher to help students make pipe bombs. But if the basic lessons of chemistry, physics, engineering, safety, and demolition were considered valid lessons to teach to a child -- at what age would it be appropriate?

"No syllabus in the world contains something like this," the mother of one of the students told the newspaper. She said that when the bombs were detonated, the students were only 30 meters (100 feet) away and were not wearing protective glasses or ear protectors. "The explosion was so powerful that the children felt the shockwave in their guts," she said. There were apparently no cases of injuries, however.

A spokesman for the Lübeck public prosecutors office confirmed to the newspaper that an investigation was being conducted into the case, on suspicion that the teacher had committed an offense against Germany's law on the use of explosives. If the teacher is convicted, he could face a fine or up to three years in prison.

Hans Peter Scherer, the head of the association that runs the private Waldorf school, also confirmed the investigation but said that the teacher "continues to enjoy the trust" of the management and the parents. _Spiegel

It is the opinion of Al Fin educational theorists and child psychologists that children should be taught many advanced skills from the earliest ages of pre-school and school. Among those subjects would be food growing and preparation, basic shelter construction, basic survival skills of orienteering, firemaking, survival foods, finding water, signaling for help etc, basic individual and group self-defense, and more.

On the topic of edged weapons, firearms, archery, and explosives, experts of the Al Fin Institute of Advanced Childhood Educational Studies agree that all children of sound and stable mind should be taught these deadly skills. The main point of contention among these luminaries is the exact age when children should become competent at such dangerous practises. All are agreed on the point that such skills should only be taught within a philosophical matrix of the limits of and strict non-initiation of violence, using the best safety precautions available.

A well-educated child is a dangerous child. While this concept seems quite foreign to modern psychologically neotenous and sheltered societies, it is in fact transparently obvious and necessary to anyone who expects humans to progress to the next level.

More on this concept, and how it relates to the much needed revival of the concept of multiple "rites of passage of childhood" later.

Big Wind and Solar Power: When Al Fin Changed His Mind

2012-01-11T09:05:00.002-08:00

Actually, Al Fin has changed his mind on many things over the years. But this is one topic that you can check for yourselves. Do a topic search on "Renewable Energy" on either alfin2100 (Al Fin) or alfin2300 (Al Fin Energy). You can trace the progression of Dr. Fin's attitude toward big wind and big solar from "very favourable" all the way to "very unfavourable." What happened? No money changed hands to prompt the transformation. It was merely a question of looking at verifiable facts over time, and being compelled logically to change.

But in the larger world, big wind and big solar still have their champions -- from the US White House to the big money green activist groups to the EU bureaucratic apparatus to big money investors who benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, such as Warren Buffett.

Now we are being told that "renewable energy" has surpassed nuclear power in terms of "energy generation." Does this mean that big wind and big solar are delivering on their promises? Well, no, not really. Look at the chart below, which breaks down the categories of "renewable energy."

RealClearEnergy

The recent reports that renewable energy has overtaken nuclear power as a source of primary energy for the nation have created the mistaken impression that all the windmill and solar panel construction is having a decisive impact. In fact, as the Energy Information Administration's December Monthly Report reveals, 80 percent of "renewable energy" is still supplied by hydroelectricity, wood and biofuels. Twelve percent comes from wind and 1.2 percent from solar. An additional 6 percent comes from burning waste - which not everyone regards as "renewable" - and 2.5 percent comes from geothermal energy.

...Under this set of definitions, the consumption of renewables actually exceeded nuclear power before 1987, until nuclear gained ground as more reactors were completed. Renewables declined after 2000 while nuclear continued to expand from improved performance by existing reactors, even though no new reactors have been built. The slight ascent in renewables over the last few years has come from the expansion of wood, biomass and wind. _RealClearEnergy

It is important to emphasise that no matter how much big wind "capacity" is built, that is not the same thing as power production. And just as important, one must point out that the wind tends not to blow at the time the power is needed. This is a fatal flaw in the big wind scheme. Not only must expensive backup power capacity be built and kept on constant standby to supply any wind deficits, but if wind power output should happen to be excessive in relation to demand, the utility must find a way to dump significant power. In the US Pacific northwest, federal judges have forced utilities to pay wind developers for power, even if the utility could not use it!

This moment-to-moment unreliability of wind generation has been likened to "throwing a live grenade into the power grid control booth." Wind farms are also harmful to the health of people living nearby, and to birds and bats -- for what that is worth to your tender hearts.

Big solar power has many of the same problems, except it is even more expensive than wind. Mr. Obama invested billions of dollars in US taxpayer dollars into already failed or soon-to-fail big wind and big solar projects. But since the backers of these projects were political backers of Mr. Obama, a few $billion wasted here or there doesn't amount to much.

The Obama administration -- for reasons of its own -- is rather slow at catching on to the ruinous effects of the mad pursuit of big wind and big solar, on the national power system and economy. But the governments of Spain and Japan have already been forced to drop their most of their generous government subsidies for these green wastrels, out of a return to basic economic common sense.

Sharp contraction ahead for solar power industry

Vestas Wind Systems shares lost 92% of value since 2008

General problems with wind power ... articles from Master Resource blog

This slideshare presentation on wind power started the shift in Al Fin's opinion of big wind power

It should be noted that Al Fin took a sabbatical from his day job a number of years ago, in order to get involved in one of his greatest enthusiasms -- renewable energy, esp. wind and solar power. He expanded his knowledge of power systems, electrical engineering, and residential, commercial, and industrial electricity, in order to be able to participate in the installation of renewable power systems. He had a great deal of fun in the process, and felt he was accomplishing some good things.

He had to return to his day job, but he retained his warm feeling toward wind and solar power. But along the way, Dr. Fin learned that there is a tremendous difference in justifiability between a small, off-grid wind or solar installation and a giant wind farm or solar plant. With a small installation, one keeps a close watch on his power usage, power generation, and battery storage state. With large wind or solar installations, there is no way to control for intermittency, unreliability, the huge cost of power standby, and many other problems.

And thus was a mind changed. And a voice that had once promoted big renewables changed to one that criticises them quite harshly.

Minds that are incapable of changing, are minds that have passed their due date -- regardless of the age of the individual. The most fruitful way of understanding a controversial field where the opponents are closely matched, is to study the arguments of those who have changed their minds. Sometimes the arguments justify the change, and sometimes not, but they are typically informative and educational both for what they include and for what they leave out.

Trillions of dollars are on the line in connection with the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming argument. If you want to study a high stakes disagreement, that would be an excellent place to start. BTW, Al Fin changed his mind on that topic as well.

Neo-Malthusianism vs. Anti-Malthusianism: Can Humans Survive?

2012-01-10T04:29:00.001-08:00

I think I may fairly make two postulata.

First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.

Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. _Thomas Malthus Essay pub. 1798

From those postulates, Malthus argues that population grows exponentially while food production can only grow in a linear fashion.

Keith MontgomeryOur first indication that something may be wrong with Malthus' argument lies in the colours in the map above.

If population growth were necessarily exponential as Malthus argues, the colors on the map above would be uniformly pink to red, indicating high fertility and likely geometric population growth -- as in Sub Saharan Africa. The fact that several relatively prosperous countries exhibit either very low -- and even negative -- population growth suggests that the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian thesis may be in error.

Edward Morgan 5 Stage Demographic Transition
And indeed, if we look at the 5 stage demographic transition graphic above (extended from Warren Thompson's 4 stage demographic transition graphic seen below), we see what happens when Malthusian man meets post-Malthusian woman, and very low fertility rates appear to reverse the earlier Malthusian exponential growth.

Some current trends lead to some fascinating projections of the future demographic make-up of the most technologically advanced factions of our global society. The low birth rate, especially in Europe, has allowed for an empowerment of women unseen before in history. Many are essentially swapping children for careers. _NewGeography

Keith Montgomery: Warren Thompson's 4 Stage Demographic TransitionWarren Thompson's 4 stage demographic transition model, seen above, was devised in 1929 -- long before the invention of modern contraception, and the modern demographic collapse. Thompson's model suggests that as societies move through industrialisation and into a post-industrial state, that death rates and birth rates will converge, leading to a stable population.

Despite modern contraceptive methods, and the ongoing demographic collapse of Russia, Japan, and the greater part of Europe, neo-Malthusian doomsterism is alive and well. Mish's Global Economic Analysis presents an extremely coherent and up to date version of the neo-Malthusian vision only today. As you can see from Mish's piece, peak oil (and many other forms of) doomerism is closely tied to the neo-Malthusian vision.

Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet's finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing. The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do... _Mish

Such thoughts must have occurred to melancholic misanthropes since the coming of Australopithecus, although not in so many words (modern human language not having originated yet).

The neo-Malthusian website of Paul Chefurka is an abbreviated version of what you can find in much more detail at dieoff.org. Wherever you look, such doomerism is solidly based upon Thomas Malthus' kindly but jaundiced vision. Such authors appear not to have noticed the rapid fall in fertility across the developed world. Not having noticed the demographic transition, they are not forced to confront the implications.

We should also mention the anti-Malthusians, who feel that the growth of human populations can be a good thing, rather than an unmitigated evil -- as the neo-Malthusians appear to view population growth.

population is not just a factor in consumption. It is the basis for “human capital.” No humans, no human capital. Humans are not just mouths, but also hands and brains. As famously noted by Julian Simon, they are the Ultimate Resource. This is something Neo-Malthusians have difficulty in comprehending. _Indur Goklany

But at this point in time, both the neo-Malthusian doomers and the anti-Malthusian cornucopians may be overlooking important details. Human populations are not uniform in their history of invention, innovative progress, and the creation of widespread health and prosperity. And judging by the map above, it is the populations that have failed most dismally to create prosperity and progress which are reproducing the most rapidly. Given the critical dependency of these rapidly reproducing populations upon the largesse and technological savvy of other populations which are in fact decreasing in fertility, some of the glow could easily pass from the anti-Malthusian rose very rapidly.

In fact, anti-Malthusian cornucopianism applies largely to higher-IQ societies which have the human capital to create prosperity in the first place. Neo-Malthusian doomerism applies largely to lower-IQ societies which are dependent upon other, higher IQ populations for their own ability to reproduce beyond their own ability to feed, energise, and otherwise support themselves.

