Kruse Kronicle

Confronting Liberal and Conservative Biases on Science

New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter has an excellent piece about how ideology shapes our embrace/rejection of science. The left loves to rant about the "anti-science" right when the left participates just as much in the same anti-science behavior, and the left's anti-science behavior is every bit as destructive.

"The left is turning anti-science," Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape who as a venture capitalist has become one of the most prominent thinkers of Silicon Valley, told me not long ago.

He was reflecting broadly about science and technology. His concerns ranged from liberals' fear of genetically modified organisms to their mistrust of technology's displacement of workers in some industries. "San Francisco is an interesting case," he noted. "The left has become reactionary."

Still, liberal biases may be most dangerous in the context of climate change, the most significant scientific and technological challenge of our time. For starters, they stand against the only technology with an established track record of generating electricity at scale while emitting virtually no greenhouse gases: nuclear power.

Only 35 percent of Democrats, compared with 60 percent of Republicans, favor building more nuclear power plants, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

It is the G.O.P. that is closer to the scientific consensus. According to a separate Pew poll of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 65 percent of scientists want more nuclear power too.

He goes on to note:

Research suggests that better scientific knowledge will not be sufficient, on its own, to overcome our biases. Neither will it be mostly about improving education in STEM fields. To defeat our scientific phobias and taboos will require understanding how the findings of science and their consequences fit into the cultural makeup of both liberals and conservatives.

Explaining in more detail:

It is not hard to figure out the biases. People on the right tend to like private businesses, which they see as productive job creators. They mistrust government. It's not surprising they will play down climate change when it seems to imply a package of policies that curb the actions of the former and give a bigger role to the latter.

On the left, by contrast, people tend to mistrust corporations — especially big ones — as corrupt and destructive. These are the institutions bringing us both nuclear power and genetically modified agriculture.

"When science is aligned with big corporations the left immediately, intuitively perceives the technology as not benefiting the greater good but only benefiting the corporation," said Matthew Nisbet, an expert on the communication of science at Northeastern University.

So when assessing the risks of different technological options, the left finds the risk of nuclear energy looming the highest, regardless of contrary evidence.

This doesn't affect only beliefs about climate change and energy policy. The research identified similar distortions in people's beliefs about the scientific consensus on the consequences of allowing concealed handguns. Biases also color beliefs in what science says and means across a range of other issues.

In the context of climate change, this heuristic presents an odd problem. It suggests that attitudes about climate change have little to do with education and people's understanding of science.

Fixing it won't require just better science. Eliminating the roadblocks against taking substantive action against climate change may require somehow dissociating the scientific facts from deeply rooted preferences about the world we want to live in, on both sides of the ideological divide.

And it is the last sentence that is key. How do we do that? We must create spaces for productive conversations. No matter how emotionally satisfying it may be to engage in tribal disdain for those of another tribe for being "anti-science," this behavior entrenches those we may wish to persuade. And the glaring truth is that very very few of us are pro-science. We are pro-ideology and pro-heuristics and happy to embrace science when it meets these prior concerns. The reality is that there are multiple ways to frame an agenda. So another piece of the puzzle is to enter the mind of opponents and to figure out how to frame concerns in a way that resonates with things they value. But research shows, unsurprisingly, that we nearly always attempt persuasion from the most persuasive angle for us, projecting our values onto others. It usually has the effect of driving the opponent further away.

I think the answer lies in these considerations. I didn't say it was an easy answer. What thoughts do you have?

GDP Decoupling from Energy and Resource Use

Harvard Business Review: Stuff: When Less Is More

One of the most persistent economic misconceptions I see is the presumed fixed relationship between a unit of GDP and the energy/resources consumed in the process. This false relationship is projected into the future to show that growth is leading to total collapse in the near future. These graphs dispel the validity of that relationship.

However, the article points out that this incredible increase in productivity makes products cheaper, so consumption of the products grows dramatically. That does create a greater aggregate demand for energy/resources. The question is whether or not the decoupling of energy and resources can one day get out ahead and then go into decline through some combination of innovation and slowed demand. These two graphs were especially interesting.

"Material intensity continues to fall dramatically. In the U.S., the amount of resources extracted per dollar of GDP has decreased by nearly 75% over the past 90 years."

"Energy intensity, the portion of the total energy supply required to produce a material, has also dropped markedly. For example, the manufacture of 1.5 gigatons of steel would have gobbled up one-fifth of the world's total primary energy supply (TPES) in 1900. In 2010 it used only about one-fifteenth."

Why "Sustainable Development" is Not the Answer

New York Times: A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development - Eduardo Porter

If billions of impoverished humans are not offered a shot at genuine development, the environment will not be saved. And that requires not just help in financing low-carbon energy sources, but also a lot of new energy, period. Offering a solar panel for every thatched roof is not going to cut it.

"We shouldn't be talking about 10 villages that got power for a light bulb," said Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University in India who was among the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

"What we should be talking about," she said, "is how the village got a power connection for a cold storage facility or an industrial park."

Changing the conversation will not be easy. Our world of seven billion people — expected to reach 11 billion by the end of the century — will require an entirely different environmental paradigm....

... The "eco-modernists" propose economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it requires dropping the goal of "sustainable development," supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity's footprint by using nature more intensively.

"Natural systems will not, as a general rule, be protected or enhanced by the expansion of humankind's dependence upon them for sustenance and well-being," they wrote.

To mitigate climate change, spare nature and address global poverty requires nothing less, they argue, than "intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world."

As Mr. Shellenberger put it, the world would have a better shot at saving nature "by decoupling from nature rather than coupling with it."

This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small-scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world's surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water.

As the manifesto notes, as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity was supposedly in harmony with Mother Nature. Over the last half century, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed per average person declined by half. …

… Development would allow people in the world's poorest countries to move into cities — as they did decades ago in rich nations — and get better educations and jobs. Urban living would accelerate demographic transitions, lowering infant mortality rates and allowing fertility rates to decline, taking further pressure off the planet.

"By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends," the manifesto argues. …

Read the whole thing. Decoupling is essential. We have already seen this with land use. We are using no more land for agriculture in the United States than we were 100 years ago. Before that time, it took a fixed amount of land to feed each person. That same decoupling is developing worldwide, but it could be accelerated. The amount of energy consumed per unit of GDP has now begun to decline. We see this decoupling with other resources. Add a move to solar and nuclear power in combination with decoupling, and we have a real chance to drive down carbon emissions drastically.

I haven't yet read the whole EcoModernist Manifesto linked in the article, but the parameters and reasoning laid here are the best articulation of my views on economic development and sustainability that I have read.

The Decentralized Energy Revolution

Forbes: How The Energy Revolution Will Transform How We Live and Work

Revolutions used to be few and far between. James Watt's steam engine, developed in 1781, set the stage for the first industrial revolution. But it wasn't until a century later that the widespread adoption of electricity and the internal combustion engine brought about the second industrial revolution.

The information age didn't really get going until the 1970's and that's led to what to what many are now calling the new industrial revolution, which incorporates computer aided design and advanced fabrication techniques like 3D printing. However, the next revolution, in energy, is already underway.

While the drop in price for fossil fuels has grabbed most of the headlines lately, Citibank predicts that the shale boom will merely serve as a bridge to get us to a new era of renewable energy. This revolution, if anything, will be more far reaching than the others. While the earlier revolutions empowered large enterprises, this one might very well undo them. ...

... The last century was in large part driven by scale advantages. The bigger you were, the more efficient you would become. Those efficiencies would enable enterprises to own and control more resources, which would increase bargaining power and enhance the dominance of the firm.

Initially, information technology bolstered these trends. Only large organizations were able to afford computer systems that could help them administer resources by tracking accounting, maintenance and human resources. However, with the rise of personal computing and the Internet, that began to change. ...

Most populist support for renewable energy comes from concern over climate change. I am not persuaded that apocalyptic doom is certain without a swift and radical global economic restructuring. I am convinced that increasing CO2 at present rates can create highly undesirable but imprecisely understood consequences down the road. I see CO2 as a risk management issue. All things being equal, changes that minimize risk are a good thing. But since things are not equal, other considerations must also be weighed.

Human freedom and well-being are equally important to me, if not more so. Decentralized renewable energy would create enormous opportunities around the world while simultaneously reducing much of the geopolitical strife that emerges from the energy sector. Expanded opportunity has a way of translating into greater prosperity. Prosperous people are better equipped to handle climate change adaptations that may be required. Decentralized renewable energy both reduces the amount of CO2 emitted while improving the chances of smooth adaptation to changes in climate.

Critics are prone to look at renewable energy - and I'll add new generation nuclear power - as incapable of having a significant impact for many decades. Yet I keep imagining myself in 1895, looking at expanding U.S. cities and the problem of horse transportation. A guy is welding a frame between two bicycles and motorizing the contraption so he can become auto-mobile. How many would have predicted what transportation would look like in 1920 and later?

Before the industrial revolution, economies of scale were usually marginal or nonexistent. The Industrial Revolution made centralization and the economies of scale that come with it possible. The Information revolution is decentralizing the economy in some fundamental ways, but it is a networked decentralization. That is why I am skeptical of the doomsayers about the world 50 and 100 years into the future. We overestimate how much change can happen in the near term - say five years - but radically underestimate what can happen in twenty years.

Invisible Fuel (and "Limits to Growth" Thinking)

Economist: Inivisble Fuel

THE CHEAPEST AND cleanest energy choice of all is not to waste it. Progress on this has been striking yet the potential is still vast. Improvements in energy efficiency since the 1970s in 11 IEA member countries that keep the right kind of statistics (America, Australia, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden) saved the equivalent of 1.4 billion tonnes of oil in 2011, worth $743 billion. This saving amounted to more than their total final consumption in that year from gas, coal or any other single fuel. And lots of money is being invested in doing even better: an estimated $310 billion-360 billion was put into energy efficiency measures worldwide in 2012, more than the supply-side investment in renewables or in generation from fossil fuels.

The “fifth fuel”, as energy efficiency is sometimes called, is the cheapest of all. A report by ACEEE, an American energy-efficiency group, reckons that the average cost of saving a kilowatt hour is 2.8 cents; the typical retail cost of one in America is 10 cents. In the electricity-using sector, saving a kilowatt hour can cost as little as one-sixth of a cent, says Mr Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute, so payback can be measured in months, not years.

The largest single chunk of final energy consumption, 31%, is in buildings, chiefly heating and cooling. Much of that is wasted, not least because in the past architects have paid little attention to details such as the design of pipework (long, narrow pipes with lots of right angles are far more wasteful than short, fat and straight ones). Energy efficiency has been nobody’s priority: it takes time and money that architects, builders, landlords and tenants would rather spend on other things. ...

Whether we are talking about climate change or peak resources, the tendency is to project current economic dynamics - like a ratio of energy usage per unit of GDP - indefinitely into the future and then make dire predictions of impending doom.

However, continuous innovation teaches us that such relationships are alterable. Until the early 20th century, there was a consistent linkage between the acreage in agricultural production and human population. It would have been unsustainable with the level of growth the next century would bring. One hundred years later, we now see that the global demand for agricultural land has flattened – and may even decline – even as the global population continues to grow, albeit at an ever-slowing rate.

Similarly, energy use and GDP have typically been closely related. What we see now is that energy and GDP are decoupling. Both are increasing, but energy is at a slower rate than GDP. Even as both global population and living standards rise, it does not follow that energy and resource usage will inevitably follow suit. Through innovations in engineering, nanotechnology, and recycling, nearly everything we use can eventually be made of renewable materials. We have only scratched the surface of power sources that are available to us. Dramatic innovation is underway in energy storage, transmission, and usage.

There unquestionably are challenges, but predictions of impending and inescapable collapse are not justified.

For more on decoupling and a link to an excellent video by Bjorn Lomborg on the fallacy of limited growth thinking, see my post, Limits to Growth: Still Wrong, Still Influential - Bjorn Lomborg.

Nuclear Power From Nuclear Waste

See this article for more details: Back to the Future: Can Nuclear Energy Save the World?

