Five looming dangers that could tear the eurozone apart | Business | The Observer
Greece, Spain, Italy, Growth, Hardliners.... time doesn't seem to remove looming dangers, just add them....
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Five looming dangers that could tear the eurozone apart
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Drone attacks in Pakistan are counterproductive, says report | World news | The Guardian
Drone attacks in Pakistan are counterproductive, says report | World news | The Guardian
- The CIA's programme of "targeted" drone killings in Pakistan's tribal heartlands is politically counterproductive, kills large numbers of civilians and undermines respect for international law, according to a report by US academics.
- The study by Stanford and New York Universities' law schools, based on interviews with victims, witnesses and experts, blames the US president, Barack Obama, for the escalation of "signature strikes" where groups are selected merely through remote "pattern of life" analysis.
- "The dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling 'targeted killings' of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false," the report, entitled Living Under Drones, states.
- The "best available information", they say, is that between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September this year ? of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians, including 176 children. The figures have been assembled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism which, estimated that a further 1,300 individuals were injured in drone strikes over that period.
- The study goes on to say: "Publicly available evidence that the strikes have made the US safer overall is ambiguous at best ? The number of 'high-level' militants killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low ? estimated at just 2% [of deaths]. Evidence suggests that US strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks ? One major study shows that 74% of Pakistanis now consider the US an enemy."
- "US practices may also facilitate recourse to lethal force around the globe by establishing dangerous precedents for other governments. As drone manufacturers and officials successfully reduce export control barriers, and as more countries develop lethal drone technologies, these risks increase."
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Insomnia: relax… and stop worrying about lack of sleep
Insomnia: relax… and stop worrying about lack of sleep | Life and style | The Observer
insomnia is a unique and difficult condition to treat because it is self-inflicted. The cause is often the brain's refusal to give up its unequalled ability to think about itself, a metaphenomenon that Harvard professor Daniel M Wegner has called "the ironic process of mental control".
If popular sleeping pills don't offer a major boost in sleep time or quality, then why do so many people take them? Part of the answer is the well-known placebo effect. Taking any pill, even one filled with sugar, can give some measure of comfort.
But sleeping pills do something more than that. Drugs like Ambien have the curious effect of causing what is known as anterograde amnesia. The drug makes it temporarily harder for the brain to form new short-term memories. This explains why those who take a pill may toss and turn in the middle of the night but say the next day that they slept soundly. Their brains simply weren't recording all those fleeting minutes of wakefulness, allowing them to face each morning with a clean slate, unaware of anything that happened over the last six or seven hours. Some sleep doctors argue that this isn't such a bad thing. "If you forget how long you lay in bed tossing and turning, in some ways that's just as good as sleeping," one physician who worked with pharmaceutical companies told the New York Times, voicing what is a widely held opinion among the sleep doctors I spoke with.
Lowering patients' expectations of sleep and helping them recognise what contributed to their insomnia combined to be more powerful over the long term than medication. "In the short run, medication is helpful," Morin told the New York Times. "But in the long run, people need to change their actual sleep habits — that's what CBT helps them do."
Sleeping patterns that change as we age show that our brains expect us to be living and sleeping in a group, Worthman says. To illustrate this idea, she noted that the three basic stages of adulthood – teenage, middle age, old age – have drastically different sleep structures.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Ig Nobels honour dead salmon's 'brain activity' in improbable research awards | Science | The Guardian
Ig Nobels honour dead salmon's 'brain activity' in improbable research awards | Science | The Guardian
- Bennett and Abigail Baird, of Vassar College, used standard scanning techniques to build up a picture of the dead salmon's brain and were surprised to find a signal. Bennett said their study was a warning to neuroscientists to be careful with the way they do their work, so that they are not caught out by chance signals when they repeat a scan multiple times.
- Anita Eerland, of the Open University in the Netherlands, won this year's Ig Nobel for psychology when she and her team discovered they could make people guess the height of the Eiffel Tower incorrectly when they were leaning one way or another. Psychologists think people have a mental number line, where they tend to represent small numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right. This can be activated in a number of ways, such as looking to the right or left, and thinking about the line can prime people to think of higher or lower numbers.