Here is the crux of the matter: The elite within several advanced societies have uncritically adopted the dismal neo-Malthusian vision -- including peak oil doom, carbon hysteria, overpopulation doom etc. -- despite its many failings when applied to intelligent and advanced populations. The neo-Malthusian policy prescriptions which are being progressively loaded onto the backs of the citizens of these advanced societies are creating a situation of self-fulfilling doom prediction. In other words, neo-Malthusian "solutions" are worse than the original problem would have been, had it been left to human ingenuity to solve.

The anti-nuclear (and anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-oil sands, anti-shale) policies currently in vogue in much of Europe, in Japan, and popular among many pseudo-intellectuals of North America and Oceania, cause government policy-makers to pursue unreliable, exorbitantly expensive, and ultimately destructive power sources such as big wind and big solar. With government policies such as that, there is no need for actual peak oil from resource depletion. "Political peak oil" will do just as well or better in terms of destroying a society's prosperity, competitiveness, and morale, as the real thing would have done, had it existed.

When government policy is based upon models which are not good at matching the realities in the outside world, the end result is likely to be disastrous.

The map is not the territory. The model is not the reality. Your solutions are likely to be worse than the problem. Everything you think you know, just ain't so.

But there is still time for certain enclaves within the more developed world to innovate their way into long-term prosperity, riding the current wave of rapid scientific and technological advances. For these enclaves to escape the destructiveness of the more likely occurrences of neo-Malthusian doom (the coming anarchy), they will need to be areas of relatively high average population IQ and high trust among citizens, which requires relative homogeneity of culture and language. They will also need abundant reliable affordable energy supplies. And those are only a few of the crucial things to consider, if you are thinking about relocating.

Things can go very badly for most of the planet -- largely due to political ineptness and corruption -- and yet things can turn out well for humanity in the end.

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

Brain Waves and the Limits of Short Term Memory

2012-01-09T08:12:00.001-08:00

Capacity of short-term memory impacts the effects of reasoning -- the greater the capacity, the better the effects. Currently researchers conduct studies on developing the most effective ways of training short-term memory.

...In 1995 researchers from Brandeis University in Waltham suggested that the capacity of short-term memory could depend on two bands of brain's electric activity: theta and gamma waves..."The hypothesis formulated by Lisman and Idiart in 1995 assumes that we are able to memorise as many 'bites' of information, as there are gamma cycles for one theta cycle. Research to date provided only indirect support for this hypothesis," say psychologist Jan Kamiński, PhD student from the Nencki Institute... _SD

Most neurocognitivists are slowly coming around to the idea that the "language of mind" is carried via modulated brain waves. The interaction of gamma waves (30Hz and above) and theta waves (4 to 7 Hz) is a particularly intense focus of research into neurocognition.

Recent research at the Nencki Institute in Warsaw suggests that a person's crucial short term memory capacity may be limited by the number of gamma cycles which fall on each theta cycle.
A 'bite' of information refers to its portion in memory. A 'bite' may be a number, letter, idea, situation, picture or smell. "Designing experiments on the capacity of memory one needs to be very careful not to make it too easy for the subject to group many 'bites' into one," stresses Kamiński and as an example gives the following sequence of letters: 2, 0, 1, 1. "Such four 'bites' of information are easy to group into the number corresponding to current year. Instead of four bites of information we are left with just one."

Interpreting the length of theta and gamma waves from EEG recording is not easy either. These waves are not directly visible in the EEG signal. Kamiński proposed a new method of determining them. Researchers recorded brain's electric activity in seventeen volunteers resting with closed eyes for five minutes. Next they filtered the signals and analysed not the cycles themselves but their correlations. Only based on discovered correlations the ratio of the length of theta wave to gamma wave was determined and the likely capacity of verbal short-term memory was determined.

Following the EEG recording, the volunteers, were subjected to classic short-term memory capacity test. It consisted of repeated display of longer and longer sequences of numbers. Each number was presented for one second. Then volunteers had to reconstruct the sequence from memory. At first the sequence consisted of three numbers but at the end of the exam of as many as nine. "We have observed that the longer the theta cycles, the more information 'bites' the subject was able to remember; the longer the gamma cycle, the less the subject remembered. Next we determined the correlation between the results of the tests and estimates from the EEG measurements. Just as expected the correlation turned out to be very high and it confirmed the hypothesis of Lisman and Idiart," says Kamiński._SD
Article abstract...Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

A look at Beta band oscillations and alertness, by the same authors... International Journal of Psychophysiology

And then there is this research into a "master control gene" of memory which may control as many as hundreds of other genes in the brain -- particularly the hippocampus -- which provides a much lower-level glimpse into the machinery of learning and behaviour. All levels of brain function, from the molecular to the behavioural, are important -- although it can be difficult to focus on all of them at the same time.

Our unconscious minds -- including the underpinnings of our short term memories -- function on a parallel basis. Our conscious minds tend to function on a serial -- one thing at a time -- basis. Better educational methods might take those differences into account.

Causation vs. Correlation: A Real World Example

2012-01-08T14:31:00.007-08:00

Blogger Dennis Mangan points to a study that suggests the US may have suffered almost 14,000 excess deaths as a result of nuclear fallout (PDF) from the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear core meltdown. Here is the story as it originally appeared in the June 10-12 Weekend Edition of Counterpunch. Although this does not necessarily discredit the authors of the "study," you should probably be aware that Joseph J Mangano (MPH, MBA) and Janette D Sherman (MD), have been involved for many years in anti-nuclear activism.

Here is the abstract of the article as it appeared in the International Journal of Health Services:

The multiple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima plants beginning on March 11, 2011, are releasing large amounts of airborne radioactivity that has spread throughout Japan and to other nations; thus, studies of contamination and health hazards are merited. In the United States, Fukushima fallout arrived just six days after the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns. Some samples of radioactivity in precipitation, air, water, and milk, taken by the U.S. government, showed levels hundreds of times above normal; however, the small number of samples prohibits any credible analysis of temporal trends and spatial comparisons. U.S. health officials report weekly deaths by age in 122 cities, about 25 to 35 percent of the national total. Deaths rose 4.46 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese fallout, compared with a 2.34 percent increase in the prior 14 weeks. The number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80 percent, compared with a previous 8.37 percent decrease. Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected. These preliminary data need to be followed up, especially in the light of similar preliminary U.S. mortality findings for the four months after Chernobyl fallout arrived in 1986, which approximated final figures. _Source (PDF)

The basic thesis is fairly simple: The authors claim that a comparison of CDC weekly death rates for a select group of US cities -- from just before and just after the Fukushima meltdown -- will provide a valid picture of the fatal effects of fallout from the Japanese nuclear plant on these US cities of the Pacific Northwest.

We will look at this thesis from the standpoint of Hill's Criteria of Causation, recently considered in this Al Fin blog post.

Temporal Relationship
Strength
Dose Response Relationship
Consistency
Plausibility
Considerations of Alternate Explanations
Experiment
Specificity
Coherence

A far more devastating criticism of the authors' thesis can be found here.

.....there are several conclusions to be drawn here:
-- There is no spike in infant mortality due to Fukushima. Instead there is an accidental dip during the 4 weeks before the radioactive releases reached the U.S. west coast.
-- The infant mortality rate in the northwest U.S. was actually 23% higher in the first 7 weeks of 2011 than after Fukushima, 108 cases in 7 weeks give a weekly ratio of 15.43. We can thus say, by using Sherman and Mangano's own way of phrasing it, that this amounts to a decrease of 23% and is statistically significant.
-- The data for the full time period of weeks 1 - 21 amount to 272 infant deaths over 21 weeks, i.e. a weekly rate of 12.95. This is slightly higher than the weekly rate after Fukushima (12.50).
-- Janette Sherman and Joseph Mangano have a lot to explain for us...if anybody cares to listen to them after this low point in their so called scientific careers. _Source

Source
Excess deaths from relatively low, transitory radiation exposures should only show up years after the exposure. One would not reasonably expect to find "instant deaths" from such low level, short term exposures. And yet, that seems to be what the authors were trying to find, using quite noisy data from the CDC which was never meant for this type of comparative analysis.

But what is the question that everyone should be asking of the authors? "What does your follow-up data show, over the subsequent time period since the Fukushima event?"

A quick check of the most recent CDC MMWR of 6 Jan 2012 (PDF) shows a total death count for the sample 122 cities, as 9,530. This is down by over a thousand from the 3 June 2011 MMWR (PDF) which shows a death count of 10,839, for the sample 122 cities. Should I then claim that radiation from the Fukushima incident was beneficial to the health of US residents, since the US death rate has declined over time since the meltdown? Of course not. The data bounces up and down every week, for a large number of reasons. Simple correlational studies based upon this type of data should never be used to prove causation.

Index for all MMWRs in 2011, where you can find the tables for each week of 2011.

The remarkable aspect of Mangano and Sherman's paper, is the number of people who were taken in by their shoddy "research." This includes the International Journal of Health Services, as well as a wide range of "green" and anti-nuclear political sites. One of the most disheartening articles linked to this issue is this article in Oilprice.com, by John Daly.

In the real world, people are paid a lot of money to generate such pseudo-scientific "studies", "surveys," opinion polls, marketing research, and the like. Billions of dollars can change hands based upon the results of such shoddy analysis. In the case of the UN's IPCC and global climate policy, monetary redistribution into the $trillions might be easily achieved, by "scientific" methods no more valid than those used by Mangano and Sherman.

At this point in time, most of the global media is willing to cut corners on fact-checking, for the sake of "a good story," or for the sake of "advancing the agenda."

The book, How to Lie With Statistics, is as timely now as ever. If you read it and understand it, you are likely to grow angry more frequently when consuming media pieces. If you prefer bliss, you should probably choose ignorance, like most folks.

More: A quick and dirty takedown of the Mangano / Sherman "study" by Scientific American Technology Fellow Michael Moyers

Is Giant Russia a Dying Bear?