 

Science and Technology Links

1. Christian Science Monitor: In Kenya, selling human waste could revolutionize sanitation

Dealing with human waste has become a health crisis in many poor communities, but residents of a Kenyan slum have found a solution that turns poop into profit. ...

... Sanergy’s toilets are low-tech and low-cost, but they have a key feature: They come with removable waste cartridges. Local entrepreneurs buy and operate the toilets, charging users a small monthly membership fee. Sanergy then collects the waste and processes it into organic, sell-able fertilizer. Soon the company plans to process the waste into biogas, biochar and several types of plastic, as well.

Creating business relationships means that toilet operators earn steady income from their investments, and waste treatment pays for itself. It benefits people you would expect like the toilet users, who now have access to a clean and private space to go to the bathroom, and people you wouldn’t, like the farmers who pay less for the processed, organic fertilizer. ...

2. Jason Kolb: 5 Technologies That Will Change the World

... Here are five technologies that seem poised to break out on the world in the next few years, and how they will change our lives. The most interesting aspect of these to me is how they interact when used together–the intersections of these disruptive technologies are where you can start really understanding how these will change the world in concrete ways. Like layer cakes, they get even more delicious when you eat them together. ...

3. Wired: The Germans Have Figured Out How to 3-D Print Cars

The assembly line isn’t going away, but 3-D printing is going to reshape how we make cars. The EDAG Genesis points the way, with an beautifully crafted frame made from a range of materials and inspired by a turtle’s skeleton. ...

4. Business Insider: New Roles For Technology: Rise Of The Robots

... Since moving from the page and screen to real life, robots have been a mild disappointment. They do some things that humans cannot do themselves, like exploring Mars, and a host of things people do not much want to do, like dealing with unexploded bombs or vacuuming floors (there are around 10m robot vacuum cleaners wandering the carpets of the world). And they are very useful in bits of manufacturing. But reliable robots--especially ones required to work beyond the safety cages of a factory floor--have proved hard to make, and robots are still pretty stupid. So although they fascinate people, they have not yet made much of a mark on the world.

That seems about to change. The exponential growth in the power of silicon chips, digital sensors and high-bandwidth communications improves robots just as it improves all sorts of other products. And, as our special report this week explains, three other factors are at play. ...

5. City Journal: The Next Age of Invention

... Certainly, it is difficult to know exactly in which direction technological change will move and how significant it will be. Much as in evolutionary biology, all we know is history. Yet something can be learned from the past, and it tells us that such pessimism is mistaken. The future of technology is likely to be bright. ...

6. The Guardian: Fracking: the surprising new proving ground for water technologies

The energy industry's growing demand for water is spurring water-treatment innovation that could spill over into other sectors. ...

7.  Scientific American: How to Profit from CO2 Emissions

Pulling CO2 from the atmosphere to lessen global warming is prohibitively expensive, unless we can find ways to profit from it. Scientists and entrepreneurs are developing some ingenious processes for turning CO2 emissions into the raw materials for a wide range of products. A Nexus Media production for Scientific American.

8. Business Insider: CITI: 'The Age Of Renewables Is Beginning'

In a new note titled "The Age of Renewables is Beginning – A Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE)," Perspective, Citi's alternative energy team led by Shar Pourreza, writes that we can expect across-the-board price decreases in solar and wind, which will continue to fuel the renewable energy generation boom. ...

9. Atlantic: The UN's New Focus: Surviving, Not Stopping, Climate Change

The United Nations' latest report on climate change contains plenty of dire warnings about the adverse impact "human interference with the climate system" is having on everything from sea levels to crop yields to violent conflicts. But the primary message of the study isn't, as John Kerry suggested on Sunday, for countries to collectively reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead, the subtext appears to be this: Climate change is happening and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. As a result, we need to adapt to a warming planet—to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits associated with increasing temperatures—rather than focusing solely on curbing warming in the first place. And it's businesses and local governments, rather than the international community, that can lead the way.

“The really big breakthrough in this report is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change,” Chris Field, the co-chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study, said this week, adding that governments, companies, and communities are already experimenting with “climate-change adaptation.” ...

10. Christian Science Monitor: Thorium: a safer nuclear power

In the same month as the Three Mile Island and Fukushima nuclear disasters, China announces it is speeding up its research into so-called molten salt reactors that can run on thorium.  If it succeeds, it would create a cheaper, more efficient, and safer form of nuclear power that produces less nuclear waste than today's uranium-based technology. ...

11. NPR: Half Of Americans Believe In Medical Conspiracy Theories

Misinformation about health remains widespread and popular.

Half of Americans subscribe to medical conspiracy theories, with more than one-third of people thinking that the Food and Drug Administration is deliberately keeping natural cures for cancer off the market because of pressure from drug companies, a survey finds.

Twenty percent of people said that cellphones cause cancer — and that large corporations are keeping health officials from doing anything about it. And another 20 percent think doctors and the government want to vaccinate children despite knowing that vaccines cause autism.

"One of the things that struck us is that people who embrace these beliefs are not less health conscious," says , a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who led the study. "They're just less likely to embrace traditional medicine." ...

12. CBS: New colon cancer test could be alternative to colonoscopy

13. Forbes: Scientists Reconstruct Faces From DNA Samples

Sometime in the future, technicians will go over the scene of the crime. They’ll uncover some DNA evidence and take it to the lab. And when the cops need to get a picture of the suspect, they won’t have to ask eyewitnesses to give descriptions to a sketch artist – they’ll just ask the technicians to get a mugshot from the DNA.

That, at least, is the potential of new research being published today in PLOS Genetics. In that paper, a team of scientists describe how they were able to produce crude 3D models of faces extrapolated from a person’s DNA. ...

14. Mashable: The Cause of Earth's Largest Mass Extinction: Microbe Sex

Around 252 million years ago, 90 percent of all species on Earth were wiped out in an extinction event commonly called The Great Dying. Now, a team of MIT researchers from the U.S. and China might have the answer for the largest mass extinction our planet has ever seen.

It wasn’t asteroids or volcanoes, but methane-producing microbes called Methanosarcina having sex — or rather, passing genetic material in a strange microbial form of sex. ...

Science and Technology Links

1. PBS: Five Cook Stoves Used Around the World

2. Upworthy: It Used To Take Up 40% Of Their Daily Expenses. Then They Found A New Way To Cook.

3. Viral Forest: This is the Pallet Emergency Home. It Can Be Built in One Day With Only Basic Tools.

... Developed by the creative folks at i-Beam Design, this house plan makes use of commonly available materials, and is designed to be built by anyone, even without construction experience. ...

4. Upworthy: A Man Has Revolutionized Sanitary Pads For Women In India 'By Thinking Like A Woman'

5. Huffington Post: Global Food Waste Now At Shamefully High Levels

WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - The world loses or wastes a staggering 25 percent to 33 percent of the food it produces for consumption, losses that can mean the difference between an adequate diet and malnutrition in many countries, the World Bank said in a report released on Thursday. ...

6. Wired: This Gigantic 3-D Printer Can Create an Entire Table

7. Mashable: Researchers 3D Print Blood Vessels Into Tissue for Artificial Organs

... Using a custom-built four-head 3D printer and a "disappearing" ink, materials scientist Jennifer Lewis and her team created a patch of tissue containing skin cells and biological structural material interwoven with blood-vessel-like structures. Reported by the team in Advanced Materials, the tissue is the first made through 3D printing to include potentially functional blood vessels embedded among multiple, patterned cell types. ...

8. SourceFed: Man Gets New 3D Printed Face

9. Reuters: Nine-month-old baby may have been cured of HIV, U.S. scientists say

A 9-month-old baby who was born in California with the HIV virus that leads to AIDS may have been cured as a result of treatments that doctors began just four hours after her birth, medical researchers said on Wednesday.

That child is the second case, following an earlier instance in Mississippi, in which doctors may have brought HIV in a newborn into remission by administering antiretroviral drugs in the first hours of life, said Dr. Deborah Persaud, a pediatrics specialist with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, at a medical conference in Boston. ...

 10. Globe and Mail: How tiny robots could help make babies

... Microtechnology and nanotechology involve the manipulation of extremely small robots or bits of matter. To give a sense of the units of measure involved, a micrometre is one millionth of a metre, while a nanometre is a billionth.

The AMNL’s in vitro project focused on improving Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, a process used to create test tube babies. Developed in the early 1990s, the procedure allows an embryologist to gather a single sperm in a needle and inject it into an oocyte (egg cell). Given that a sperm head is about five micrometres wide, doing this procedure by hand requires a tremendous amount of precision, dexterity and accuracy.

To make this process more efficient and precise, the U of T lab developed a robotic injection system. ...

11. BBC: 30,000-year-old giant virus 'comes back to life'

An ancient virus has "come back to life" after lying dormant for at least 30,000 years, scientists say. ...

12. MIT News: Bionic plants

Nanotechnology could turn shrubbery into supercharged energy producers or sensors for explosives. ...

... Plants have many valuable functions: They provide food and fuel, release the oxygen that we breathe, and add beauty to our surroundings. Now, a team of MIT researchers wants to make plants even more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production and give them completely new functions, such as monitoring environmental pollutants.

In a new Nature Materials paper, the researchers report boosting plants’ ability to capture light energy by 30 percent by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast, the plant organelle where photosynthesis takes place. Using another type of carbon nanotube, they also modified plants to detect the gas nitric oxide.

Together, these represent the first steps in launching a scientific field the researchers have dubbed “plant nanobionics.” ...

13. Economist: Happy birthday world wide web

14. Huff Post Impact: How Can We Balance the Risks and Rewards of New Technologies?

... That said, in today's complex and interconnected world, their sustainable development and use also hinges on understanding how they might harm people and the environment, and how people's perceptions and assumptions might affect their development trajectories. This is where an increasingly sophisticated understanding of sustainable innovation is needed. While scientists and engineers are masters at demonstrating what is technologically possible, it is society that ultimately decides which technologies succeed and which do not. ...

15. Scientific American: What the 1960s Got Right—and Wrong—about Today's Tech

In 1964—exactly 50 years ago—sci-fi author Isaac Asimov wrote up his predictions about what life today would be like. He had a lot of hits and a lot of misses, as I wrote in my Scientific American column this month.

But Asimov wasn't the only person to look into the technological crystal ball. Fifty and 60 years ago gee-whiz films depicting life today were a staple—a sure way to wow audiences. Today these fanciful visions of the future live on, on YouTube. Let them be a warning to anyone today who's inclined to make a prediction about life in 2064. ...

 16. The Atlantic: This 13-Year-Old Just Became the Youngest Person Ever to Build a Nuclear-Fusion Reactor

... Edwards—a "young boffin," as the Post delightfully calls him—began construction of his makeshift nuclear reactor back in October in a science lab at Priory. He also kept a blog tracking his progress in the work of reactor-building, cataloguing his collection of a diffusion pump and a control panel and other components of the device that would eventually smash some atoms. 

This morning, all that work paid off. Edwards smashed two atoms of hydrogen together, creating helium. Yep: From a little science lab in a school in Lancashire, a 13-year-old created nuclear fusion. ...

17. Business Insider: Global Warming: Who Pressed The Pause Button?

... If so, the pause has gone from being not explained to explained twice over--once by aerosols and the solar cycle, and again by ocean winds and currents. These two accounts are not contradictory. The processes at work are understood, but their relative contributions are not. ...

... The solar cycle is already turning. And aerosol cooling is likely to be reined in by China’s anti-pollution laws. Most of the circumstances that have put the planet’s temperature rise on "pause" look temporary. Like the Terminator, global warming will be back.

18. Library of Economics and Liberty - David Henderson: 1.6%, Not 97%, Agree that Humans are the Main Cause of Global Warming

Mark Bahner, a commenter on my previous post on global warming and on David Friedman's post, has sifted through the data behind John Cook's statement that 97% of climate scientists who stated a position believe that humans are the main cause of global warming. ...

... Here are the categories that Cook et al state. I have added the numbers that Bahner found beside each. ...

1,Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+% : 64
2,Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimize: 922
3,Implicitly endorses AGW without minimizing it: 2910
4,No Position: 7970
5,Implicitly minimizes/rejects AGW: 54
6,Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW but does not quantify: 15
7,Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW as less than 50%: 9 ...