- Rouslan Krechetnikov, of the University of California, Santa Barbara : his observational and theoretical analysis of the way coffee moved in cups led him to discover that it was just a coincidence that "the sizes of common coffee cups (dictated by the convenience of carrying them and the normal consumption of coffee by humans) are such that the frequency of natural liquid oscillations in the cup is on the order of the step frequency of normal walking". He noted: "This fact together with the natural irregularity of biomechanics of walking, which contributes to the amplification of coffee sloshing, are responsible for coffee spilling."
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Facebook and Twitter: the art of unfriending or unfollowing people | Technology | The Guardian
Facebook and Twitter: the art of unfriending or unfollowing people | Technology | The Guardian
I am particularly intrigued by the idea thatfriend clutter relates to an intrinsic problem in dealing with endings, even though beginnings (marriages, births) are culturally celebrated, and every beginning marks a different ending.
some extracts :
I am particularly intrigued by the idea thatfriend clutter relates to an intrinsic problem in dealing with endings, even though beginnings (marriages, births) are culturally celebrated, and every beginning marks a different ending.
some extracts :
- Technology exposes us to vastly more opportunities for making social connections, and far more effortlessly than even a stroll down the street and a handshake. Yet an etiquette for terminating those links, should they outlive their mutual benefit ? if they ever had any ? remains as absent as ever.
- Physical clutter...We think we want this stuff, but, once it becomes clutter, it exerts a subtle psychological tug. It weighs us down. The notion of purging it begins to strike as us appealing, and dumping all the crap into bin bags feels like a liberation. "Friend clutter", likewise, accumulates because it's effortless to accumulate it: before the internet....Friend clutter exerts a similar psychological pull.
- Last year, a writer of romance novels from Illinois named ArLynn Presser embarked upon what you might call an audit of her so-called friends..she made a New Year's resolution to visit them all, to find out why or, indeed, whether they were friends.
- [however] according to an ever-growing body of evidence, social media isn't making us lonelier or less deeply connected. Instead, study after study endorses the idea of "media multiplexity": people who communicate lots via one medium, it turns out, are the kind of people who communicate lots via others as well. Regular emailers are more likely also to be regular telephoners, one study found; people who use Facebook multiple times a day, according to another investigation, have 9% more close ties in their overall social network, on average, than those who don't. Social media builds social capital, rather than degrading it:
- Even chilling statistics about more Americans lacking a confidant now looks dubious: a new analysis by the sociologist Claude Fischer concluded that the finding arose because of a change in how the questions were asked.
- The anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar famously calculated "Dunbar's number" ? the notion that the largest number of meaningful social relationships that any one person can maintain is somewhere around 150.
- Online networks have a tendency to obliterate the nuances between different kinds of relationships. Despite Facebook's lists, privacy settings and the rest, Mullany points out, "ultimately, somebody is either your friend on Facebook or they're not. In real life, we're very political about our friendships, and I don't mean that in a bad way." There are friendships we'll let fade to nothing; others for which we'll put on a facade for a few hours at Christmas; or friendships of necessity, where we'll give the impression of intimacy without the reality. In contrast, "Facebook essentially doesn't allow us to be political."
- The more profound truth behind friend clutter may be that, as a general rule, we don't handle endings well. "Our culture seems to applaud the spirit, promise and gumption of beginnings," writes the sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot in her absorbing new book, Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free, whereas "our exits are often ignored or invisible". We celebrate the new ? marriages, homes, work projects ? but "there is little appreciation or applause when we decide (or it is decided for us) that it's time to move on". We need "a language for leave-taking", Lawrence-Lightfoot argues, and not just for funerals.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Do you feel rich or poor? some example responses from the UK
As always, pleasantly (and as Android's word prediction fittingly first suggested poignantly) surprised by "the man in the street"
Do Britons feel rich or poor? | Money | The Guardian
Friday, September 14, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Can tablet screens disrupt sleep? (and how to report it)
Can tablet screens disrupt sleep? | Technology | guardian.co.uk
what is worth reading about this 'science story' is not the interesting headline (in the classic 'study shows' genre) but how the piece itself is an unusually good example of how such stories should be reported. While there is indeed first the eye catching headline, the inevitable invoking of authority with phrases such as 'a team of scientists', and even mention of a related proven phenomenon which makes the study more plausible ("Melatonin is a hormone used by the body as a biological indicator of how dark it is outside"), what is excellent about this piece is it then provides details on the study (just 13 volunteers), links to the paper itself, who funded it, and most importantly, a counter argument, which in fact is much more persuasive than the original conclusion.