2012-01-07T11:55:00.001-08:00

The people won't be fooled again. The demonstrations have been going on since December, and despite hundreds of arrests, the people keep coming out... Putin is...finding that many of his publicity and information management techniques that had served him so well for over two decades, no longer work. It was that damn Internet again, where a lot of smart Russians had collaborated to pick apart the reality from the myth that Putin had created in the media. There are many real problems in Russia and the Internet has allowed details, and names, to be collected and made available to all. _StrategyPage

Russia is in decline on several fronts:

The very high death rates for men reflects a horrendous public health situation in Russia.
The core population of Russia -- ethnic Russians -- continue to die faster than they can reproduce
Russia is losing a large proportion of its best people via emigration to countries offering higher wages and greater opportunities to achieve
Russia's educational system is in free-fall collapse
Capital flight out of Russia continues to grow
The Russian military is in decline in terms of both human capital and weapons competence
Russia is declining in power and population at the same time that its neighbor China seems to be growing in power economically, politically, and militarily.
Russia's economic trump card -- its oil and gas reserves -- are doomed to decline in importance as some of its best customers discover and learn to exploit massive reserves of unconventional hydrocarbons within their own borders.

There have been many attempts to deny the ongoing and accelerating decline of Russia as a world power, but these have not been convincing. The main reason for this is that such Russian apologists are typically reduced to comparing Russia with its Eastern European neighbors, rather than comparing Russia with genuine world powers. Such irrelevant comparisons should not even be printed in reputable media outlets.
Russia is likely to remain a net mortality society for the foreseeable future.Official Russian statistics anticipate a continuing and widening gap separating deaths and births between now and 2030. Rosstat envisions a surfeit of 205,000 deaths over births for 2011, rising to more than 725,000 in 2030, with a cumulative total of 9.5 million more deaths than births between 2011 and 2030. Even in Rosstat’s most optimistic scenario, the agency projects a mortality surfeit of 2.7 million between 2011 and 2025, reaching 4.7 million by 2030. In these official Russian forecasts, further depopulation can be fore-stalled only by massive immigration from abroad.

Russia has certainly beneﬁted over the past two decades from a net inﬂux of millions of workers, most of whom hail from former Soviet states in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

...Although Russia today accounts for about six percent of the world’s population with a post-secondary education, barely 0.1 percent of the worldwide patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over the last decade and a half were awarded to Russians. This is not some U.S. conspiracy against Russian inventors: the records of the UN’s World Intellectual property Organization show that Russia’s share of out-of-country patent applications over that same period was less than 0.2 percent of the global total. The picture is hardly better when it comes to the output of scientiﬁc papers: the number of articles by Russians in peer-reviewed journals was no higher in 2008 than it had been in 1990,whereas output almost everywhere else in the world rose over those same years. By 2008, Russian authors were publishing far fewer scientiﬁc papers than the authors of Russia’s bric peers: Brazil, China, and India. In effect, Russia stands as a new and disturbing wonder in today’s globalized world: a society characterized by high levels of schooling but low levels of health, knowledge, and education.

...Unlike Beijing, which is committed to military modernization in the coming decades, Moscow is in effect preparing to ﬁght this century’s wars with last century’s technology. In fact, as the Russia analysts Anders Aslund and Andrew Kuchins noted in 2009, as China’s military capabilities have improved, Beijing has reduced its imports of Russian military technology and even exports its own versions to traditional Russian clientssuch as Angola,Ethiopia and Syria. Russia’s dwindling conventional military is on track to become the Polish cavalry of coming generations. _AEI Dying Bear PDF
Putin is taking Russia in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of giving Russians greater opportunities and more reasons to form families and build a better Russia from the bottom up, Putin is moving the nation back toward a Soviet style of authoritarianism and hyper-centralisation that will only accelerate the nations decline and dissolution.

Eventually, Russians will grow tired of being manipulated by Putin's and the communist's endless paranoid ravings about "western foreign provocateurs," and will begin to look much closer to home for the sources of Russia's accelerating decline.

Overturning Feminist Dogma: Massive Gender Gap Measured

2012-01-06T07:56:00.001-08:00

Men and women have large differences in personality, according to a new study published Jan. 4 in the online journal PLoS ONE....The researchers used personality measurements from more than 10,000 people, approximately half men and half women. The personality test included 15 personality scales, including such traits as warmth, sensitivity, and perfectionism. When comparing men's and women's overall personality profiles, which take multiple traits into account, very large differences between the sexes became apparent, even though differences look much smaller when each trait is considered separately. _SD

In a promising sign of things to come, scientists from Italy and the UK have overturned an important block in the foundation of modern radical feminist dogma. Using new techniques of measuring personality, and taking greater care to compensate for measurement error, the researchers discovered important statistical differences in the personalities of men and women.

These findings could go a long way to explain the different types of personal and career choices which men and women tend to make.
In addition to their direct influences on mating processes, personality traits correlate with many other sexually selected behaviors, such as status-seeking and risk-taking (see e.g., [20], [34], [35]). Thus, in an evolutionary perspective, personality traits are definitely not neutral with respect to sexual selection. Instead, there are grounds to expect robust and wide-ranging sex differences in this area, resulting in strongly sexually differentiated patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior – as if there were “two human natures”, as effectively put by Davies and Shackelford [15]. _PLoSOne
Differences in status seeking and risk taking behaviours help to explain why males are willing to work more dangerous jobs and much longer hours in order to achieve material success and to attain higher status.

While feminist dogma blames sexist discrimination for the greater prevalence of men at the top of the professional and executive ladders of many occupations, arts, and industries, scientific research helps us to understand the truer and more general underpinnings of such differences in accomplishment.

As more research helps to round and fill in our understanding of important gender differences, we will be less likely to resort to government regulation, mandate, and legislation in order to "correct for" things that are actually intrinsic in the nature of human animals.

PLoSOne Study:

In conclusion, we believe we made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated. While our current estimate represents a substantial improvement on the existing literature, we urge researchers to replicate this type of analysis with other datasets and different personality measures. An especially critical task will be to compare self-reported personality with observer ratings and other, more objective evaluation methods. Of course, the methodological guidelines presented in this paper can and should be applied to domains of individual differences other than personality, including vocational interests, cognitive abilities, creativity, and so forth. Moreover, the pattern of global sex differences in these domains may help elucidate the meaning and generality of the broad dimension of individual differences known as “masculinity-femininity” [11]. In this way, it will be possible to build a solid foundation for the scientific study of psychological sex differences and their biological and cultural origins.

Pay close attention to how deeply feminist dogma has penetrated the skankstream media: compare media coverage of important research of this type with the hyperbolic coverage that is routinely given to "meta analysis studies" which deny important gender differences in specific preferences or aptitudes. It can be an enlightening experience.

The Backward Arab World Grows Even More Backward

2012-01-06T00:46:00.000-08:00

Between 1980 and 2000, Korea granted 16,328 patents, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., granted a combined total of only 370, many of them registered by foreigners. A study in 1989 found that in one year, the United States published 10,481 scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab world published only four. This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke, but when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world in 2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. The recent push to establish new research and science institutions in the Arab world...clearly still has a long way to go. _NewAtlantis

The Arabian "Golden Age" and the Arabian empire, were always more dependent upon the abilities and energies of the conquered peoples, than on the abilities of the Arab conquerors. The Arabian hegemony from central Asia to North Africa and southern Spain, allowed a commingling of the wisdom of the East, Middle East, and the remnants of ancient Greek learning. The so-called "golden age of Islam" was the result of the symbiotic knowledge explosion that occurred when multiple traditions of knowledge collided within an environment that was tolerant of mathematical and scientific ideas. But that tolerance did not last forever, as Islam never remains tolerant for very long.
By the year 750, the Arabs had conquered Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and much of North Africa, Central Asia, Spain, and the fringes of China and India. Newly opened routes connecting India and the Eastern Mediterranean spurred an explosion of wealth through trade, as well as an agricultural revolution...The spread of empire brought urbanization, commerce, and wealth that helped spur intellectual collaboration. Maarten Bosker of Utrecht University and his colleagues explain that in the year 800, while the Latin West (with the exception of Italy) was “relatively backward,” the Arab world was highly urbanized, with twice the urban population of the West. Several large metropolises — including Baghdad, Basra, Wasit, and Kufa — were unified under the Abbasids; they shared a single spoken language and brisk trade via a network of caravan roads. Baghdad in particular, the Abbasid capital, was home to palaces, mosques, joint-stock companies, banks, schools, and hospitals; by the tenth century, it was the largest city in the world.

...the single most significant reason that Arabic science thrived was the absorption and assimilation of the Greek heritage — a development fueled by the translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad....the Abbasids found scientific Greek texts immensely useful for a sort of technological progress — solving common problems to make daily life easier. The Abbasids did not bother translating works in subjects such as poetry, history, or drama, which they regarded as useless or inferior. Indeed, science under Islam, although in part an extension of Greek science, was much less theoretical than that of the ancients. Translated works in mathematics, for example, were eventually used for engineering and irrigation, as well as in calculation for intricate inheritance laws. And translating Greek works on medicine had obvious practical use.

...The second factor central to the rise of the translation movement was that Greek thought had already been diffused in the region, slowly and over a long period, before the Abbasids and indeed before the advent of Islam. Partly for this reason, the Abbasid Baghdad translation movement was not like the West’s subsequent rediscovery of ancient Athens, in that it was in some respects a continuation of Middle Eastern Hellenism. Greek thought spread as early as Alexander the Great’s conquests of Asia and North Africa in the 300s b.c., and Greek centers, such as in Alexandria and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (238-140 b.c., in what is now Afghanistan), were productive centers of learning even amid Roman conquest. By the time of the Arab conquests, the Greek tongue was known throughout the vast region, and it was the administrative language of Syria and Egypt. After the arrival of Christianity, Greek thought was spread further by missionary activity, especially by Nestorian Christians. Centuries later, well into the rule of the Abbasids in Baghdad, many of these Nestorians — some of them Arabs and Arabized Persians who eventually converted to Islam — contributed technical skill for the Greek-Arabic translation movement, and even filled many translation-oriented administrative posts in the Abbasid government.

...As the Middle Ages progressed, Arabic civilization began to run out of steam. After the twelfth century, Europe had more significant scientific scholars than the Arabic world, as Harvard historian George Sarton noted in his Introduction to the History of Science (1927-48). After the fourteenth century, the Arab world saw very few innovations in fields that it had previously dominated, such as optics and medicine; henceforth, its innovations were for the most part not in the realm of metaphysics or science, but were more narrowly practical inventions like vaccines. “The Renaissance, the Reformation, even the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, passed unnoticed in the Muslim world,” Bernard Lewis remarks in Islam and the West (1993)....Islamic civilization did not have a culture hospitable to the advancement of science, while medieval Europe did.