19. The Energy Collective: When Renewables Destroy Nature

... But in the first article from a forthcoming issue of Breakthrough Journal, Will Boisvert argues that bioenergy’s devastating impact on nature is typical of renewables, not exceptional. A world powered primarily by renewables, Boisvert writes, is unlikely to be environmentally friendly at all. ...

... Against the vision of renewables having a light footprint on the land, Boisvert notes, “The renewable energy paradigm requires an unprecedented industrial reengineering of the landscape: lining every horizon with forty-story wind turbines, paving deserts with concentrating solar mirrors, girdling the coasts with tidal and wave generators, and drilling for geological heat reservoirs; it sees all of nature as an integrated machine for producing energy.”

Ultimately, if we want to save more nature we must leave more of it alone, not harness it to power a human population of 7 going on 9 billion. “Stewardship of the planet requires that we continue to unshackle ourselves from ecosystems,” Boisvert writes, “and ecosystems from us.”

20. Forbes: Nuclear Energy Rising At The Expense of Renewable Power

...What now? Nuclear energy is getting off of its knees and it is perched to rebound, at least in certain parts of the world: In the United States, four reactors at two plants are under construction while the U.S. Department of Energy has been increasing funding for advanced nuclear research and development.

Meantime, China, Korea, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the UK are advancing nuclear production to address air pollution and climate concerns. China has 20 nuclear plants today and 28 more under construction — 40 percent of all projected new nuclear units, says the World Nuclear Association. A similar dynamic exists in the UK, which approved the construction of two reactors at Hinkley Point that will provide 7 percent of the UK’s electricity. ...

Limits to Growth: Still Wrong, Still Influential - Bjorn Lomborg

Below is a presentation by Bjorn Lomborg at Creative Innovation 2013: Asia Pacific. I think this is a remarkable presentation. First, a few remarks.

How much can the global economy grow? That is a big issue in economics and environmentalism. Clearly, the earth has a fixed quantity of resources. If the economy grows exponentially, then one day, we run out of resources, and the world system collapses. We must limit growth if we are to survive. It seems so plainly obvious. Limits to Growth was an attempt to quantify how this all played out and advocate for changes.

My Dad was a professor and research chemist during my childhood. He was intensely focused on energy. Limits to growth conversations were in the ether all around me during my junior high, high school, and college years in the 1970s. I volunteered in the 1980 John Anderson presidential campaign, partly because he wanted to impose a $.50 a gallon gas tax to get us off of petroleum and move toward nuclear and renewable fuels. Limits to Growth (LTG) was very much a product of the thinking of the 1970s mindset, but its influence is still very strong today.

But the problem is that the LTG framing is spectacularly wrong! In the video below, Bjorn Lomborg unpacks why this is so. LTG focused on five factors:

• Population
• Agricultural Production
• Natural Resources
• Industrial Production
• Pollution

Each of these was believed to be growing exponentially. Population was growing exponentially. It requires a certain amount of acreage to generate enough food to feed each person. Feeding this growing number of people will mean cultivating evermore acreage. Supplying basic goods to these people will mean an exponential growth in industrial production, with an attendant rise in resource consumption and pollution.

What the scenario spectacularly overlooks is human innovation and substitution. For example, population growth is slowing and will likely stop at between ten and eleven billion, maybe less, in the second half of this century. The increase directly resulted from the life-enhancing technology that caused a sharp decline in death rates. But birth rates took far more years to adjust. Thus, millions of children that would have died young in past eras were now becoming adults and having children. But over time, the fertility appears to drop back down to the replacement rate and even lower in some places. People innovated.

Another example. The agricultural land required to feed one American stayed constant until about 1910, when three hundred ten million acres were in production. Now if you went back in time and told Americans that the population would triple during the next century and asked them how much agricultural land would be needed, they could easily tell you. An additional six hundred million acres, or most of the land area east of the Mississippi. How many acres are in production today? Three hundred ten million acres, the same as in 1910. Innovation and technology allowed us to become magnitudes more efficient in agriculture to the point that we are not only able to feed the additional Americans but also export food. This is called decoupling because the two variables of population and agricultural land use no longer move in tandem. Americans innovated.

One chart from the video below shows a similar development in world agriculture.

 

Even with population growth, the land needed for agriculture is projected to remain about the same or a little higher by other estimates. More decoupling through innovation.

Then there is this recent chart. It suggests that energy consumption may be decoupling from economic output:

 

Source

As Lomborg notes, innovation is the missing element in LTG. By recycling some non-renewable resources, using nanotechnology to redesign materials at the molecular level, and eventually substituting renewable materials for non-renewables, the possibilities for growth are inestimable.

There is a caveat here. As we innovate, it is possible that we may not find it possible to innovate quickly enough on a particular challenge to avoid creating considerable hardship for segments of the human race at a particular time. I’m not suggesting we should be without caution, just that the idea of the limits is very flawed.

Here is the video. Enjoy:

Science and Technology Links

1. The Atlantic: What Americans Don't Know About Science

On a recent survey, just 74 percent of Americans said that the Earth revolves around the sun. ...

... As you'll see, in the words of the report, "many Americans provide multiple incorrect answers to basic questions about scientific facts." Then again, "residents of other countries, including highly developed ones, appear to perform no better."...

... Finally, the report shows us that for at least some of the questions, Americans may be answering not based on knowledge, but on belief. As shown above, only 48 percent of Americans responded "true" to the statement "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." But if the question was reframed slightly, far more people responded with "true." Given the statement "according to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals," 72 percent answered "true." (Emphasis mine.) A similar pattern happens with the Big Bang question. When the statement is simply "The universe began with a huge explosion," 39 percent responded "true." When it is "according to astronomers, the universe began with a huge explosion," 60 percent said "true." This seems to indicate that many Americans are familiar with the theories of evolution and the Big Bang; they simply don't believe they're true.

2. The Atlantic Cities: Pre-Fab Houses to Help the Homeless

3. Foreign Affairs: Networking Nature: How Technology Is Transforming Conservation

Conservation is for the first time beginning to operate at the pace and on the scale necessary to keep up with, and even get ahead of, the planet’s most intractable environmental challenges. New technologies have given conservationists abilities that would have seemed like super powers just a few years ago. We can now monitor entire ecosystems -- think of the Amazon rainforest -- in nearly real time, using remote sensors to map their three-dimensional structures; satellite communications to follow elusive creatures, such as the jaguar and the puma; and smartphones to report illegal logging.

Such innovations are revolutionizing conservation in two key ways: first, by revealing the state of the world in unprecedented detail and, second, by making available more data to more people in more places. Like most technologies, these carry serious, although manageable, risks: in the hands of poachers, location-tracking devices could prove devastating to the endangered animals they hunt. Yet on balance, technological innovation gives new hope for averting the planet’s environmental collapse and reversing its accelerating rates of habitat loss, animal extinction, and climate change. ...

4. Real Clear Science: Science Opinions Cross Partisan Lines

... Our results indicate that, more than political party identification, ideology or religious beliefs, an individual’s beliefs about science and society had the strongest influence on their support for stem cell research. It was also possible to identify distinct segments who differ substantially in what they thought about science’s social implications. Traditional political labels do not easily define these groups.

Based on our data we classify the US public in four categories:

Scientific optimists: These comprise about a third of the public. They believe strongly in the link between science and social progress. They are likely to support most scientific advances and three quarters of this group are in favour of embryonic stem cell research. Optimists are on average highly educated, financially well off and disproportionately white. They are split almost evenly along political lines, with slightly more Democrats among them. In terms of political ideology, they are the most moderate in their outlook.

Scientific pessimists: This group comprises just under a quarter of the public. They have strong reservations about the moral boundaries that might be crossed by scientists and believe science may lead to new problems. They are the most likely to oppose advances in biomedical research, with only 40% in favour of stem cell research. Compared to optimists, this group scores much lower on average in terms of educational attainment and income. More tend to be female and from a minority background. Pessimists split evenly along party lines, but tend to be disproportionately either moderate or conservative in their ideological outlook.

The conflicted: This group represents another quarter of the public. They view science in both optimistic and pessimistic terms. Though they are socially similar to the Pessimists in their background, they tend to be older on average than members of other segments. They appear open to accepting the arguments of scientists and advocates who emphasise the benefits of research. By 2010, more than 60% of this segment had come to favour embryonic stem cell research.

The disengaged: About 15% of the public lacks strong beliefs about how science might impact society. As a result, they are likely to be the most susceptible to shifts in opinion driven by political messages. For example, between 2008 and 2010, support for embryonic stem cell research among this group increased by 20 percentage points. ...

 5. CBR: So what is nanotechnology anyway?

Nanotechonology is one of the current buzzwords of science today, and deals with technology on the 'nano' scale. What's the nano scale!? The nano scale is small that you can't see it with a regular microscope; in fact, a nanometre is one-billionth of a metre. A regular atom is about one-tenth of a nanometre in diameter.

At this scale, scientists are able to manipulate atoms themselves, and that leads to the creation of all sorts of fascinating and interesting materials. One prime example is that of a carbon nanotube, which is made my rolling a sheet of graphite molecules into a tube. The right combination of nanotubes can create a structure that is hundred of times stronger than normal steel but only one-sixth the weight. This is just one example of the practical use of nanotechnology.

A concise actual definition for nanotechnology, found here, is: "The design, characterization, production, and application of structures, devices, and systems by controlled manipulation of size and shape at the nanometer scale (atomic, molecular, and macromolecular scale) that produces structures, devices, and systems with at least one novel/superior characteristic or property."

What is nanotechnology used for? ...

6. Nano Werk: Nanotechnology is getting closer to 3D nanoprinting

Fabrication of three-dimensional (3D) objects through direct deposition of functional materials – also called additive manufacturing – has been a subject of intense study in the area of macroscale manufacturing for several decades. These 3D printing techniques are reaching a stage where desired products and structures can be made independent of the complexity of their shapes – even bioprinting tissue is now in the realm of the possible.

Applying 3D printing concepts to nanotechnology could bring similar advantages to nanofabrication – speed, less waste, economic viability – than it is expected to bring to manufacturing technologies.

In addition, pre-patterned micro- or nanostructures could be used as substrates, allowing researchers to realize unprecedented manufacturing flexibility, functionality and complexity at the nanoscale.

Researchers in Korea have now shown that nanoscale 3D objects such as free-standing nanowalls can by constructed by an additive manufacturing scheme. Even without the motion of the substrate, nanojets are spontaneously laid down and piled to yield nanowalls. ...

7. BBC: Tiny motors controlled inside human cell

For the first time, scientists have placed tiny motors inside living human cells and steered them magnetically. ...

8. Extreme Tech: This single-atom engine breaks the laws of physics, could drive progress in quantum computing

A new invention from Germany’s University of Mainz is not only the world’s smallest engine by an enormous margin, it may have broken a theoretical limit for engine efficiency. The device, a so-called “atomic engine,” produces power thanks to the movements of just a single atom trapped and manipulated. It’s an incredible achievement that, while not particularly useful for engineering in the short term, could revolutionize our understanding of the quantum world. Plus, it’s really neat. ...

9. Re/Code: 3-D Printing’s Next Frontier: Mass Customization

The next evolution of 3-D printing may well be what some call “mass customization,” where customers get to contribute to the design process of a product like a necklace, an orthotic footbed, headphones or a toy. By printing one piece at a time, it can fit the buyer’s identity, shape or preference, and their input becomes part of the creation process.

At a basic level, mass customization is kind of like the next level of printing a face on a mug. Now, you could make the mug from scratch with a relief of the face laid into the material like a sort of personal Mount Rushmore. Or you could dream bigger.

Unlike traditional factories, which are optimized for making large quantities of the same thing and so have minimum orders and set-up costs, 3-D printers create individual objects by painstakingly layering material on top of itself.

As Shapeways marketing director Carine Carmy put it to Re/code, “The printer doesn’t care whether it’s 1,000 of one thing or one of 1,000 things.” ...