This story is a classic example of small, unreliable and commercially funded 'research' which we are so often bombarded with, not because they we need to be informed, but because they are 'topical', and help fill some pages. So refreshing to see it handled properly for a change.
Some extracts
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9533249/Using-iPads-before-bed-can-lead-to-a-poor-nights-sleep.html
With its classic 'researchers are warning approach" - though fair dues to the Telegraph for squeezing in a cancer reference, since as it so often tells us, everything must either cause or cure it...
what is worth reading about this 'science story' is not the interesting headline (in the classic 'study shows' genre) but how the piece itself is an unusually good example of how such stories should be reported. While there is indeed first the eye catching headline, the inevitable invoking of authority with phrases such as 'a team of scientists', and even mention of a related proven phenomenon which makes the study more plausible ("Melatonin is a hormone used by the body as a biological indicator of how dark it is outside"), what is excellent about this piece is it then provides details on the study (just 13 volunteers), links to the paper itself, who funded it, and most importantly, a counter argument, which in fact is much more persuasive than the original conclusion.
This story is a classic example of small, unreliable and commercially funded 'research' which we are so often bombarded with, not because they we need to be informed, but because they are 'topical', and help fill some pages. So refreshing to see it handled properly for a change.
Some extracts
- - team of scientists who found that exposure to the light from self-luminous displays, such as Apple iPads, could be "linked to increased risk for sleep disorders because these devices emit optical radiation at short wavelengths, close to the peak sensitivity of melatonin suppression".
- - However, Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, is not convinced. For a start, he said, melatonin levels were not a good way to predict how much sleep someone will get
- - One final thing that very few of the news reports on the research have mentioned: the study was funded by Sharp Laboratories of America, the research organisation run by Sharp Corporation, the electronics company that makes TVs, PCs and tablets.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9533249/Using-iPads-before-bed-can-lead-to-a-poor-nights-sleep.html
With its classic 'researchers are warning approach" - though fair dues to the Telegraph for squeezing in a cancer reference, since as it so often tells us, everything must either cause or cure it...
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Acupuncture useful, but overall of little benefit, study shows | Science | The Guardian
Acupuncture useful, but overall of little benefit, study shows | Science | The Guardian
Data indicates treatment is more than a placebo, but differences between true and sham acupuncture are modest
Data indicates treatment is more than a placebo, but differences between true and sham acupuncture are modest
- a potential problem with the trials in the meta-analysis was that, in all cases, the therapist knew whether he or she was administering real or sham acupuncture. "Arguably, it is next to impossible to completely keep this information from the patient. In other words, a trial is either both patient and therapist-blind, or not blind at all. Acupuncturists tend to tell us that therapist blinding is impossible, but this is clearly not true. I fear that, once we manage to eliminate this bias from acupuncture studies, we might find that the effects of acupuncture exclusively are a placebo response."
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Friday, September 7, 2012
Draghi pins hopes of saving euro on plan to buy struggling countries' bonds | Business | The Guardian
Draghi pins hopes of saving euro on plan to buy struggling countries' bonds | Business | The Guardian
Could this be one of the last kicks of the can? the 'big bazooka' that finally brings some calm and order? Even if not, it certainly does seem to be momentous, not least because if overrode German opposition, Also, and this I find patricularly noteworthy, the bond buying would be 'sterilized' - which means any money used to buy bonds, will be taken from somewhere else, which in effect would be a transfer of money from the wealthier areas, to the poorer, or at least, to those who are going bust (which is slighlty less fair!). Given how such sharing of wealth is a crucial part of any cohesive 'nation' (i.e. a society bound together enough to consider sharing amongst itself), could this be another tiny step on the road to European integration? Hearts may yet be away behind, but maybe they will inevitably also, follow the money?