...In trying to explain the Islamic world’s intellectual laggardness, it is tempting to point to the obvious factors: authoritarianism, bad education, and underfunding (Muslim states spend significantly less than developed states on research and development as a percentage of GDP). But these reasons are all broad and somewhat crude, and raise more questions than answers. At a deeper level, Islam lags because it failed to offer a way to institutionalize free inquiry. That, in turn, is attributable to its failure to reconcile faith and reason.

...most criticism in the Muslim world is directed outward, at the West. This prejudice — what Fouad Ajami has called (referring to the Arab world) “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity” — is undoubtedly one of Islam’s biggest obstacles. It makes information that contradicts orthodox belief irrelevant, and it closes off debate about the nature and history of Islam. _NewAtlantis
A very interesting article, all in all.

But it fails to bring out the genetic decline within the Arab world caused by inbreeding -- first cousin marriages being one widespread offense against wise genetics. A resulting low average IQ in the Arab world -- with a mean IQ of roughly 85 (the same as the average African American IQ) -- places limits on the scientific and intellectual accomplishments of the Arab world which no outside enemy could ever place. (see Wikipedia IQ and the Wealth of Nations)

The relative intolerance and hatred toward outsiders which is so common in Arab Islam is an additional limiting factor. The unwillingness to learn from the experience of others dooms Arab Muslims to persist in making the same fatal mistakes over and over. The underlying source of this Arab xenophobia is likely to be found in tribal tradition, religious tradition, and underlying genetic complement.

Arabs who immigrate to the west are likely to occupy the upper end of the bell curve, and present a misleading picture to western observers, of what they should expect from Arabs as a whole.

There is no indication that any of the efforts to boost higher learning and scientific accomplishment in the Arab lands, will have more than a temporary or superficial impact. The hold of stone-age Islam is simply too strong -- as was seen in the "Arab Spring" movement which quickly devolved into a fundamentalist Muslim hatefest against all "others."

Arab populations are more intelligent and less backward, on average, than SubSaharan African populations. And SubSaharan African populations are typically less backward than Australian Aboriginal populations. That is simply what one would expect from comparing psychometric studies for the respective groups.

Any truly benevolent friend of Arabs as a people, would want to face the facts clearly and without excuses. And he would look to the foundations of Arab backwardness in order to find a solution, and a way to benefit Arabs as a whole.

How Humans Cause Earthquakes

2012-01-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

The best-known case is the earthquake caused by the Zipingpu Dam, in China’s Sichuan province, in 2008. Zipingpu held 42.3 billion cubic feet of water, the weight of which precipitated what Klose says is the largest human-triggered earthquake to date: a 7.9-magnitude quake that killed nearly 80,000 people. Klose estimates that Zipingpu, with nearly 320 million tons of water pressing down on a fault line, contributed enough stress to trigger the quake through a process called impoundment. “If you push your finger on top of a paper plate, the plate will bend,” he says. “That same effect works on all the tectonic plates on the Earth’s crust.” The quake occurred two years after the dam’s completion, and its epicenter was a mere three miles from the structure.

Authorities in Basel, Switzerland, shut down the city’s geothermal plant after a 3.4 quake in 2006. Tapping geothermal energy involves boring into rock miles beneath the Earth’s crust in search of steam as a source of energy. Engineers in areas without much water, such as Basel, sometimes create boreholes by way of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which involves forcefully injecting water to create fissures. Fracking can generate small tremors, but the real damage may happen as excess liquid pools in the cracks between rocks, making them less stable. Although dams have caused some 76 earthquakes, mining is responsible for at least 137 earthquakes, over half the number of man-made quakes to date.

In 1989 a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit Newcastle, Australia, the direct result of coal mining. Extracting millions of tons of coal added stress to the fault lines, but the real danger resulted from the water that was extracted during mining. For each ton of coal produced, Klose estimates, 4.3 times as much water was pumped out of the ground, a necessary step to prevent flooding inside the mine. But removing so much water dramatically altered the stability of the earth surrounding the mine. Klose says the earthquake caused $3.5 billion in damage—an amount that nearly equaled the profit of all the coal produced by the mine over its 200-year history. _PopSci

More here

Other human-caused micro-quakes have occurred via deep well injection of fluids, and by experimental deep hydraulic fracturing into crystalline rock (such as granite) near faults. It should be noted that shale fracturing -- such as is done for oil & gas production -- has not produced a causal link to earthquakes.

The recent small quakes in the Youngstown, Ohio area are associated with deep well injection of waste fluids -- a completely different process from shale fracturing.

Unfortunately, a large part of the news media has reported the quakes as having been caused by shale fracturing -- which is not the case. This type of skanky behaviour by news media is nothing new, but one has to wonder whether it is caused by ignorance or by willful deception.

We expect the faux environmental and green sites to misreport such events -- out of both ignorance and willful deception, depending upon the outlet. But in the case of the Ohio micro-quakes, normally careful sites such as oilprice.com, slate.com, and other mainstream outlets produced news copy that was not fit for a third grade newsletter, due to the inaccuracies. This is a troubling trend that should be watched very carefully.

It has been shown for decades that deep fluid injection into the crust can induce micro-quakes, if it takes place near known and discovered faults. And of all energy-related drilling, the type most closely associated with inducing micro-quakes is geothermal -- both enhanced and the geyser type. Deep CO2 injection is likewise liable to induce micro-quakes. Shale fracturing is probably the least likely cause of micro-quakes due to the more shallow nature and due to the type of rock involved.

But if one wishes to be absolutely sure that one is not performing shale fracturing near a fault zone, a thorough seismic survey (for about $10 million) can be done prior to any drilling. Clearly a less expensive method of reassuring the panicky public, skankstream media, and less than honest environmental media is needed.

Scientific research is the best antidote to the type of superstitions being purveyed by the modern skankstream.

Some European experience:The data generally support the view that injection in sedimentary rocks tends to be less seismogenic than in crystalline rocks. In both cases, the presence of faults near the wells that allow pressures to penetrate significant distances vertically and laterally can be expected to increase the risk of producing felt events. All cases of injection into crystalline rocks produce seismic events, albeit usually of non-damaging magnitudes, and all crystalline rock masses were found to be critically stressed, regardless of the strength of their seismogenic responses to injection. Thus, these data suggest that criticality of stress, whilst a necessary condition for producing earthquakes that would disturb (or be felt by) the local population, is not a sufficient condition. The data considered here are not fully consistent with the concept that injection into deeper crystalline formations tends to produce larger magnitude events. The data are too few to evaluate the combined effect of depth and injected fluid volume on the size of the largest events. Injection at sites with low natural seismicity, defined by the expectation that the local peak ground acceleration has less than a 10% chance of exceeding 0.07 g in 50 years, has not produced felt events. _Geothermics

Enhanced geothermal drilling is a far greater micro-earthquake hazard than is any drilling or fracturing in porous shale for oil & gas. But even so, it is best to avoid overreacting to the risk, but rather to plan deep drilling and hydraulic fracturing of crystalline rock very carefully, to minimise risks.
The risk of overreaction to the risks inherent in deep geothermal projects is very real. The establishment of an overly harsh regulatory framework would penalize the geothermal industry in comparison to other energy sectors that carry a recognized risk of inducing seismicity, such as gas extraction or coal mining.

From their outset, EGS projects need to be thought of both as pilot projects with scientific unknowns and as commercial ventures with technological and financial risks. Companies need to have allocated enough of their budget to scientific investigations not directly related to the exploitation of heat. Local authorities need to avoid being enticed by the promises of alternative energy, and to remember to ask the right questions. Risk evaluations need to be done before — not after — these projects begin. _Nature
In such cases where the risks are small but clear, appropriate care must be used in conjunction with any deep geothermal drilling, or deep well injections -- particularly near fault zones.

But the risks of shale drilling and fracturing are completely different -- and orders of magnitude smaller -- than the risks of drilling and fracturing crystalline rock such as granite. If regulatory agencies rush in to ban economically important procedures which have been demonstrated to be safe over decades of experience and geological testing, they will be doing a grave disservice to their constituents.

Cross-posted from an orignal Al Fin Energy article

It should be noted that by inducing multiple small quakes, built-up stresses within faults can be slowly dissipated over time -- theoretically reducing the devastation caused by later earthquakes. This is an area of science begging for funding. Perhaps the many billions that have been mis-allocated to carbon hysteria research would be better spent on genuinely important research such as this.

Unconscious Pathways to a More Creative World

2012-01-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

Creativity is one of our most valued human traits. It has given human beings the ability to change the world that they live in; and it has also, paradoxically, given them the ability to adapt to changes in the world over which they have no control. Our highly developed capacity to develop and implement new ideas arises from our highly developed human brain. Understanding how creative ideas arise from the brain is one of the most fascinating challenges of contemporary neuroscience. _Journey Into Chaos

Creativity makes our lives richer in many ways, but it cannot be easily explained by ordinary conscious thinking or decision making. Creativity is not the same thing as intelligence, since people with very high intelligence do not tend to have a high creative output on average. Persons of greatest creative achievement appear to have IQs that cluster near the 120s -- above average, but not genius level. (Andreasen 1987, MacKinnon 1965)If creativity is not equivalent to a high IQ, then how else might it be defined and measured? Several different approaches have been taken to address this question. One has been to develop tests specifically designed to measure creativity and to designate people who achieve high scores on these tests as creative. The basic assumption behind most such tests is that creativity can be defined as having a capacity for achieving a high level of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is defined as the ability to come up with a large number of responses to an open-ended probe; it is contrasted with convergent thinking, which tends to apply a sequential series of steps to answer a question that has only one possible solution (Runco and Marz, 1992). An example of a probe used to assess divergent thinking is asking: How many uses can you think of for a brick? A series of similar questions can be asked and then used to create a score that is a continuous measurement of divergent thinking (Torrance, 1998). This approach is favoured by some psychologists as a way of achieving an objective measure of creativity.