10. Huff Post Tech: 3D Printing Has Started A Revolution

... Few companies grasp the coming upheaval. Perhaps because 3D printing, an innovation that can come across as a curiosity, is propelling this disruption. Yet, these printers, which churn out objects by laying thin layer after thin layer of metal, plastics or other materials on top of each other, won't tip the scale alone.

It's their collision with two other disruptive technologies -- intelligent robotics and open source electronics -- that will bring an end to the era of big and complex global supply chains. Together, they're going to usher in the digitalization of manufacturing, by creating flexible, fast, local supply chains underpinned by software. ...

11. Scientific American: Robotic Surgery Opens Up

If the open-source approach to building robot surgeons can cut costs and improve performance, patients will increasingly find them at the other end of the scalpel ...

12. The Skin Gun

Remarkable advancement in treating burn victims.

13. Huff Post Impact: This New Product May Drastically Change The Battlefield For The Better

U.S. combat troops may soon benefit from faster and more effective relief from gunshot wounds on the battlefield.

The U.S. Army has requested expedited approval from the FDA for XStat, a new product that has the potential to decrease troop casualties during warfare. The product acts as a modified syringe -- injecting specially coated sponges into deep tissue wounds to stop hemorrhaging, Popular Science reports. ...

14. Business Insider: Number Of Test-Tube Babies Born In US Hits Record Percentage

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More test-tube babies were born in the United States in 2012 than ever before, and they constituted a higher percentage of total births than at any time since the technology was introduced in the 1980s, according to a report released on Monday. ...

15. Huffington Post: What Percentage Of Our Brains Do We Actually Use? Popular Myth Debunked In TED-Ed Video

It's commonly said that we humans use only about 10 percent of our brains, with some people attributing Einstein's brilliance to his ability to stretch that paltry figure to 15 percent.

But in the video above, neurologist Dr. Richard Cytowic debunks these familiar notions, arguing that brain regions once believed to be "silent" are actually humming with activity.

What exactly do these "silent" regions do? According to Cytowic, they're intimately involved with our ability to plan, make decisions, adapt to evolving situations, and reason abstractly. And evidence suggests that at any moment up to 16 percent of our brain cells are active. ...

16. Associated Press: Ancient baby DNA suggests tie to Native Americans

NEW YORK (AP) -- The DNA of a baby boy who was buried in Montana 12,600 years ago has been recovered, and it provides new indications of the ancient roots of today's American Indians and other native peoples of the Americas.

It's the oldest genome ever recovered from the New World. Artifacts found with the body show the boy was part of the Clovis culture, which existed in North America from about 13,000 years ago to about 12,600 years ago and is named for an archaeological site near Clovis, N.M. ...

17. Live Science: Mother Lode' of Amazingly Preserved Fossils Discovered in Canada

A treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada's Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth, scientists say. ...

18. Christian Science Monitor: When nearly everything on Earth died in the blink of an eye

Scientists have determined that the Permian extinction – the greatest mass die-off in the history of our planet so far – lasted just 60,000 years, an instant in geological time. ...

19. Newser: Source of Stonehenge's Rocks Pinpointed

For nine decades, it's been established that many of Stonehenge's smaller rocks hail from the Preseli Hills in Wales. Now, a newly published study says that we've been wrong about an outcrop that has been accepted as a specific source since 1923. And the new research, published in February's issue of Journal of Archaeological Science,suggests the rocks—known as bluestones, of which there are many types—may not have been transported there by humans at all. As head researcher Dr. Richard Bevins explains, in 1923, geologist H.H. Thomas identified Carn Meini as the source of spotted dolerite bluestones, but a new analysis of the rocks' chemical makeup has fingered Carn Goedog as the true home of at least 55% of those used at Stonehenge, reports Planet Earth. ...

20. USA Today: Genetically engineered crops in nearly 12% of fields

Even as some U.S. consumers reject foods containing ingredients from genetically modified plants, farmers continue to embrace the technology. In 2013, crops grown from seed engineered to withstand weed killers, kill pests or resist diseases made up 11.7% of fields planted worldwide, a report released Thursday says. ...

21: BBC News: Genetically modified potatoes 'resist late blight'

British scientists have developed genetically modified potatoes that are resistant to the vegetable's biggest threat - blight....

22. My Science Academy: Scientists resurrect extinct frog that gives birth through its mouth

Scientists have resurrected an extinct frog species, that gives birth through its mouth, by transplanting its DNA into the eggs of another frog species.

23. Scotsman: Ten myths concerning nuclear power

Civil nuclear power’s historical links with nuclear weapons (and Chernobyl, Fukushima and suchlike) colours our perceptions of this important source of energy. We don’t eschew high explosives for their many valuable uses because they can kill people when abused. We keep driving cars despite the daily death toll.

The fruits of technology always present us with the Faustian dilemma of use for good or evil. The safe application of knowledge depends on the effectiveness of democracy, regulation and governance. Civil nuclear power suffers from its unfamiliarity to the public. This needs correcting by its promoters and by those in a position to influence public attitudes; they need to engage effectively with the public and encourage nuclear opponents to adopt an objective approach to the evidence.

1. Too dangerous? Objective examination of accident statistics for all fuels for deaths per unit of energy transformed shows that civil nuclear power generation has the best safety record. That includes the consequences of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

2. Causes cancer? Risks of cancer due to exposure to radiological hazards from civil nuclear power are extremely low, much lower than the risks from granite in Aberdeen, or from the use of diagnostic and therapeutic radioactivity in medicine (risks which are still heavily outweighed by the benefits). Scientists recognise that nuclear radiation limits are actually set lower than necessary. ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Economic Development Links

1. EconLog: On Sweatshops: They're Better Than the Alternative - Art Carden

... Here's some of what I wrote them specifically:

Sweatshops are an important exercise in appreciating the difference between what we see (people in sweatshops) and what we don't see (the jobs they would have if they didn't have sweatshop opportunities). Sweatshops employ children because the children are available for work and because their next-best opportunities (agriculture or, in some cases, prostitution) are usually worse than sweatshop labor. It is definitely good that the workers at least have opportunities to work in sweatshops because, as research by Powell and others has shown, their other alternatives are even worse. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but sweatshop earnings are better than they are in other lines of employment.

Perhaps I'm reading uncharitably, but I think a lot of sweatshop critics misunderstand the economist's argument. The argument isn't that sweatshop conditions and wages are good in some cosmic sense. Rather, they are better than the available alternatives. ...

2. Business Insider: Child Labor Bans Actually Make Things Worse For The Poorest Children

This is straight from the "good intentions gone bad" file.

... But banning child labor outright may not work in countries with systemic, widespread poverty and no social security programs to help out poor families in dire straits. 

This is according to a new NBER study by Prashant Bharadwaj of UCSD, Leah Lakdawal of Michigan State University and Nicholas Li of the University of Toronto. 

The study uses data from India, a country where the problem of child labor is particularly egregious. According to official estimates, the number of child laborers between the ages of 5 and 14 lay at nearly 5 million in 2010.  In 1986, India instituted a ban on child labor through the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, which sought to ban children under the age of 14 being employed in "hazardous" occupations, which included construction work, some factory work and work in automobile garages. It also restricted the number of hours children could work in "non-hazardous" occupations, such as food service. 

The ban's intended effect was to make it riskier, and hence more costly for employers to employ child labor.

But the only people sending their children out to work were the poorest and most desperate families who had no other means of reaching a minimum level of subsistence. Employers took advantage of this desperation and responded by cutting the wages they would pay a child laborer as a means of passing on the higher cost of the risk of employing them.  Families that would earlier have sent only one of their children to work, were now forced to send more of their young children into the workforce. The fall in child wages due to the ban actually led to an increase in child labor.

The research found that child labor increased 12.5% over the pre-ban average, and the likelihood of a business employing a child versus employing an older person increased by 1.7 to 1.9 percentage points.  ...

3. BBC: Maid to entrepreneur: Rising out of poverty in Brazil

... The changes have been particularly marked for Brazilian women. Falling birth rates mean mothers have smaller families to care for and often do better in their chosen professions.

According to Sebrae, a body that promotes entrepreneurship, the number of Brazilian women who became business owners grew by 21% in the past decade, at twice the rate of men. ...

4. New York Times: In Middle of Mexico, a Middle Class Rises

... Education. More sophisticated work. Higher pay. This is the development formula Mexico has been seeking for decades. But after the free-market wave of the 1990s failed to produce much more than low-skilled factory work, Mexico is finally attracting the higher-end industries that experts say could lead to lasting prosperity. Here, in a mostly poor state long known as one of the country’s main sources of illegal immigrants to the United States, a new Mexico has begun to emerge.

Dozens of foreign companies are investing, filling in new industrial parks along the highways. Middle-class housing is popping up in former watermelon fields, and new universities are waving in classes of students eager to study engineering, aeronautics and biotechnology, signaling a growing confidence in Mexico’s economic future and what many see as the imported meritocracy of international business. In a country where connections and corruption are still common tools of enrichment, many people here are beginning to believe they can get ahead through study and hard work. ...

5. Forbes: Three Young Entrepreneurs Fighting Poverty Have Big Impact

Jake Harriman says that if the company he’s founded still exists in 30 years, “we’ve failed.” You see, Harriman believes Nuru International can end extreme poverty in that time.

Harriman and I met at the Social Innovation Summit at Stanford this week, where I found a number of young entrepreneurs who are working to end poverty.

Beth Schmidt created a crowdfunding site called Wishbone to help poor high school students to raise funding to attend special university programs that help them prepare for college.

Leila Janah created Samasource to help U.S. companies crowdsource affordable staff from the developing world, providing women and young people with quality jobs that lift them out of poverty. Janah notes, “There are 1.4 billion people living on $1.25 per day or less. This is not acceptable.”...

6. Businessweek: Want to Fight Poverty? Just Give the Poor Cash

A new study by economists at Harvard and from MIT suggests that the best way to fight global poverty (PDF) is simply to give people cash and let them spend it however they want. The study was conducted with Innovations for Poverty Action, with funding from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund. ...

7. Businessweek: Is Land Reform Finally Coming to China?

China’s leaders raised a multitude of reforms as priorities at the plenum that closed a week ago. A key one, a change in land ownership so that farmers can more freely rent, sell, and mortgage their land, is hoped to boost China’s still laggard household consumption.

“The Party leadership has given its blessing to land reforms that should shift more income to rural households. Change will happen slowly but the result should be a boost to consumer spending,” wrote Mark Williams and Julian Evans-Pritchard, economists at London-based Capital Economics in a Nov. 20 note. ...

8. Atlantic: One of the World's Tiniest, Poorest Countries Is Redefining HIV Care

In Rwanda, success is measured not by how many people live and die, but by how many take their medication and lead normal lives.

... Yet in Rwanda, where just 20 years ago a genocide claimed approximately 1 million lives, the government has transformed HIV care for the poor by redefining the standards for successful treatment. More than three decades into the epidemic, many national and international agencies are still counting the basics—how many people get infected, how many people receive medication, how many patients die. Success in Rwanda, meanwhile, is measured not in the number remaining alive, but rather in how many are actually able to take their medications as directed and suppress the virus in their bodies to a level where it is essentially non-existent. In Rwanda, success is achieved when people living with HIV can earn a living, support their family, raise their children, and care for their community no differently than their peers. ...

9. Slate: We're Not Sending Poor Countries the Stuff They Want

The paper looked what people identified as the most pressing problems facing their countries on public attitude surveys from 42 African and Latin American countries. In the case of Africa, Leo found that the overwhelming priorities as “(1) jobs and income; (2) infrastructure; (3) enabling economic and financial policies; and (4) inequality. Since 2002, these issues have steadily accounted for roughly 70 percent of survey responses.” (Notice that health, education, and political instability are not on that list.)

So is this what U.S. aid to Africa has focused on? Not even close. According to Leo, “percentage of US development commitments aligned with what Africans have cited as the three biggest problems has exceeded 50 percent in only two African countries over the last decade.” Those would be Botswana, where PEPFAR programs addressed AIDS, and Burkina Faso, where a Millennium Challenge Corp. grant focused on infrastructure.

Most countries are more like Kenya, where only 6 percent of the $5 billion in U.S. development commitments over the last decade has gone toward the three problems Kenyans consistently identify as the country’s biggest: unemployment, bad infrastructure, and unfriendly economic conditions. ...