BUT - while from grand EU strategy this might seem logical, a very nasty devil could lurk in the detail. While I'm glad to see the ECB doing something major, I am still firm in the belief that one can't cut one's way out of recession. Perhaps inflation is the only way to get rid of the debt effectively, without creating more, and this would mean the 'sterilization' is exactly what's not wanted, since it is this which is supposed to prevent inflation. The problem of course is that for every inflation might destroy debt, but it destroys savings too, so maybe even more than sterilization this road would require a society prepared to take the hit for its (possibly wasteful) brother. Looked at it that way, things don't look quite so bright
other comment pieces :
Impression left by announcement on unlimited bond buying is that it is technically sound ? but based on flawed economics : Mario Draghi rescue plan with more misery at its core will not save euro
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/06/mario-draghi-rescue-plan-euro
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/06/ecb-bond-buying-what-the-economists-say
Could this be one of the last kicks of the can? the 'big bazooka' that finally brings some calm and order? Even if not, it certainly does seem to be momentous, not least because if overrode German opposition, Also, and this I find patricularly noteworthy, the bond buying would be 'sterilized' - which means any money used to buy bonds, will be taken from somewhere else, which in effect would be a transfer of money from the wealthier areas, to the poorer, or at least, to those who are going bust (which is slighlty less fair!). Given how such sharing of wealth is a crucial part of any cohesive 'nation' (i.e. a society bound together enough to consider sharing amongst itself), could this be another tiny step on the road to European integration? Hearts may yet be away behind, but maybe they will inevitably also, follow the money?
BUT - while from grand EU strategy this might seem logical, a very nasty devil could lurk in the detail. While I'm glad to see the ECB doing something major, I am still firm in the belief that one can't cut one's way out of recession. Perhaps inflation is the only way to get rid of the debt effectively, without creating more, and this would mean the 'sterilization' is exactly what's not wanted, since it is this which is supposed to prevent inflation. The problem of course is that for every inflation might destroy debt, but it destroys savings too, so maybe even more than sterilization this road would require a society prepared to take the hit for its (possibly wasteful) brother. Looked at it that way, things don't look quite so bright
other comment pieces :
Impression left by announcement on unlimited bond buying is that it is technically sound ? but based on flawed economics : Mario Draghi rescue plan with more misery at its core will not save euro
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/06/mario-draghi-rescue-plan-euro
- The "rescue" plan involves governments in Rome and Italy driving
their economies deeper into depression to reduce the interest rates they
pay on their borrowing. The ECB seems to think that the reason
investors are giving Italy and Spain the cold shoulder is that they are
not cutting hard enough, fast enough. Steeped in economic orthodoxy,
Draghi makes George Osborne look like a paid-up member of the Maynard
Keynes appreciation society.
The reason investors demand high interest rates when they lend to Italy and Spain is their concern about the impact of permanent recession on public finances and banks. A rescue plan that has at its core more demand-destroying measures will do more harm than good.
To sum up, Draghi has bought Europe a bit more time. The can has been kicked a few metres down the road. He has done so by incurring the wrath of the Bundesbank and will know that if this fails, there is little more the ECB can do.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/06/ecb-bond-buying-what-the-economists-say
- As expected, the ECB will buy short-term bonds
provided that there is accompanying pressure on politicians to maintain
structural changes. I believe it is essential that such conditions are
applied, not just for discipline but also because the actions taken by
the ECB are not without cost.
Opposition to the ECB action is usually made on the ground of monetary financing or inflation. In fact, one of the costs is not so much inflation of consumer prices but long-term lowering of returns to most pensioners and savers, as well as increasing the cost of pension contributions for the working age population.
This can, in turn, also negatively affect business competitiveness. These sectors of society are of course already affected as a result of the cycle of stimulus, lowering of interest rates, and quantitative-easing-type measures that have been taken in the US and Europe.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)