An alternative approach is to define creativity operationally. That is, people who have produced some type of creative output are designated as creative based on their achievements. When this method is used, it is typically in conjunction with an approach known as the “case study method.” People are selected because they have achieved a high level of success and recognition in fields such as architecture, writing, mathematics and physics. Often a specific criterion of success is used, such as having won a major prize or award (e.g., Fields Medal, Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Lasker Award). These people are further assessed using structured interviews about their work habits and thought processes, personality tests and measures of cognition. The commonalities that they share are considered to be characteristics of creative people and their cognitive style. An important recent spin-off of this approach is to conduct neuroimaging studies of such people in order to examine the neural basis of creativity. _Mens Sana Monograph...Chaos, Creativity, and the Unconscious

Creativity may be able to tap into deeper wells of thought than are available to the conscious mind in the setting of a timed, structured IQ test.

Creativity involves both the creation of novel ideas, and the selection of the best of these novel ideas for further development. It has been generally felt that the unconscious participates most in the stage of novel creation, rather than in the selection stage. But recent research suggests that the second stage -- selectively choosing the best creative ideas -- is also an area of unconscious expertise.
Today's world of continuous change thrives on creative individuals. Anecdotal reports suggest that creative performance benefits from unconscious processes. Empirical research on the role of the unconscious in creativity, though, is inconsistent and thus far has focused mainly on one aspect of the creative process – idea generation. This is the first study to assess the role of the unconscious mind for both idea generation and idea selection. Participants generated creative ideas immediately, after conscious thought, or after a period of distraction during which unconscious thought was hypothesized to take place. After having listed their ideas, participants selected their most creative idea. Performance in idea generation was similar between conscious and unconscious thought; however, individuals who had unconsciously thought about ideas were better in selecting their most creative idea. These findings shed more light on the role of unconscious processes in creativity, and provide a means to enhance creative performance. _Thinking Skills & Creativity
Here is a plain language explanation of this research

Although the authors of the above study make an excellent point regarding the value of the unconscious in selecting between creative ideas, they appear to understate the value of the unconscious mind in generating creative ideas. More on this later.

Interestingly, the unconscious also seems to play a role in improving economic decision-making:...a more rational and optimal approach to financial decision making than is proposed by finance theories alone would be that includes unconsciousness into the process. The total cognitive decision making capacity of an individual is comprised of both a conscious component and an unconscious component; and these two components are complementary and compensatory to each another. A decision-making process that integrates these two components would, therefore, first generally improve the quality of decisions, and second reduce the unfavorable impact of behavioral biases (with overconfidence, heuristics, etc as examples) on decision making. _(Abstract) Journal of Behavioral Finance

It is important not to underestimate the role of the unconscious in the generating of novel and creative ideas, however. Successful induction of creative mind states almost invariably calls on the unconscious -- as if in the conjuring of spirits. When conjuring the creative unconscious spirits of one's own mind, it is best to adopt a humble attitude. The conscious mind thinks of itself as the star of the show, and often struggles for dominance as if it were a question of survival.

The unconscious mind will make its creativity known, if allowed to. Suppression of the conscious mind occurs automatically during sleep, and much creativity occurs in that state. We cannot access this creativity, however, except during specific stages of transition between sleep and wakefulness -- the hypnagogic states.

If you want to be creative without falling asleep, you will have to find other ways to temporarily suppress the conscious mind, at least partially. Several methods have been devised, including Edward de Bono's "Lateral Thinking" method, and John David Garcia's powerful "Autopoiesis" method. Few of these methods are widely used either by professional writers, musicians, inventors etc., or by educational institutions.

Many creative persons suppress their conscious minds with chemicals, such as alcohol, opiates, or sometimes hallucinogenics. While it is possible to function creatively under the influence of moderate quantities of alcohol or opiates, the creative benefit of hallucinogens is often not experienced until after one has mostly emerged from the hallucinogenic state.

Deep relaxation or meditation can sometimes induce more creative quasi-unconscious mental activity as well, as can deep laughter. But as with the hallucinogens, an enhanced productive creativity may only be accessible as one emerges from the meditative state.

Once one has generated a wealth of creative ideas, and selected the most promising among them, actual creative production can be enhanced by stimulating other parts of the unconscious mind, which drive semi-rote behaviours. These highly automatised unconscious processes can be induced by caffeine and other stimulants such as amphetamines, as well as by rather light doses of alcohol.

One of the best all-around mental exercises for enhanced creativity, is the use of Manfred Clynes' Sentic Cycles (PDF). These cycles are not generally promoted as creativity enhancers, but it is likely that the best ways of enhancing creativity are those that are not yet recognised as such.

More aspects of the unconscious mind are being discovered

Exciting and Powerful New Method of Learning a Foreign Language

2012-01-03T09:30:00.001-08:00

It has previously been demonstrated that enactment (i.e., performing representative gestures during encoding) enhances memory for concrete words, in particular action words. Here, we investigate the impact of enactment on abstract word learning in a foreign language. We further ask if learning novel words with gestures facilitates sentence production. In a within-subjects paradigm, participants first learned 32 abstract sentences from an artificial corpus conforming with Italian phonotactics. Sixteen sentences were encoded audiovisually. Another set of 16 sentences was also encoded audiovisually, but, in addition, each single word was accompanied by a symbolic gesture. Participants were trained for 6 days. Memory performance was assessed daily using different tests. The overall results support the prediction that learners have better memory for words encoded with gestures. In a transfer test, participants produced new sentences with the words they had acquired. Items encoded through gestures were used more frequently, demonstrating their enhanced accessibility in memory. The results are interpreted in terms of embodied cognition. Implications for teaching and learning are suggested. _Mind, Brain, and Education

Manuela Macedonia, Max Planck Institute PDF
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute are discovering that the adult brain learns foreign languages better, when physical gesturing is incorporated into the training, to assist brain encoding.

Manuela Macedonia and Thomas Knösche at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, enrolled 20 volunteers on a six-day course to learn "Vimmi", an artificial language designed to make study results easier to interpret. Half of the material was taught using spoken and written instructions and exercises, while the other half was taught with body movements to accompany each word, which the students were asked to act out.

Students remembered significantly more of the words taught with movement, and used them more readily when creating new sentences (Mind, Brain and Education, DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-228X.2011.01129.x).

Whilst this may seem intuitive for words that have a physical counterpart, like "cut", the pair were surprised to find the trick also worked for abstract words like "rather" that have no obvious gestural equivalent.

Based on fMRI scans, the pair argue that enactment helps memory by creating a more complex representation of the word that makes it more easily retrieved. Unpublished results from tests in real language classes suggest that the method "could really speed up foreign language learning in schools", says Macedonia. _NewScientist

The concept is not difficult to accept. But devising the best accompanying gestures to best assist brain encoding of a foreign language, may take some time to work out.

Here is an image-rich explanation of the concept (PDF), demonstrating examples of gestures, accompanying MRI scans, and a data analysis of the study results.

A Declining America Under Obama: Dealing With the Aftermath

2012-01-03T08:51:00.001-08:00

Not so long ago, a high-ranking Chinese official, who obviously had concluded that America's decline and China's rise were both inevitable, noted in a burst of candor to a senior U.S. official: "But, please, let America not decline too quickly." Although the inevitability of the Chinese leader's expectation is still far from certain, he was right to be cautious when looking forward to America's demise.

For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor -- not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes. _FP
The accelerating decline of America under Obama is not coincidental. It is an active process originating in the White House, working its way down the federal bureaucracy to impair virtually every function of the US economy and private sector, starting with energy.
“For the first time in U.S. history, net coal capacity is in decline. On top of 38 gigawatts of generation that is already being run below normal levels or slated for early retirement, NERC predicts another 36 to 59 gigawatts will come offline by 2018, depending on the ‘scope and timing’ of EPA demands. That could mean nearly a quarter of all coal-fired capacity.”

It is coal-fired plants that currently provide fifty percent of all the electricity generated in America! The EPA is feverishly trying to force a quarter of that capacity offline. Why? Because the EPA claims that these plants are “polluting” the air. The air in America has never been cleaner. _CFP
Besides shutting down the coal industry, Obama has blocked offshore oil drilling, blocked the Keystone pipeline for Canadian oilsands, threatened to abort the shale oil & gas bonanza, impeded development of safer, more advanced nuclear power, and shunted billions of dollars of funding to political cronies who are backing unreliable and exorbitantly expensive big wind and big solar projects.

As a result, the cost of energy in America is getting set to rise at the same time that the availability of energy is set to decline. Added to all the other economic burdens under Obama, and the US private sector will have good reason to cry.

When America's energy declines, American industry and commerce will also decline. As economic conditions at the grass roots level continue to degenerate under Obama, incidents of civil disorder and disobedience are likely to occur in multiple locations, manifesting in multiple ways.

The re-election of Obama in 2012 would allow a further accelerated decline in the quality and reliability of US energy and electrical power infrastructure. Obama's wholesale attack against the US private sector would be amplified, in order to remove the source of funding for the opposition to the political power elite. With a further breakdown in the private sector economy, conditions leading to civil disorder would be expanded to more parts of the country.

Living in an urban setting would become even more hazardous, as the decline of "the commons" accelerates. The dividing line between public employees and private citizens will grow more stark, as public sector union pensions and benefits create a new elite, at the expense of a shrinking group of private taxpayers. This will lead to a growing antipathy toward government and government employees at all levels -- a very dangerous and unstable situation. (see pensiontsunami.com) The longer that President Obama remains in office, the longer it will take to come to grips with this "under the radar" problem.

US military and law enforcement have devoted a good deal of thought to how they will deal with widespread outbreaks of civil disorder in the US. The development of "non-lethal" weaponry is one response to the growing threat, under Obama. This PDF download (h/t Wired) is a report on some of the latest types of non-lethal weapons, which has been released to US government agencies for discussion and planning. While these weapons are nominally considered "non-lethal," in practise a certain number of deaths and disability injuries are likely.

Of course, as the US government continues its decline under Obama, weapons which were meant for the exclusive use of official US government agencies, will eventually fall into the hands of other groups, organisations, and individuals. That means that a wide range of criminal and quasi-criminal groups are likely to obtain powerful weapons of both lethal and "non-lethal" varieties -- although the non-lethal variety would likely be easier to obtain. Possessing both types of weapons would allow groups a wider latitude of strategies and tactics.

If President Obama remains in office for much longer, he may need to withdraw all overseas US troops just to deal with the growing civil disorder within US borders. Mr. Obama is not likely to be bothered by petty issues of posse comitatus or the like, if he sees his power base coming under threat.