10. Wired: The Hyper-Efficient, Highly Scientific Scheme to Help the World’s Poor

...At the time, there was a campaign, spearheaded by the World Bank, to provide free textbooks throughout sub-Saharan Africa, on the assumption that this would boost test scores and keep children in school longer. ICS had tasked Kremer’s friend with identifying target schools for such a giveaway.

While chatting with his friend about this, Kremer began to wonder: How did ICS know the campaign would work? It made sense in theory—free textbooks should mean more kids read them, so more kids learn from them—but they had no evidence to back that up. On the spot, Kremer suggested a rigorous way to evaluate the program: Identify twice the number of qualifying schools as it had the money to support. Then randomly pick half of those schools to receive the textbooks, while the rest got none. By comparing outcomes between the two cohorts, they could gauge whether the textbooks were making a difference. ...

... But soon after Kremer returned to the US, he was startled to get a call from his friend. ICS was interested in pursuing his idea. Sensing a rare research opportunity, Kremer flew back to Kenya and set to work. By any measure it was a quixotic project. ...

11. Businessweek: Poor Countries Need Relief From Climate Change. They Need Electricity More

... Campaigners pointed out that those with the most to lose from the failure of the climate talks are the world’s poorest people—certain to suffer the greatest impact of the floods, droughts, and rising temperatures that climate change is bringing. At the same time, the world’s poorest people are also those with the lowest access to modern sources of energy such as electricity and natural gas. In order to foster economic growth and improvements in health, developing countries will need to generate huge amounts of additional power. How to achieve considerable reductions in carbon dioxide at a time of massive increases in global energy consumption is of the most complex—and urgent—challenges facing policymakers in the developed world. ...

12. Atlantic: Here's Why Developing Countries Will Consume 65% of the World's Energy by 2040

One bit of good news: Energy consumption per gross domestic product is expected to decline worldwide in the coming decade, with developed and developing nations reaching parity by 2040.

13. Huff Post Impact: How Is Technology Driving Job Creation In Poor Countries? - Jessica Long

... In the developing world, the pace of change may be slower than many would like but, nonetheless, there are marked examples of technology's role in raising incomes and driving employment opportunities.

It's not just the supply chain and information-based jobs spawned by technological innovation that create jobs in less developed countries. In many cases, it's the technology firms themselves that need trained IT programmers and other professionals to fill knowledge gaps and keep up with the demands of the rapidly growing economy. ...

14. Forbes: Why Gates Is Wrong About Poverty And Development And Zuckerberg Is Right

... For the main problem in the world is not disease, nor malnutrition, nor education: it’s poverty. Solve the poverty and all of the other problems become infinitely more malleable, hugely easier to solve. We also need to recall that it is not poverty that is made: no one has caused the poor of the world to be destitute. This is in fact the natural condition of mankind. This is how our own ancestors lived for millennia. ...

Just to give you an idea Mozambique, Guinea, Togo, the sort of places that we regard as the poorest of the poor these days. GDP per capita of around $1,000 a year. These places are richer than the Roman Empire. As rich as England was in 1600 AD and richer than Scotland or Wales were at that time.

What is made is the wealth to lift people up out of that destitution. Thus the great need of our time is to bring the tools of wealth creation to those places that don’t have it. ...

15. Huffington Post: Capitalism for Human Rights? - Carol Te

... There seems to be this justification that promoting civil and political freedoms are sufficient because they are necessary vehicles for procuring social and economic security -- but what if it is the other way around?

It is not a coincidence that many non-profits right now take care of the economically and socially disadvantaged -- economic and social rights are not recognized as important human rights as is evidenced by their absence in international law. So instead the international community pushes aid to both non-profits and the government to even out the structural inequality between civil and political rights and economic and social rights. But it is not enough. Basic economics stipulates that incentives are required for innovation. When organizations or governments are given aid, they aren't going to increase levels of productivity. They are simply not given the incentives to work hard to invest in the future. In fact, economist William Easterly finds that the larger the aid, the lower the savings on the recipient's part -- in effect, aid creates disincentives for the recipient in gathering his or her own resources for development. So, if we cannot count on traditional human rights organizations to make a leap forward, then what should we count on? The answer is trade.

Economic growth requires a free global market. Trade is good for poor countries -- it gives them access to markets in the developed world, it creates more competition for workers, which increases wages, and foreign investment introduces new capital, technology and skills. As economist Dambisa Moyo argues, once there is economic growth, then a middle class can be created to hold the government accountable -- robust institutions can form to create stability. New market potential can reap extraordinary benefits for both natives of the country and the investor. And most important of all, it is sustainable. That is, the infrastructure will not fall apart simply because a donor decides to pull out of a project -- a fate that many NGOs fall prey to. ...

16. Jeffery Sachs: Development, Structure, and Transformation: Some Evidence on Comparative Economic Growth

ABSTRACT:

We suggest that the geographical patterns of income differences across the world have deep underpinnings. We emphasize that economic development is a complex process driven by economic, political, social, and biophysical forces. Some economists have argued that the patterns reflect mainly the historical footprint of colonial rule and political evolution, and that geography’s effects on development occurred exclusively through its effects on this historical institutional development.

We believe that economic development has also been shaped very importantly by the biophysical and geophysical characteristics of economies. Per capita incomes differ around the world in no small part because of sharp differences across regions in the natural resource base and physical geography (e.g. distance to coast), and by the amplification of those differences through the dynamics of saving and investment. We posit that the drivers of economic development include institutions, technology, and geography, and that none of these alone is sufficient to account for the diverse patterns of global growth. We survey the relevant literature, and empirically show that a multi-causal framework helps to explain when countries achieve middle income; the distribution of economic activity around the world today; the patterns of growth between 1960 and 2010; the patterns of income per person within large economies; and the structural characteristics of the remaining countries still stuck in poverty today.

17. Real Clear World: Elections Don't Matter, Institutions Do - Robert Kaplan

... And yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one state to the other.

Well, of course that's true, they're only states, not countries, you might say. But the fact that my observation is a dull commonplace doesn't make it any less amazing. To be sure, it makes it more amazing. For as the late Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington once remarked, the genius of the American system lies less in its democracy per se than in its institutions. The federal and state system featuring 50 separate identities and bureaucracies, each with definitive land borders -- that nevertheless do not conflict with each other -- is unique in political history. And this is not to mention the thousands of counties and municipalities in America with their own sovereign jurisdictions. Many of the countries I have covered as a reporter in the troubled and war-torn developing world would be envious of such an original institutional arrangement for governing an entire continent.

In fact, Huntington's observation can be expanded further: The genius of Western civilization in general is that of institutions. Sure, democracy is a basis for this; but democracy is, nevertheless, a separate factor. For enlightened dictatorships in Asia have built robust, meritocratic institutions whereas weak democracies in Africa have not.

Institutions are such a mundane element of Western civilization that we tend to take them for granted. ...

18. Huffington Post: Why Can't We Innovate Our Way Out of Poverty?

It is one of those unproven-but-probably-true facts that developing countries have an easier time getting out of poverty than getting into prosperity. They go from "low-" to "middle-income" level relatively fast, but rarely make it to "high-income" status. [A country is considered middle-income if its average citizen makes between $1,200 and $12,000 a year, give or take a few dollars]. Somehow, they get stuck in a dreaded middle-income "trap". For them, the typical development story goes like this. They get an initial boost by reforming their agriculture or exploiting their oil and minerals. This releases the labor and the money needed to build industries that can use basic technology to produce cheaply the kind of goods that consumers in rich countries want to buy. Think of Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, or Turkey -- chances are that your T-shirt, tool-box, tea-pot, and TV set were manufactured or assembled in a middle-income country like these. But when those countries try to climb up the technological ladder, sell more valuable stuff, be more productive, and create better-paying jobs, things get complicated. Then the game is no longer to sell cheap but to sell new, not just to be efficient but to be innovative. ...

... How on earth can governments promote that!?

A new book called Mass Flourishing, written by Edmund Phelps, says they can't. Or, rather, it says that they need cultural change. ...

19. Businessweek: Farewell to the Age of Free Trade - Joshua Kurlantzick

Since the end of World War II and the birth of the modern global economy, business leaders have come to accept an iron law: International trade always expands faster than economic growth. Between the late 1940s and 2013, that assumption held true. Trade grew roughly twice as fast as the world economy annually, as fresh markets opened up, governments signed free-trade pacts, new industries and consumers emerged, and technological advances made international trade cheaper and faster.

Now this iron law may be crumbling. Over the past two years, international trade has grown so slowly that it has fallen behind the growth of the world economy, which itself is hardly humming. ...

Not sure I agree, but some interesting thoughts.

20. New York Times: Inequality and Good Intentions - Casey Mulligan

... Progress begets inequality, and the resulting inequality can either encourage more progress or impede it, or both. Professor Deaton suggests that inequality in the modern United States has had both of these effects.

He points to a third influence of progress and inequality on outcomes for those left behind: good intentions. As part of the world becomes rich and no longer worries about day-to-day survival, it can look outward. Many residents of developed countries have a “need to help” those less fortunate.

But the attempts to help often – perhaps even usually – go awry. ...

21. The Telegraph: The world has never had it so good - thanks partly to capitalism

We live in largely peaceful times, with better access to medicine and education - the world is easily in the best place it’s ever been. 

Science and Technology Links (Environment Edition)

I'm playing catchup with a backlog of links to be posted. This list pulls together a subsection of science and technology links dealing with the environment.

1. Bloomberg: Warring Dogmas Block Climate-Change Progress

... In 1981, [Julian] Simon proposed a bet. [Paul] Ehrlich could name any five metals, and by the end of the decade, Simon wagered, their prices would decrease, thus disproving Ehrlich's claim that population growth would produce an increase in scarcity.

Ehrlich eagerly accepted. Working with like-minded scientists, he selected chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. In the 1970s, the market prices of all five had increased significantly (at least in nominal terms). Ehrlich was confident that as a result of population growth, the trend would continue.

But Simon won the bet, and it wasn't even close. By 1990, the prices of each metal had decreased by an average of 50 percent, even though the decade had seen the largest global population growth in history (with 800 million additional people). To all appearances, Simon had been vindicated. ...

... As Sabin explains, it turns out that Simon was a lucky winner. Not long ago, economists ran a series of simulations for every 10-year period from 1900 to 2008. They found that with respect to the prices of the five metals on which Ehrlich and Simon bet, Ehrlich would have won 63 percent of the time.

But this doesn't mean that Ehrlich was right. Because of macroeconomic factors, commodity prices are volatile, and they are a poor proxy for the effects of population increases. ...

... These decisions raise diverse questions, and each of them must be investigated on its own merits. For such problems, the noisy, headline-grabbing dogmas of Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon are a serious impediment to progress. The coming decisions will require careful exploration of costs and benefits, not abstract narratives about the supposed arc of history.

2. Nature: Climate change: The case of the missing heat

Sixteen years into the mysterious 'global-warming hiatus', scientists are piecing together an explanation.

The biggest mystery in climate science today may have begun, unbeknownst to anybody at the time, with a subtle weakening of the tropical trade winds blowing across the Pacific Ocean in late 1997. These winds normally push sun-baked water towards Indonesia. When they slackened, the warm water sloshed back towards South America, resulting in a spectacular example of a phenomenon known as El Niño. Average global temperatures hit a record high in 1998 — and then the warming stalled. ...

3. L. A. Times: A climate change of heart by the European Union?

Confronted by rising energy costs and international competition, the European Union's executive body has recommended relaxing rules on renewable energy with a plan that doesn't hold specific nations responsible for specific targets. The EU's member states and Parliament should reject it. The EU has been the leader on fighting climate change; if it shies away from its commitment now, similar efforts in the U.S. and around the world will almost surely suffer.

On a positive note, the recommendations call for creating an overall target of a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared with what they were in 1990. It's a worthy target, though environmentalists would like it to be even higher; the 28-nation bloc has reduced such emissions by 12% so far. By 2030, the EU is supposed to get more than a quarter of its energy from renewable sources. But the plan would eliminate binding agreements under which each member nation would have to meet certain targets. So which nations would be responsible for attaining the 2030 goal and how would they be held to it? That's unclear. In addition, the plan would loosen environmental regulations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas.