Mr. Obama has taken a bad situation -- decades in the making -- and made it incalculably worse. And he will continue making it worse as long as US voters allow him to. The aftermath is likely to be explosive -- not only for America.
Another consequence of American decline could be a corrosion of the generally cooperative management of the global commons -- shared interests such as sea lanes, space, cyberspace, and the environment, whose protection is imperative to the long-term growth of the global economy and the continuation of basic geopolitical stability. In almost every case, the potential absence of a constructive and influential U.S. role would fatally undermine the essential communality of the global commons because the superiority and ubiquity of American power creates order where there would normally be conflict. _FP
The accelerating decline of America under Obama is likely to result in civil disorder within the US, and global war outside the US.

Elections have consequences.

Preventing Large Earthquakes by Intentional Triggering of Small Quakes

2012-01-02T11:55:00.002-08:00

Scientists are continuously thinking of ways to try and reduce earthquake power. Some are trying to lessen the friction between colliding plates. They poured water down a fault where two plates were grinding together. The water “lubricated” the fault, letting one piece jerk free with a number of little earthquakes and preventing a large tremor. _EarthquakePrevention

Large earthquakes have killed millions of people, and are a constant threat to hundreds of millions of people living in cities within prominent seismic zones. If there were any possible way to reduce the deadly danger in which these people are living, earth science must investigate the possibility.

Deep injection of fluids into the Earth's crust has the potential to trigger earthquakes, typically small, multiple quakes. Do not confuse this type of deep fluid injection with fracking for oil or gas. The two things are not the same at all.

"Injection induced earthquakes" are NOT caused by hydrofracturing. Injection of fluids for the purpose of waste disposal or well stimulation is NOT "fracking." Injection of fluids CAN induce earthquakes in some circumstances. Hydrofracturing has NOT been found to induce earthquakes. _Injection Induced Earthquakes Reference

An interesting case mentioned in the New York Times of 1 Jan 2012 (yesterday), is a series of small earthquakes in the Youngstown, Ohio, area, associated with the deep injection of waste fluids into the Earth's crust:An official in Ohio said on Sunday that the underground disposal of wastewater from natural-gas drilling operations would remain halted in the Youngstown area until scientists could analyze data from the most recent of a string of earthquakes there.

The latest quake, the 11th since mid-March, occurred Saturday afternoon and with a magnitude of 4.0 was the strongest yet....a 2.7-magnitude temblor on Dec. 24, showed that it occurred less than 2,000 feet below the well. Because of a lack of data, depth estimates of earlier earthquakes had been far less precise.

... Scientists had suspected that some of the wastewater might have migrated into deeper rock formations, allowing an ancient fault to slip. Similar links between disposal wells and earthquakes have been suspected in Arkansas and Texas. _NYT
Injection-induced earthquakes have been noted in Germany in 1997, in Colorado in the 1990s, in Texas, and Arkansas.

This reference website contains over 130 references to reports of injection associated quakes. The association between deep crust fluid injection and small earthquakes appears to be well founded. But it is important to note that there is no such association between fracking and earthquakes. Keep that distinction in mind.

Geothermal power at the Geysers in Lake County, California, has been associated with thousands of tiny earthquakes above magnitude 1 since 1975 when the resource was tapped.

Earthquakes are triggered by a number of different things, including the construction of hydroelectric dams.

Depth of the reservoir is the most important factor, but the volume of water also plays a significant role in triggering earthquakes.

RIS [Reservoir Induced Seismicity] can be immediately noticed during filling periods of reservoirs.

RIS can happen immediately after the filling of a reservoir or after a certain time lag.

It would be best for humans to invest in the best accelerated research possible to clearly and unequivocally define the risks and benefits of small scale induced seismicity. One of the best ways of doing this would be for seismic scientists to work closely with deep drilling enterprises which also involve the deep injection of fluids into the earth's crust. By piggy-backing onto economic activity which is already being done, seismologists can increase the detail of their seismic maps, and can also collect abundant data on the impact of deep crustal fluid injection into different fault configurations.

The risk of causing small earthquakes associated with deep geothermal drilling for enhanced geothermal power, and in CO2 sequestration injection into the crust, are both real -- although perhaps minimal. Whether such injections will serve to reduce the risk of later larger earthquakes is something that needs to be determined.

One thing is very clear, however: While lefty-Luddite greens of the energy-starvationist persuasion are screaming about the unlikely possibility that fracking might conceivably cause small earthquakes, the very real possibility that deep injection CO2 sequestration will likely cause small quakes is ignored by the same activists.

If there is a way to prevent large, destructive earthquakes by triggering multiple smaller quakes in a prophylactic manner, such technologies should be studied very carefully and expeditiously.

Part of this article was taken from a previous article at Al Fin Energy.

Complexity, Causation, and Crucial Failures of Science

2012-01-02T00:38:00.146-08:00

Khan Academy Video: Correlation and Causality
The confusion of correlation with causation is a common mistake among journalists, celebrities, academics, and political activists -- not to mention ordinary people. It is difficult to blame one for making this mistake, since modern media -- even much of "scientific media" -- is drowning in this error.

If you do not have a grip on the distinction between correlation and causation, then you do not have a prayer of understanding the deeper issues that will be touched on here. Therefore, we will take a look at "Hill's Criteria of Causation," which are applied to possible causal links in the field of medicine and public health.

1. Temporal Relationship:

Exposure always precedes the outcome. If factor "A" is believed to cause a disease, then it is clear that factor "A" must necessarily always precede the occurrence of the disease. This is the only absolutely essential criterion. This criterion negates the validity of all functional explanations used in the social sciences, including the functionalist explanations that dominated British social anthropology for so many years and the ecological functionalism that pervades much American cultural ecology.

2. Strength:

This is defined by the size of the association as measured by appropriate statistical tests. The stronger the association, the more likely it is that the relation of "A" to "B" is causal. For example, the more highly correlated hypertension is with a high sodium diet, the stronger is the relation between sodium and hypertension. Similarly, the higher the correlation between patrilocal residence and the practice of male circumcision, the stronger is the relation between the two social practices.

3. Dose-Response Relationship:

An increasing amount of exposure increases the risk. If a dose-response relationship is present, it is strong evidence for a causal relationship. However, as with specificity (see below), the absence of a dose-response relationship does not rule out a causal relationship. A threshold may exist above which a relationship may develop. At the same time, if a specific factor is the cause of a disease, the incidence of the disease should decline when exposure to the factor is reduced or eliminated. An anthropological example of this would be the relationship between population growth and agricultural intensification. If population growth is a cause of agricultural intensification, then an increase in the size of a population within a given area should result in a commensurate increase in the amount of energy and resources invested in agricultural production. Conversely, when a population decrease occurs, we should see a commensurate reduction in the investment of energy and resources per acre. This is precisely what happened in Europe before and after the Black Plague. The same analogy can be applied to global temperatures. If increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere causes increasing global temperatures, then "other things being equal", we should see both a commensurate increase and a commensurate decrease in global temperatures following an increase or decrease respectively in CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

4. Consistency:

The association is consistent when results are replicated in studies in different settings using different methods. That is, if a relationship is causal, we would expect to find it consistently in different studies and among different populations. This is why numerous experiments have to be done before meaningful statements can be made about the causal relationship between two or more factors. For example, it required thousands of highly technical studies of the relationship between cigarette smoking and cancer before a definitive conclusion could be made that cigarette smoking increases the risk of (but does not cause) cancer. Similarly, it would require numerous studies of the difference between male and female performance of specific behaviors by a number of different researchers and under a variety of different circumstances before a conclusion could be made regarding whether a gender difference exists in the performance of such behaviors.

5. Plausibility:

The association agrees with currently accepted understanding of pathological processes. In other words, there needs to be some theoretical basis for positing an association between a vector and disease, or one social phenomenon and another. One may, by chance, discover a correlation between the price of bananas and the election of dog catchers in a particular community, but there is not likely to be any logical connection between the two phenomena. On the other hand, the discovery of a correlation between population growth and the incidence of warfare among Yanomamo villages would fit well with ecological theories of conflict under conditions of increasing competition over resources. At the same time, research that disagrees with established theory is not necessarily false; it may, in fact, force a reconsideration of accepted beliefs and principles.

6. Consideration of Alternate Explanations:

In judging whether a reported association is causal, it is necessary to determine the extent to which researchers have taken other possible explanations into account and have effectively ruled out such alternate explanations. In other words, it is always necessary to consider multiple hypotheses before making conclusions about the causal relationship between any two items under investigation.

7. Experiment:

The condition can be altered (prevented or ameliorated) by an appropriate experimental regimen.

8. Specificity:

This is established when a single putative cause produces a specific effect. This is considered by some to be the weakest of all the criteria. The diseases attributed to cigarette smoking, for example, do not meet this criteria. When specificity of an association is found, it provides additional support for a causal relationship. However, absence of specificity in no way negates a causal relationship. Because outcomes (be they the spread of a disease, the incidence of a specific human social behavior or changes in global temperature) are likely to have multiple factors influencing them, it is highly unlikely that we will find a one-to-one cause-effect relationship between two phenomena. Causality is most often multiple. Therefore, it is necessary to examine specific causal relationships within a larger systemic perspective.

9. Coherence:

The association should be compatible with existing theory and knowledge. In other words, it is necessary to evaluate claims of causality within the context of the current state of knowledge within a given field and in related fields. What do we have to sacrifice about what we currently know in order to accept a particular claim of causality. What, for example, do we have to reject regarding our current knowledge in geography, physics, biology and anthropology in order to accept the Creationist claim that the world was created as described in the Bible a few thousand years ago? Similarly, how consistent are racist and sexist theories of intelligence with our current understanding of how genes work and how they are inherited from one generation to the next? However, as with the issue of plausibility, research that disagrees with established theory and knowledge are not automatically false. They may, in fact, force a reconsideration of accepted beliefs and principles. All currently accepted theories, including Evolution, Relativity and non-Malthusian population ecology, were at one time new ideas that challenged orthodoxy. Thomas Kuhn has referred to such changes in accepted theories as "Paradigm Shifts". _Hill's Criteria of Causation

This is basic stuff which most basic and clinical scientists and physicians studied in the early stages of their training. But there is little evidence that many science journalists have given these criteria any thought, to judge by what they write.

All of the preceding is by way of introduction to the phenomenon where science gets bogged down by complexity and by a confusion of logical levels -- or a failure to recognise "emergent phenomena." (PDF)

An example of this type of science failure is presented in a Wired.com article written about a cholesterol drug which ended up making the heart disease in patients worse, rather than better -- even to the point of killing some of them. This happens sometimes in medicine, where all logic and data suggests that a treatment is most likely to be highly beneficial -- but it ends up being worthless or worse.
The story of torcetrapib is a tale of mistaken causation. Pfizer was operating on the assumption that raising levels of HDL cholesterol and lowering LDL would lead to a predictable outcome: Improved cardiovascular health. Less arterial plaque. Cleaner pipes. But that didn’t happen.

Such failures occur all the time in the drug industry. (According to one recent analysis, more than 40 percent of drugs fail Phase III clinical trials.) And yet there is something particularly disturbing about the failure of torcetrapib. After all, a bet on this compound wasn’t supposed to be risky. For Pfizer, torcetrapib was the payoff for decades of research. Little wonder that the company was so confident about its clinical trials, which involved a total of 25,000 volunteers. Pfizer invested more than $1 billion in the development of the drug and $90 million to expand the factory that would manufacture the compound. Because scientists understood the individual steps of the cholesterol pathway at such a precise level, they assumed they also understood how it worked as a whole.

This assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by our ceaseless accumulation of facts. Scientists refer to this process as reductionism. By breaking down a process, we can see how everything fits together; the complex mystery is distilled into a list of ingredients. And so the question of cholesterol—what is its relationship to heart disease?—becomes a predictable loop of proteins tweaking proteins, acronyms altering one another. Modern medicine is particularly reliant on this approach. Every year, nearly $100 billion is invested in biomedical research in the US, all of it aimed at teasing apart the invisible bits of the body. We assume that these new details will finally reveal the causes of illness, pinning our maladies on small molecules and errant snippets of DNA. Once we find the cause, of course, we can begin working on a cure.

...The truth is, our stories about causation are shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts. Most of the time, these shortcuts work well enough. They allow us to hit fastballs, discover the law of gravity, and design wondrous technologies. However, when it comes to reasoning about complex systems—say, the human body—these shortcuts go from being slickly efficient to outright misleading.

Consider a set of classic experiments designed by Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte, first conducted in the 1940s. The research featured a series of short films about a blue ball and a red ball. In the first film, the red ball races across the screen, touches the blue ball, and then stops. The blue ball, meanwhile, begins moving in the same basic direction as the red ball. When Michotte asked people to describe the film, they automatically lapsed into the language of causation. The red ball hit the blue ball, which caused it to move.

This is known as the launching effect, and it’s a universal property of visual perception. Although there was nothing about causation in the two-second film—it was just a montage of animated images—people couldn’t help but tell a story about what had happened. They translated their perceptions into causal beliefs.

...There are two lessons to be learned from these experiments. The first is that our theories about a particular cause and effect are inherently perceptual, infected by all the sensory cheats of vision. (Michotte compared causal beliefs to color perception: We apprehend what we perceive as a cause as automatically as we identify that a ball is red.) While Hume was right that causes are never seen, only inferred, the blunt truth is that we can’t tell the difference. And so we look at moving balls and automatically see causes, a melodrama of taps and collisions, chasing and fleeing.

The second lesson is that causal explanations are oversimplifications. This is what makes them useful—they help us grasp the world at a glance. For instance, after watching the short films, people immediately settled on the most straightforward explanation for the ricocheting objects. Although this account felt true, the brain wasn’t seeking the literal truth—it just wanted a plausible story that didn’t contradict observation.

This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world when we use our perceptual habits to explain events that we can’t perceive or easily understand. Rather than accept the complexity of a situation—say, that snarl of causal interactions in the cholesterol pathway—we persist in pretending that we’re staring at a blue ball and a red ball bouncing off each other. There’s a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.

...Although modern pharmaceuticals are supposed to represent the practical payoff of basic research, the R&D to discover a promising new compound now costs about 100 times more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than it did in 1950. (It also takes nearly three times as long.) This trend shows no sign of letting up: Industry forecasts suggest that once failures are taken into account, the average cost per approved molecule will top $3.8 billion by 2015. What’s worse, even these “successful” compounds don’t seem to be worth the investment. According to one internal estimate, approximately 85 percent of new prescription drugs approved by European regulators provide little to no new benefit. We are witnessing Moore’s law in reverse.

...Given the increasing difficulty of identifying and treating the causes of illness, it’s not surprising that some companies have responded by abandoning entire fields of research. Most recently, two leading drug firms, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, announced that they were scaling back research into the brain. The organ is simply too complicated, too full of networks we don’t comprehend. _Wired

The author of the Wired article, Jonah Lehrer, provides other examples where medical science has foundered on the rocks of complexity, in the full article. He also alludes to philosophical theories of causation -- particularly the ideas of David Hume -- to help the reader to get a better idea of the scale of the problem.

Most people have not thought too deeply about cause and effect. For most lives, such deep thinking is completely unnecessary -- and probably counter-productive. But if one wants to better understand what is happening when science butts its head against the wall -- as in the examples given by Jonah Lehrer -- such thinking becomes unavoidable. Here are a couple of web-based overviews which you may wish to look at after browsing through the Wikipedia entry "Causality:"

A brief overview of philosophical idas about causality from informationphilosopher.com

A look at the metaphysics of causation from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Here is the problem that human science faces, as I see it: We do not truly understand the mechanisms of what is happening within us and around us at any scale, but we wish to. In order to understand these underlying mechanisms -- in the absence of a valid overarching theory -- we are forced to collect a large amount of data, which we can only correlate in fairly crude ways.

Even as our computational machines improve along with our methods of correlation, we must still face up to the fact that "correlation is not causation." And even as we approach theories, hypotheses, and explanations which appear to be valid on one logical level, we are liable to be completely stymied when these explanations fail on higher and more emergent levels.

The intractability of many problems in science forced the reluctant, back-door acceptance by part of mainstream science, of some of the ideas of complexity, chaos, and paradoxical causality.

But most "bad science" of today is merely the failure of scientists to scrupulously stick to the rules of the scientific method. In other words, modern climate science is not unreliable and untrustworthy due to the chaotic nature of climate. Modern climate science is untrustworthy because the most powerful and best-connected of the group are willing to lie, obscure, strong-arm, and cover up the many weaknesses of their arguments and theories in order to enlarge their influence and power. That has everything to do with human weakness, greed, and immorality, and nothing to do with deep level difficulties in science.

Many observers of science -- and even many scientists -- feel that philosophy has been superceded by the power of modern science. But that is not actually true. In fact, the more powerful the science, the more it needs a sound philosophical underpinning. But that is easier said than done.

More on this topic -- including an attempt to clarify many of the most critical ideas in simpler language -- at a later date.

2012: Coming Up On the Future of Flight

2012-01-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

Wired.co.uk Terrafugia Transition
100 Transitions have been reserved -- that's a backlog worth some $25 million (£16m). Terrafugia hopes to begin delivery of the flying cars late 2012, with a starting price around $279,000. _Wired.co.uk

Stratolaunch
Burt Rutan and Paul Allen aim to build a giant stratospheric space launch plane out of the parts of two used Boeing 747s. It will use 6 747 jet engines and will have the widest wing span of any plane in the air. Besides saving rocket fuel, an airborne mobile space launcher allows insertion into the widest range of Earth orbits available.

Stratolaunch
...Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, joins super-wealthy entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos in looking to the heavens for his next venture, as NASA turns to the private sector for help getting to space.

...Carrying a rocket to high altitude means it needs less fuel, thereby saving weight and money. Much of the fuel needed to launch a rocket is needed just to get above the dense lower levels of the atmosphere. At 30,000 feet more than half of the density of the atmosphere would be below the rocket. Beyond saving fuel, air-launching a rocket allows engineers to design more efficient rocket nozzles because they’re operating in the thinner parts of the atmosphere. _Wired
Besides supplying the rocket component of the Stratolaunch system, Elon Musk's SpaceX is moving ahead in the development of a fully reusable 3 stage ground based space launch system:

Fully Reusable SpaceX 3 Stage Launch System
Elon Musk wants to become an important supplier to the International Space Station, as well as a successful satellite launch company. And that's not all. Elon Musk wants to begin sending SpaceX missions to Mars in as early as 10 years time.

Here is a Space.com article looking at some other reusable rocket systems which are aiming to compete with SpaceX.

The "12 Most Anticipated Spaceflight-Associated Missions of 2012":In 2012, the first of these private vehicles is set to make its maiden voyage to the orbiting laboratory [ISS]. The Dragon space capsule developed by Hawthorne, Calif., company Space Exploration Technology (SpaceX) is scheduled to launch atop the company's Falcon 9 rocket Feb. 7. A few days later, the craft is due to autonomously rendezvous with the space station. When it comes within range, the astronauts aboard the station will grab hold of it with the station's robotic arm and berth it to the outpost.

...Another burgeoning field of commercial spaceflight is the suborbital space tourist industry. A leader in this market is Mojave, Calif.-based Virgin Galactic, headed by British billionaire Sir Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic plans to fly paying passengers on suborbital joy rides to the edge of space and back, initially at $200,000 a pop.

Virgin Galactic's vehicles, the space plane SpaceShipTwo and its mothership WhiteKnightTwo, have so far made gliding test flights. The first powered flights have not been announced, but experts are hoping to see SpaceShipTwo's rocket engines ignited for flights sometime in 2012. These test flights will be a major step toward flying space tourists, more than 400 of whom have already paid in full.

...Twelve spaceflyers are scheduled to travel to the space station on four different launches in 2012. These men and women will spend around six months each living and working in space, performing experiments in a wide range of sciences inside humanity's only microgravity laboratory. _Space.com

And don't forget Robert Bigelow and his Bigelow Aerospace inflatable space habitats and hotels. Bigelow has already launched two small versions of his inflatable habitat, and is waiting for reliable private transport to space to get his space hotel business off the ground. In the meantime, he is collaborating with the Arab Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology, to help advance human spaceflight.

Finally, here is a look at some lighter-than-air approaches to both orbital and sub-orbital flight, which may see some advancement during the year 2012.