Driving the changes are concerns about the struggling European economy. With energy costs higher because of reduced reliance on cheaper fossil fuels, European businesses are in a weak position to compete with those in nations without strong environmental rules. ...

4. The American Interest: End Result of Germany's Green Energy Policy: More Coal

Germany produced more energy by coal last year than it has in nearly a quarter century. King Coal's return comes courtesy of the energiewende—the policy put in place following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The plan was to phase out the country's numerous nuclear reactors and jumpstart its fledgling renewable energy industry, but coal has been forced to fill the gap. ...

5. The American Interest: Why Europe's Greens Are Wrong, in Two Charts

Europe has so far snubbed shale gas and has been rewarded with rising electricity prices and a greater reliance on coal. The end result: America is reducing emissions faster than Europe:

If you go anti-science on nuclear safety, this is what you get. ;-)

6. Scientific American: New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions Drop 19% Since 2005

New York City's greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by 19 percent since 2005, outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday, putting the city nearly two-thirds of the way to meeting the goal that Bloomberg set five years ago.

7. BBC: Ethiopia's renewable energy revolution (Video)

In Ethiopia the government has recently announced major deals that should massively increase the amount of electricity generated from renewable resources.

The BBC's Emmanuel Igunza has been finding out how Ethiopia is leading Africa in the drive to exploit sustainable energy supplies.

8. USA Today: How fast is the Earth's climate actually changing?

How quickly parts of the Earth's climate are changing in response to added greenhouse gases and what's forecast for decades ahead is a mixed bag, a federal advisory council says in a report out Tuesday. ...

... "Research has helped us begin to distinguish more imminent threats from those that are less likely to happen this century," said James W.C. White, professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and chairman of the committee that wrote the report.

"Evaluating climate changes and impacts in terms of their potential magnitude and the likelihood they will occur will help policymakers and communities make informed decisions about how to prepare for or adapt to them," he added. ...

9. Forbes: Can Coal Feed The Global Energy Appetite In A Healthy Way?

It's the ultimate paradox: How to feed the world's energy appetite while ensuring the planet's endless survival. Reducing the use of coal and using more sustainable energy forms is the ultimate answer, the International Energy Agency says. But until then, the global community must strive to make coal cleaner.

10. BBC: Has the Sun Gone to Sleep (Video)

Scientists are saying that the Sun is in a phase of "solar lull" - meaning that it has fallen asleep - and it is baffling them.

History suggests that periods of unusual "solar lull" coincide with bitterly cold winters.

Rebecca Morelle reports for BBC Newsnight on the effect this inactivity could have on our current climate, and what the implications might be for global warming.

11. Christian Science Monitor: Antarctica warming tied to natural cycle in tropical Atlantic, study says (+video)

Rapid warming along the Antarctic Peninsula and puzzling shifts in the distribution and extent of winter sea ice at the bottom of the world appear to have their roots in a natural climate swing centered in the tropical Atlantic, according to a new study by researchers at New York University.

The warming of the region is of concern because of its implications for sea-level rise, while the shifting and slight increase in winter sea ice has become a favorite talking-point among many of global warming's political skeptics. ...

12. It has become gospel, based on the Cook study, that 97% of scientists agree with the theory of human-caused global warming. Two stories:

Forbes: Global Warming Alarmist Trashes His Own Poll Of Meteorologists Showing No Climate Crisis

... Stenhouse, a psychologist and doctoral student in communications at George Mason University, emailed all full members of the American Meteorological Society for whom he could find an email address and asked them to fill out an online survey on global warming. More than 1,800 AMS meteorologists filled out the survey.

Only 52 percent said global warming is occurring and is caused mostly by humans – which is itself a far cry from having 52 percent say humans are causing a global warming crisis. The results were a huge blow to the mythical notion that all or nearly all scientists agree that humans are causing a global warming crisis. This is especially the case considering the AMS survey reflected the views of scientists with atmospheric science expertise. This wasn't a survey of engineers or other non-atmospheric scientists with little if any atmospheric science expertise. ...

And Popular Technology.net, 97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists' Papers, according to the scientists that published them

The paper, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' searched the Web of Science for the phrases "global warming" and "global climate change" then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.

To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists' papers as "endorsing AGW", apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors. ...

Science and Technology Links

I've gotten very behind on my links pages. Here is my attempt to catch up on science and technology links. Sorry for the length, but there is some good stuff here. I'll have another post with environment links shortly.

1. Ancient Origins.net: Entire Neanderthal genome finally mapped – with amazing results

This incredible research has revealed the following:

• There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years. Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
• Ancient human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly complex family tree.
• The Denisovans share up to 8 percent of their genome with a "super achaic" and totally unknown species that dates back around 1 million years.
• The results conflict with the theory that modern humans arose completely from one "out of Africa" migration more than 60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
• About 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of all people with European ancestry can be traced to Neanderthals.
• Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan DNA.
• 6 percent of the genome of Australian Aborigines and indigenous Papua New Guineans belong to the Denisovan species.
• The Han Chinese, native to East Asia, and the Dai people of southern China are related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
• Some indigenous people from Brazil, such as the Karitiana, are not only related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but they show relatively high genetic contributions from the Denisovans.
• Only 87 genes responsible for making proteins in cells are different between modern humans and Neanderthals. Intriguingly, some of the gene differences involve ones involved in both immune responses and the development of brain cells in people.
• Somewhere within these 87 genes may lay the answer to why Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct.
• And least consequential of all, the Neanderthal woman's parents were related, possibly half-siblings, or an uncle and niece. As evolutionary biologist Mattias Jakobsson stated, the incest finding "is more of an anecdote". The results from one individual cannot be applied to an entire species, in the same way that the recent discovery of an incest family in Australia does not apply to the whole of the human race.

- See more at: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/entire-neanderthal-genome-finally-mapped-amazing-results-001138#sthash.XmA90FGI.dpuf

Here are a few of the findings:

• There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years. Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
• Ancient human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly complex family tree.
• The results conflict with the theory that modern humans arose completely from one "out of Africa" migration more than 60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
• Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan DNA.

2. Science: How Farming Reshaped Our Genomes

Before farming began to spread across Europe some 8500 years ago, the continent's occupants were hunter-gatherers. They were unable to digest starch and milk, according to a new ancient DNA study of a nearly 8000-year-old human skeleton from Spain. But these original occupants did already possess immune defenses against some of the diseases that would later become the scourge of civilization, and they apparently had dark skin. The findings are helping researchers understand what genetic and biological changes humans went through as they made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. ...

3. Atlantic: Male and Female Brains Really Are Built Differently

By analyzing the MRIs of 949 people aged 8 to 22, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, while female brains are more interconnected between hemispheres. ...

... By analyzing the subjects' MRIs using diffusion imaging, the scientists explored the brains' fiber pathways, the bundles of axons that act as highways routing information from one part of the mind to the other. After grouping the image by sex and inspecting the differences between the two aggregate "male" and "female" pictures, the researchers found that in men, fiber pathways run back and forth within each hemisphere, while in women they tend to zig-zag between the left, or "logical," and right, or "creative," sides of the brain.

Because female brains seem to have a stronger connections between their logical and intuitive parts, "when women are asked to do particularly hard tasks, they might engage very different parts of the brain," said Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the report. "Men might over-engage just one part of the brain."

This could mean, for example, that men tend to see issues and resolve them directly, due to the strong connections between the "perception" and "action" areas of their brains, while women might be more inclined to combine logic and intuition when solving a problem. ...

4. Atlantic Cities: How Far You Could Get From New York in One Day, From 1800 to Today

5. Huff Post Tech: Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone

6. Huff Post Tech: Isaac Asimov's Predictions For 2014 From 50 Years Ago Are Eerily Accurate

Fifty years ago, American scientist and author Isaac Asimov published a story in The New York Times that listed his predictions for what the world would be like in 2014.

Asimov wrote more than 500 books in his lifetime, including science fiction novels and nonfiction scientific books, so he was well-versed in thinking about the future.

In his article, called "Visit to the World's Fair of 2014," Asimov got a whole bunch of his guesses right -- and his other predictions are making us a little envious of his imagined future. ...

7. Huff Post Tech: This 1981 News Report About The Internet Is Adorable, But Totally Wrong

As you might have guessed, they get virtually nothing right. Memes, cat videos, Miley Cyrus, even Facebook -- all are mysteries to the people of the past. Take a look and glory in your superiority. But beware - the world of 2034 is laughing at you behind your back.

 8. New York Times: Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All

... Hampton found that, rather than isolating people, technology made them more connected. "It turns out the wired folk — they recognized like three times as many of their neighbors when asked," Hampton said. Not only that, he said, they spoke with neighbors on the phone five times as often and attended more community events. Altogether, they were much more successful at addressing local problems, like speeding cars and a small spate of burglaries. They also used their Listserv to coordinate offline events, even sign-ups for a bowling league. Hampton was one of the first scholars to marshal evidence that the web might make people less atomized rather than more. Not only were people not opting out of bowling leagues — Robert Putnam's famous metric for community engagement — for more screen time; they were also using their computers to opt in. ...

…this was Hampton's most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It's not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston's Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. "The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles," Hampton writes. Men seem to be "taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine."

Across the board, Hampton found that the story of public spaces in the last 30 years has not been aloneness, or digital distraction, but gender equity. "I mean, who would've thought that, in America, 30 years ago, women were not in public the same way they are now?" Hampton said. "We don't think about that."...

9. Space.com: Scale of Universe Measured with 1-Percent Accuracy

WASHINGTON — An ultraprecise new galaxy map is shedding light on the properties of dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion.

A team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances to galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1 percent accuracy — an unprecedented measurement. ...

10. Atlantic: Almost No Americans Die From Lightning Strikes Anymore—Why?

In the lightning-death literature, one explanation has gained prominence: urbanization. Lightning death rates have declined in step with the rural population, and rural lightning deaths make up a far smaller percent of all lightning deaths (see figure at right). Urban areas afford more protection from lightning. Ergo, urbanization has helped make people safer from lightning.

11. Huff Post Science: Creationist Beliefs Linked To Personality Type In New Survey Of Churchgoers

... A new study suggests that people who believe in creationism are more likely to prefer to take in information via their senses versus via intuition. In contrast, religious believers who see the Bible's creation story as symbolic tend to be more intuitive. ...

12. Atlantic: Why Has Republican Belief in Evolution Declined So Much?

There's been a drop of more than 10 points—to just 43 percent—in the last four years. ...

... What does that leave? Maybe the gap represents an emotional response by Republicans to being out of power. Among others, Chris Mooney has argued that beliefs on politically contentious topics are often more rooted in opposition to perceived attacks than anything else—an instance of "motivated reasoning." Given that Democrats have controlled the White House and Senate since 2009, this could be backlash to the political climate, though it will be hard to tell until Republicans control Washington again.

Of course, motivated reasoning might help explain why many Democrats also believe in evolution.

13. Business Insider: MakerBot Launches' Mini' 3D Printer For Consumers For The Same Price As A Laptop

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis unveiled the "MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact 3D" today, a smaller, cheaper, simpler 3D printer that he believes will finally make all consumers want to start extruding corn-based plastic in their own homes, and printing objects on demand. ...

14. Mashable: The Answer to Affordable Housing Could Lie Within a 3D Printer

... The process involves a giant robot with a hanging nozzle and a flexible arm on a gantry-type crane — the whole rig is known as a "contour crafter" — above the foundation. The contour crafter then proceeds to layer concrete based on a computer-generated pattern. The layers eventually take shape into walls, embedded with all the necessary conduits and passages for electricity, plumbing and air conditioning.

The research team envisions a future where contour crafters could be used for disaster relief to build emergency housing and to create affordable housing for those who are displaced, homeless or in desperate living conditions. ...

15. Business Insider: Biotech Firm: We Will 3D Print A Human Liver In 2014

2014 could be a landmark year for an amazing medical technology: human organs built by 3D printers.

San Diego biotech firm Organovo promises that its "bioprinting" technology will successfully print a human liver by the end of 2014, the company told Computerworld's Lucas Mearian. ...

16. Conservable Economist: First Burger Grown from Stem Cells Served in London

"On August 5, 2013, the first hamburger grown from stem cells in a laboratory, and not in a cow, was served in London. ... If this technology continues to evolve and is deployed at scale, it will have significant social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications." Carolyn Mattick and Brad Allenby launch the discussion in "The Future of Meat," in the Fall 2013 Issues in Science and Technology.

To be sure, the technology isn't quite ready for fast food. "From an economic perspective, cultured meat is still an experimental technology. The first in vitro burger reportedly cost about $335,000 to produce and was made by possible by financial support from Google cofounder Sergey Brin." Mattick and Allenby discuss a number of technological challenges.

But the potential for altering the environmental footprint of meet the global demand for meat is remarkable. ...

17. Project Syndicate: The GMO Stigma

... In September, an eminent group of scientists called upon the scientific community to "stand together in staunch opposition to the violent destruction of required tests on valuable advances, such as golden rice, that have the potential to save millions" of people from "needless suffering and death." But this passionate appeal fails to address the fundamental problem: the unfounded notion that there is a meaningful difference between "genetically modified organisms" and their conventional counterparts.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe fact is that GMOs and their derivatives do not amount to a "category" of food products. They are neither less safe nor less "natural" than other common foods. Labeling foods derived from GMOs, as some have proposed, thus implies a meaningful difference where none exists – an issue that even regulators have acknowledged.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphHumans have been engaging in "genetic modification" through selection and hybridization for millennia. Breeders routinely use radiation or chemical mutagens on seeds to scramble a plant's DNA and generate new traits.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphA half-century of "wide cross" hybridizations, which involve the movement of genes from one species or genus to another, has given rise to plants – including everyday varieties of corn, oats, pumpkin, wheat, black currants, tomatoes, and potatoes – that do not and could not exist in nature. Indeed, with the exception of wild berries, wild game, wild mushrooms, and fish and shellfish, virtually everything in North American and European diets has been genetically improved in some way. ...

18. New York Times: Is Moore's Law Over? Designing the Next Wave of Computer Chips

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Not long after Gordon E. Moore proposed in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be etched on a silicon chip would continue to double approximately every 18 months, critics began predicting that the era of "Moore's Law" would draw to a close.

More than ever recently, industry pundits have been warning that the progress of the semiconductor industry is grinding to a halt — and that the theory of Dr. Moore, an Intel co-founder, has run its course.

If so, that will have a dramatic impact on the computer world. The innovation that has led to personal computers, music players and smartphones is directly related to the plunging cost of transistors, which are now braided by the billions onto fingernail slivers of silicon — computer chips — that may sell for as little as a few dollars each.

But Moore's Law is not dead; it is just evolving, according to more optimistic scientists and engineers. Their contention is that it will be possible to create circuits that are closer to the scale of individual molecules by using a new class of nanomaterials — metals, ceramics, polymeric or composite materials that can be organized from the "bottom up," rather than the top down. ...

19. Business Insider: Here's Why 'The Internet Of Things' Will Be Huge, And Drive Tremendous Value For People And Businesses

The Internet Of Things represents a major departure in the history of the Internet, as connections move beyond computing devices, and begin to power billions of everyday devices, from parking meters to home thermostats. 

Estimates for Internet of Things or IoT market value are massive, since by definition the IoT will be a diffuse layer of devices, sensors, and computing power that overlays entire consumer, business-to-business, and government industries. The IoT will account for an increasingly huge number of connections: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018. That year, it will be roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCs combined. ...

20. Extreme Tech: Cold fusion tech picked up by major US partner, prepares for launch in the American and Chinese energy markets

... Cold fusion, also known as low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), is a technology that promises to create huge amounts of green energy from very cheap fuel. In the case of Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyser), nickel and hydrogen are fused into copper — a process that has 10,000 times the energy density of gasoline, and 1,000 times the power density. For more background information on cold fusion/LENR, and why it's safer and cleaner than normal nuclear reactors, read our previous E-Cat story. Suffice it to say, the scientific community's main contention is whether this reaction is actually possible or not. Rossi says he's found a special catalyst that makes it possible; lots of other scientists, though, claim it's hogwash. (Read: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.) ...

21. Real Clear Science: Debunking Myths on Nuclear Power

... There are five declared and four other nuclear-armed countries (assuming Israel's warheads detonate). There are 31 nations with nuclear power stations (and 58 with research reactors). Only seven of the nine nuclear-armed countries have civilian power programs.

All of the technical factors can be circumvented with sufficient time and money. Uneconomic fuel cycles can be run and warheads built with high levels of radioactivity. However, no country has developed indigenous nuclear weapons after deploying civilian nuclear power stations.

Historically, if a country wants to produce a nuclear bomb, they build reactors especially for the job of making plutonium, and ignore civilian power stations.

22. Breaking Energy: Terawatt Era: Solar Technology's Next 40 Years

... Whereas the past 4 years saw an incredible halving of cost seven times, this will not continue. There may only be one halving left to achieve. The action will be in deployment, and it will be phenomenal. The next 40 years should see seven doublings of in-place capacity. In Solar 1.0, the megawatt-era has given way to today's gigawatt-era. In the next 40 years the gigawatt-era will give way to the terawatt-era. By 2054 we should see over 17 terawatts of solar capacity in place around the world, which would equate to more than 10% of global energy demand at that point. At an average installed cost of $1/watt (which we will have passed by then), this represents a $17 trillion opportunity. ...

23. Wired: Watch: How Super-Efficient Nanomaterials Could Herald a Design Revolution

The Great Pyramid of Giza is 174 meters tall and weighs 10 megatons. The Eiffel Tower is over twice that height but weighs just five and half kilotons–some 10 times lighter. The difference, according to materials scientist Julia Greer, is that "elements of architecture" were introduced into the design that allowed it to be stronger and more lightweight while using far less materials. Where the pyramids are four solid walls, the Eiffel Tower is more skeletal in structure–and vastly more efficient as a result. ...

 

Plastic made from pollution hits U.S. market

USA Today: Plastic made from pollution hits U.S. market

This is pretty amazing!

... Industry experts told them it was a fool's errand. For good reason. Scientists had spent decades trying to capture carbon and use it to make plastic but couldn't do it cheaply enough. The two friends cracked the code by developing a ten-times more efficient bio-catalyst, which strips the carbon from a liquefied gas and rearranges it into a long chain plastic molecule.

The result? Today, the 31-year-old co-founders of California-based Newlight Technologies have two factories that take methane captured from dairy farms and use it to make AirCarbon — plastic that will soon appear in the form of chairs, food containers and automotive parts. Coming next year: cellphone cases for Virgin Mobile. ...

Video at 1:56:

"... The idea is these products are actually able to match on the performance of oil based plastics but in fact out compete on price, so what we have is a market driven carbon capture process, which is really exciting for us....

... We recently had a third party independent analysis done that verified that each on of our grades of plasctic actually sequester more carbon in the production process than they emit. So every single grade that we make is a carbon sink. So this product here, and this product here ... this is all actually pulling carbon on a net basis, including the energy, out of the air."

Are Economic Output and Energy Consumption Decoupling?

Washington Post: Can we sever the link between energy and economic growth?

This is a very important story that is easily overlooked. Why?

People genuinely concerned about global economic growth frequently default into a Malthusian thought process. It goes something like this. We have X amount of economic activity today, and that economic activity requires Y amount of energy and resources. If the whole world grows to our level of economic activity, then there must also be proportional growth in the amount of energy and resources consumed. (Economic growth and resource use are perfectly coupled.) It will exhaust the earth's reserves of energy and resources. The global economy will collapse. We must stop growth and embrace natural limits. Now this is true only given one very huge assumption that most people make without thought. The assumption? GDP (economic output) and the energy/resource consumption rate are inextricably linked. Is this true?

Economic records for the United States show that food production and acreage of land devoted to food production were strongly linked before 1910. There were 310 million acres in production in that year. The United States population would triple over the next century. If you took Dr. Who's Tardis back to 1910 and told them this tripling was coming, they could easily tell you how much land would be needed to feed the extra mouths: 300 million multiplied by 3 equals 900 million acres … equivalent to all the land area east of the Mississippi. How many acres were in production in 2010? There were 310 acres, just as in 1910. Food production and acreage usage decoupled. Improvements in farming techniques and technology fed the extra mouths with the same amount of land and created surpluses that could be shipped abroad.

This chart suggests that the same thing is happening with energy usage. The things we use are becoming more energy efficient. For instance, appliances use half the electricity of their counterparts from thirty years ago. Energy used in manufacturing and distribution keeps getting more energy efficient. The graph shows that GDP and energy use were coupled until about the 1980s. Since that time, it appears they are decoupling. It is conceivable that in the next century or so, we could have a growing economy while actually stabilizing or declining energy usage. (I don't totally dismiss the objections by environmental economists like those mentioned in the article, but I am skeptical that the limitations are as severe as they claim.)

I suspect we will see a similar decoupling of GDP from natural resources before very long. Technology like 3-D printing, still in its infancy, promises to reduce waste in manufacturing and construction processes. Nanotechnology, using robots about 15 times bigger than an atom, can break down substances and recombine the pieces into new substances at the molecular level. It is possible to imagine a day when almost everything we use comes from renewable substances or from nonrenewable substances that are endlessly reconfigured. Furthermore, more of the global economy will likely be about services and digital products instead of physical products.

Now, the growth opponents will raise concerns about the impact these changes will have on the nature of work and our communities. There are questions about endless consumerism, attempting to fill our lives with stuff and evermore exhilarating experiences. These are important questions, but they are questions apart from the question of unsustainability, the idea that accelerated growth will, of necessity, lead to the exhaustion of energy and material resources and the destruction of the environment. The latter is true only if you assume no innovation and creativity, the very traits that have been the hallmark of the global economy in recent generations. Moralists may be right that we should reign in our desires and change our relationship to possessions, but we need not do so because of inevitable collapse. Appreciating this is critical to useful reflection on what it means to be the church in the twenty-first century.

A 200-Year Look At Automation And How It Has Improved Our Lives

The (Mostly) Improving State of the World

Washington Post: 40 charts that explain the world

Our friend and colleague Max Fisher over at Worldviews has posted another 40 maps that explain the world, building on his original classic of the genre. But this is Wonkblog. We're about charts. And one of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are -- but how they're changing.

So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is -- but where it's going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome -- wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that's changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history. ...

As the author notes, we have challenges but hardly descend into a global dystopia. I think these charts give a pretty holistic view. Here are three examples.
It was commonly believed that primitive societies were more peaceful and that modern civilization gave rise to unprecedented violence. This chart compares death rates by war in primitive societies as calculated by anthropologists to those for Europe/USA in the 20th century.
And then there is this:

The graphs point to environmental protection and adaptation as the biggest problems in the days ahead. Those challenges are not insurmountable. Energy sources like natural gas and nuclear power can be used in the interim on the way to practical renewable technologies. Genetically modified crops can help to reduce water consumption, increase yield, and improve hardiness. Innovations in fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing promise to revolutionize the world economy into a less wasteful and more affordable human existence for everyone. There is work to do, but there is also much reason for hope of a better world.

 

Economics Links

1. Carpe Diem: 5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History

1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living longer. ...
2. Global economic growth in the past five decades has dramatically reduced poverty and made people around the world happier. ...
3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly. ...
4. Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall. ...
5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in the world. ...

2. Everyone is putting out their most important economic charts list for 2013:  Atlantic: The Most Important Economic Stories of 2013—in 44 Graphs.  Economist: 2013 in charts.  Huffington Post: The 13 Most Important Charts Of 2013.

3. Economist: The world has become better fed over the past 50 years

MANY people will groan after stuffing themselves on a Christmas feast. A traditional three-course turkey dinner can be as much as 3,500 calories. Such indulgences are a luxury in many parts of the world—but thankfully less so. Over the past half-century, the amount of food that people consume has increased (measured in calories), according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Our interactive map and chart tracks countries across five decades, letting users select places, years on the timeline or any chart-line. (It performs poorly on smartphones; our apologies.) ...