Fine Tuning Brain Ensembles with Glial Overseers

2011-12-30T12:29:00.000-08:00

Glia cells, named for the Greek word for "glue," hold the brain's neurons together and protect the cells that determine our thoughts and behaviors, but scientists have long puzzled over their prominence in the activities of the brain dedicated to learning and memory. Now Tel Aviv University researchers say that glia cells are central to the brain's plasticity — how the brain adapts, learns, and stores information.

...Almost all neurodegenerative diseases are glia-related pathologies, Prof. Ben-Jacob notes. In epileptic seizures, for example, the neurons' activity at one brain location propagates and overtakes the normal activity at other locations. This can happen when the glia cells fail to properly regulate synaptic transmission. Alternatively, when brain activity is low, glia cells boost transmissions of information, keeping the connections between neurons "alive." _aftau.org

To understand the brain, one must conceptualise multiple levels of activity occurring simultaneously. The level where glial cells influence neurons and synaptic output is a relatively low to mid-level, but a crucial one. Neuroscience has barely begun to understand this basic interaction between cell types, and is forced -- as in this study -- to use neurocomputational models in an attempt to expand the comprehension of this complex give and take.
The brain is constituted of two main types of cells: neurons and glia. Neurons fire off signals that dictate how we think and behave, using synapses to pass along the message from one neuron to another, explains De Pittà. Scientists theorize that memory and learning are dictated by synaptic activity because they are "plastic," with the ability to adapt to different stimuli.

But Ben-Jacob and colleagues suspected that glia cells were even more central to how the brain works. Glia cells are abundant in the brain's hippocampus and the cortex, the two parts of the brain that have the most control over the brain's ability to process information, learn and memorize. In fact, for every neuron cell, there are two to five glia cells. Taking into account previous experimental data, the researchers were able to build a model that could resolve the puzzle.

The brain is like a social network, says Prof. Ben-Jacob. Messages may originate with the neurons, which use the synapses as their delivery system, but the glia serve as an overall moderator, regulating which messages are sent on and when. These cells can either prompt the transfer of information, or slow activity if the synapses are becoming overactive. This makes the glia cells the guardians of our learning and memory processes, he notes, orchestrating the transmission of information for optimal brain function. _aftau.org

PLoS CompBioLooking at how synaptic connections change during learning and memory is a little bit like trying to understand what goes on inside an office building by studying a set of architectural blueprints and reviewing the utility bills. It provides a bare beginning, but it's a start.
Synaptic plasticity is the capacity of a preexisting connection between two neurons to change in strength as a function of neuronal activity. Because it admittedly underlies learning and memory, the elucidation of its constituting mechanisms is of crucial importance in many aspects of normal and pathological brain function. Short-term presynaptic plasticity refers to changes occurring over short time scales (milliseconds to seconds) that are mediated by frequency-dependent modifications of the amount of neurotransmitter released by presynaptic stimulation. Recent experiments have reported that glial cells, especially hippocampal astrocytes, can modulate short-term plasticity, but the mechanism of such modulation is poorly understood. Here, we explore a plausible form of modulation of short-term plasticity by astrocytes using a biophysically realistic computational model. Our analysis indicates that astrocytes could simultaneously affect synaptic release in two ways. First, they either decrease or increase the overall synaptic release of neurotransmitter. Second, for stimuli that are delivered as pairs within short intervals, they systematically increase or decrease the synaptic response to the second one. Hence, our model suggests that astrocytes could transiently trigger switches between paired-pulse depression and facilitation. This property explains several challenging experimental observations and has a deep impact on our understanding of synaptic information transfer. _PLoSCompBio

PLoS Comp BioBy understanding how synaptic frequencies can be modulated by changes in the glial::neuronal interaction, scientists can begin to bridge upward to the next higher levels of cognition -- local and distant neuronal ensembles. No one said it would be easy.

Neuroscientists are forced to work with a variety of animal models, human brain imaging techniques, cell culture approaches, and computational models, in order to enlarge their understanding of the foundations of an incredibly complex, multi-layered, and time-dependent phenomenon -- consciousness. And at that, we are talking about the consciousness of lower animals.

PLoS article in full

Bonus link: Wim de Neys at U. Toulouse is attempting to clarify some of the insights that come from the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. de Neys seems to want to place human intuition on a higher level than the one on which Kahneman's work suggests it belongs. Certainly humans are dependent upon their intuitions for most of the things they do and virtually all the choices they make. In the opinion of Al Fin cognitivists, such psychological research still suffers from the lack of a firm neuroscientific foundation.

"Sea Tree," A Seastead for Birds, Fish, and Bats

2011-12-29T15:53:00.000-08:00

The Sea Tree would be a tiered structure moored underwater with a cable that serves as the frame for series of layers. The layers above and below water would, over time become their own ecosystems — much like a sunken ship does underwater. Like an oil rig, the structure would rise above water and be self sufficient, but serves nature only.

The Sea Tree is a concept created by Amsterdam-based Waterstudio.nl. What is unique about this concept is that their plan was always to create the structure for nature only rather than retrofitting a green space into an urban structure or create a mixed use building. The idea was meant offset the trend of city sprawl and could be located in any water source — lakes, rivers or oceans. Wherever there is a need to bring some green back to the environment. _DVice

Humans have intentionally created artificial reefs for thousands of years for military purposes, and since the 17th century for purposes of increasing fish yields. Of course, humans have unintentionally created artificial reefs since the first ship sinkings and offshore garbage dumps.

Humans have also created island bird refuges for nesting birds, for some time.

This Dutch creation combines the artificial reef concept with the island bird refuge concept. To top it off, they have included an interior "bat cave" as a bat sanctuary and habitat.

A lush variety of plant life should provide abundant nesting areas for birds, as well as providing food for insects, which in turn provides food for birds, bats, and fish.

Once the multi-level animal seastead is placed off-limits to humans, it is apt to evolve its ecosystem in any number of directions. As an ecological experiment, it might hold more than a few surprises.

Just be sure to locate it away from any onshore or offshore wind farms, and keep feral cats far away. Maintenance would best be carried out by robotic telepresence. Monitoring should be done by webcam and UAV flyover. Keep tourists far away. Shoot to kill, if you must. ;-)

Khan Academy to 4 Million Unique Monthly Visits

2011-12-29T15:01:00.001-08:00

Forbes Video Network

Khan Academy is growing rapidly, thanks to economic backing from contributors such as Google and Bill Gates. Over 2600 videos are now offered, with more created every week.

Over the last month, Khan Academy saw 4 million unique users. That’s up from 1 million in the same period last year, and up from 3.5 million in October (asked by dbigthe)
The Khan Academy team is currently made up of 22 people, and they’re hiring ~1 more per month. (asked by dbigthe)
“I’d say that 90% [of the videos are shot] in 1 take. 99% are 2 takes.” (asked by johnsmcjohn)
“I will definitely do much more advanced mathematics in the next year than what we have now.” (This resulted in Michael Nielson, leading quantum computing expert and author of the standard text on the subject, to offer his assistance right in the thread) _TC

h/t Carpe Diem

Khan Academy is growing very rapidly -- adding topics, content, and better ways for teachers to use the content in the classroom. As more people get involved in the creative department, expect to see higher production values creeping into the routine.

As to whether KA will ever grow into an accredited provider of educational credentials, that depends a lot on where Salman Khan wants to go with the idea. At this point, he seems happy with the idea of creating a "log" of online activities as a type of student transcript. As the real world's attitudes toward education evolve, such informal proofs of mastery may be sufficient for many apprenticeships or jobs.

What seems more likely, is that an enterprising education entrepreneur will combine the best of Khan (mastery learning), Knewton (adaptive learning), and other e-learning methods into a low-cost, for-profit online institute for learning, from kindergarten to post-university and adult lifelong learning. The idea would include test prep, and a wide range of basic certifications, along with homeschool credentials at least through high school level.

College level accreditation for traditional degrees would likely require affiliation with established educational institutions. That would require deep pockets, given the mercenary nature of most university administrations. In today's economy, it might be best for such a startup to grab a profitable niche and expand from there, following a well-crafted long-term plan.

Bringing Coral Reefs Rapidly Back From the Brink

2011-12-29T12:37:00.000-08:00

"I was devastated. Basically, all the corals were dead. It was gravel and sand," Rani recalled.

But when German architect and marine scientist Wolf Hilbertz told her about a discovery he had made in the 1970s, the diver's ears pricked up. _Discovery

Discovery
The story talks about how corals were killed by cyanide poisoning and dynamite fishing. The same kind of devastation of coral reefs occurs after severe storms. Fortunately, coral is incredibly prolific at spreading its seed far and wide across seas and oceans -- spreading over hundreds of miles from the parent reef.

Hilbertz had sought to "grow" construction materials in the sea, and had done so by submerging a metallic structure and connecting it to an electric current with a weak and thus harmless voltage.

...When he tested out his invention in Louisiana in the United States, Hilbertz saw that after a few months oysters progressively covered the whole structure, and colonized the collected limestone.

More experiments were carried out and the same phenomenon was confirmed for corals.

"Corals grow 2-6 times faster. We are able to grow back reefs in a few years," Thomas J. Goreau, a Jamaican marine biologist and biogeochemist, told AFP.

Goreau began working with Hilbertz in the mid-1980s to develop Biorock technology, and he has continued their work since Hilbertz's death four years ago.

When Rani saw the discovery, it gave her an idea for how she might save "her" bay.

She decided to expand the project to 22 structures using her own money with the help of Taman Sari, the holiday resort in front of the coral restoration project.

...Today there are around sixty of these "cages" in Pemuteran bay, across a surface of two hectares, and the reef has not only been saved from near-death, it is flourishing better than ever before.

"Now we've got a better coral garden than we used to have," said Rani.

Biorock not only revives the corals but it makes them more resistant... _Discovery
Of course, cyanide and dynamite -- not to mention storms and trophy-taking tourists -- are quite hard on a reef. How wonderful to find such an easy remedy for such an unsightly problem.

For reporters to claim that the fluctuating ocean temperatures are killing reefs -- reefs which evolved to survive in a wide range of temperatures and dissolved CO2 levels -- is pure dishonesty and political activism.

It is past time for science reporters to come clean, and to report science news honestly and in a balanced fashion. The current crop of science journalists too often come across as just plain biased and incompetent.

First published at Al Fin Potpourri