In a related story at NPR: More People Have More To Eat, But It's Not All Good News

... The good news is: The percentage of the world's population getting what the researchers say is a sufficient diet has grown from 30 percent to 61 percent.

In 1965, a majority of the world survived on less than 2,000 calories a day per person. This was especially true in parts of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, China and Southeast Asia. Now, 61 percent of the world has access to 2,500 or more calories a day.

But one thing the scientists discovered is that the countries that have a history of food insufficiency didn't just up and start growing lots more food. Instead, for the most part they're increasing supply by importing food from abroad. ...

I'm unclear why the author thinks importing food is a problem but other challenges he mentions in the article are an issue.

4. Carpe Diem: When it comes to home appliances, the ‘good old days’ are now: they’re cheaper, better, more energy efficient than ever

... In 1981, the 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above from a 1981 Wards Christmas catalog sold for $359.88. The average hourly manufacturing wage then was $7.42, meaning that it would have taken 48.5 hours of work at the average hourly wage for a typical factory worker to earn enough income 32 years ago to purchase the dishwasher above. ...

... The new Kenmore 24-inch built-in dishwasher pictured above is currently listed on the Sears website for sale at $539.99. At the current average hourly wage of $20.26 for production workers, the average factory worker today would only have to work 26.7 hours to earn enough pre-tax income to buy today’s energy-efficient dishwasher, which is only a little more than one-half of the 48.5 hour time-cost for the 1981 model.

Bottom Line: Today’s modern household appliances are not only cheaper than ever before, they are the most energy-efficient appliances in history, resulting in additional savings for consumers through lower operating costs. The average dishwasher today is not only more than twice as energy-efficient as a comparable 1981 model, but its real cost today is only about 50% of the price of the 1981 dishwasher, measured in hours worked at the average hourly wage. Put those two factors together, and the average American’s dishwasher today is about six times superior to the dishwasher of thirty years ago. ...

5. Carpe Diem: How much did real US median income increase from 1979 to 2007? A lot depends on the measure of income used

"The median income data [often cited] are on tax units rather than households, they do not include many government transfer payments, they are pre-tax rather than post-tax, they do not adjust for changes in household size, and they do not include nontaxable compensation such as employer-provided health insurance.

Does this matter?  Yes!"

6. American Interest: Economic Mobility is a Male Problem

The biggest victim of family breakdown might be lower-class men. In City Journal Kay Hymowitz has a fascinating yet alarming piece on how family breakdown hurts men’s prospects more than women’s. One of the most interesting facts she highlights is that if you separate out men from women, women in America are roughly as upwardly mobile as women anywhere else in the world. It’s only when you add men back in and compare the US whole population to populations abroad that things look bleak:

Numerous studies have confirmed that the U.S. has less upward mobility than just about any developed nation, including England, the homeland of the peerage. Yet, if you look at boys separately from girls, as the Finnish economist Markus Jäntti and his colleagues at the Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labor did, the story changes markedly. In every country studied, girls are more likely than boys to climb up the income ladder, but in the United States, the disadvantage for sons is substantially greater than in other countries. Almost 75 percent of American daughters escape the lowest quintile—not unlike girls in the comparison countries of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Fewer than 60 percent of American sons experience similar success. ...

7. AEI Ideas: 3 charts that show what’s really going on with economic mobility in the US

8. Washington Post: Full employment, not inequality, should be the top economic priority - Ezra Klein

... While there are ways to reduce inequality without doing much about employment (say, by taxing the rich and using the proceeds on defense spending), it's hard to imagine full employment not doing much to reduce inequality. ...

... All that said, income inequality and social mobility really are startling trends that people should be very worried about and that the political system should be working aggressively to solve, or at least ameliorate. I don't have many policy disagreements with the folks focusing on inequality. But politics is about prioritization, and what politicians end up doing is in part driven by what problems their political coalitions are most worried about. ...

9. Conversable Economist: Falling Unemployment and Falling Labor Force Participation

10. Business Insider: This Map Shows Which Parts Of The Country Have A Huge Gender Gap In The Workforce

11. PBS: The rise of the 'new rich': 1 in 5 Americans will reach affluence in their lives

It's not just the wealthiest 1 percent.

Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America's economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation's income inequality.

The growing numbers of the U.S. poor have been well documented, but survey data provided to The Associated Press detail the flip side of the record income gap -- the rise of the "new rich." ...

12. Atlantic Cities: America's Wealth Is Staggeringly Concentrated in the Northeast Corridor

 

13. New York Times: Demand Soaring, Poor Are Feeling Squeezed

... Today, millions of poor Americans are caught in a similar trap, with the collapse of the housing boom helping stoke a severe shortage of affordable apartments. Demand for rental units has surged, with credit standards tight and many families unable to scrape together enough for a down payment for buying a home. At the same time, supply has declined, with homebuilders and landlords often targeting the upper end of the market. ...

14. Bloomberg: North America to Drown in Oil as Mexico Ends Monopoly

The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.

Plagued by almost a decade of slumping output that has degraded Mexico’s take from a $100-a-barrel oil market, President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking an end to the state monopoly over one of the biggest crude resources in the Western Hemisphere. The doubling in Mexican oil output that Citigroup Inc. said may result from inviting international explorers to drill would be equivalent to adding another Nigeria to world supply, or about 2.5 million barrels a day....

15. Oil Price: Cheap Fossil Fuels: Good or Bad for the World’s Poor?

... Let’s try reconciling all of the themes raised in Lomborg’s article and in my comments by reframing them in this way:

•    Yes, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a while. For that reason, a smart energy policy needs to focus on shifting the mix of fossil fuels, so far as is possible, to relatively clean natural gas and away from relatively dirty coal, while also keeping the pressure on for energy conservation across the board.
•    Price signals are one way to keep the pressure on. A carbon tax is a somewhat crude way to penalize relatively dirty fuels, in that climate change is not the only issue. We should be concerned, too, about sulfur and mercury from burning coal, urban air pollution from gasoline and diesel fuels, and local environmental risks of fracking for natural gas. Still, a carbon tax serves at least roughly to penalize the dirtiest fuels the most.
•    And yes, no environmental policy is going to be successful politically if it is seen as a matter of saving the earth versus helping the poor. Fuel subsidies have to go, since, realistically, they are a burden, not a boon, to the poor, but at the same time, some of the budgetary economies from the elimination of subsidies and some of the revenues from carbon taxes should  go toward smarter policies to help the world’s least advantaged.

Those ideas might help point us toward policies that are good for both the poor and the planet.

16.  askblog: The Market is a Process, not a Decision Mechanism

... I think that many commentators contrast the market and government as mechanisms for making decisions. In this contrast, the market sometimes has an efficiency advantage, but government is presumed to have a moral-authority advantage.

Instead, think of the market as a process for testing hypotheses. The process is brutally empirical, winnowing out losing strategies and poor execution. In contrast, elections are a much weaker testing mechanism. Elections are unable to winnow out sugar subsidies, improvident loan guarantees, schools that produce bad outcomes, etc. ...

17. Quartz:  Why the left-leaning Nelson Mandela was such a champion of free markets

One often overlooked aspect of Nelson Mandela’s legacy is South Africa’s economy. Parallel to everything amazing the man is connected to—freeing the country from the shackles of apartheid, subordinating retribution in favor of peace and reconciliation, and unifying a volatile nation at risk of civil war—he laid the groundwork for South Africa as the continent’s economic powerhouse. ...

18. Atlantic: Why Economics Is Really Called 'the Dismal Science'

... But this origin myth is, well, mythical. Carlyle did coin the phrase "the dismal science." And Malthus was, without question, dismal.

But Carlyle labeled the science "dismal" when writing about slavery in the West Indies. White plantation owners, he said, ought to force black plantation workers to be their servants. Economics, somewhat inconveniently for Carlyle, didn't offer a hearty defense of slavery. Instead, the rules of supply and demand argued for "letting men alone" rather than thrashing them with whips for not being servile. Carlyle bashed political economy as "a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing [science]; what we might call ... the dismal science.” ...

Science and Technology Links

1. Scientific American: Scientific American's Top 10 Science Stories of 2013

A carbon threshold breached, commitments to brain science made, mystery neutrinos found and human evolution revised—these and other events highlight the year in science and technology as picked by the editors of Scientific American

2. Reuters: "Peak farmland" is here, crop area to diminish: study

(Reuters) - The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.

Their report, conflicting with United Nations studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7 billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland". ...

... "We believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York.

"Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and Development Review. ...

3. Mashable: The Universal Translator Is Real and Its Name Is Sigmo

Ever since Star Trek explained away how all alien races could speak English through a piece of future tech called the Universal Translator, technology companies have worked to create just such a device. One may have succeeded in developing a 1.0 version with the Sigmo.

The Sigmo is a small, pillbox-sized device equipped with a microphone and speaker, but with a cloud-connected twist. Select the language you'd like to translate into, then hold the Sigmo up and speak to it. The Sigmo records your voice, then sends the recording to the cloud for translation via Bluetooth connection with your smartphone.

4. Inhabit: Africa's First Plastic Bottle House Rises in Nigeria

... the nearly-complete home is bullet and fireproof, earthquake resistant, and maintains a comfortable interior temperature of 64 degrees fahrenheit year round!

5. Wired: The World’s Largest Mega-Ship Launches for the First Time

... At 600,000 tons and 243 feet wide, when the Prelude left its dry dock in South Korea after a year-long build, it unseated the Emma Maersk (1,302 feet) as the world’s largest ship. But calling it a ship is almost a misnomer. The Prelude is a floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility that will be posted off the coast of Western Australia and will stay there for the next quarter-century.

As an FLNG plant, the Prelude handles everything involved in capturing, processing, and storing liquid natural gas, sucking the stuff from deep within the Earth and refining 3.9 million tons each year before it’s offloaded onto smaller ships that bring it back to the mainland. ...

6. Business Insider: The Number Of Smartphones In Use Is About To Pass The Number Of PCs

7. Scientific American: China Moon Rover Landing Marks a Space Program on the Rise

China cemented its reputation as the fastest rising star on the space scene this weekend by landing a rover on the moon—a challenging feat pulled off by only two nations before: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. “This is a very big deal indeed,” says lunar scientist Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “Landing on the moon is not something easily attained—it requires precision maneuvering, tracking, computation and engineering. It is a delicate task and the Chinese success reflects a mature, evolving and capable program.” ...

8. Scientific American: Study Linking Genetically Modified Corn to Rat Tumors Is Retracted

Bowing to scientists' near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats, after the authors refused to withdraw it.

The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, and published in 2012,  showed “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,” said a statement from Elsevier, which publishes the journal. But the small number and type of animals used in the study mean that “no definitive conclusions can be reached.” The known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague–Dawley strain of rat ”cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups,” it added. ...

9. Forbes: Scientists Make More Eye Cells - With An Inkjet Printer

British researchers have used an inkjet printer to successfully print retinal cells for the first time, in what could be a breakthrough for the treatment of optic nerve injury and diseases like glaucoma. ...

10. Berkley Earth (via Watts Up With That): Explaining and Understanding Declines in U.S. CO2 Emissions

11. Carpe Diem: Fossil fuels will continue to supply > 80% of US energy through 2040, while renewables will play only a minor role

12. Slate: $7 Trillion to Fight Climate Change? Bjorn Lomborg

The EU proposes spending that much on projects that will barely reduce temperatures or lower sea levels. ...

... This does not mean that climate change is not important; it means only that the EU’s climate policy is not smart. Over the course of this century, the ideal EU policy would cost more than $7 trillion, yet it would reduce the temperature rise by just 0.05^o Celsius and lower sea levels by a trivial 9 millimeters. After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference. ...

... We need a smarter approach to tackling climate change. Rather than relying on cutting a few tons of incredibly overpriced CO₂ now, we need to invest in research and development aimed at innovating down the cost of green energy in the long run, so that everyone will switch. ...

13. New York Times: The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels

... About 3.5 million of them die prematurely each year as a result of breathing the polluted air inside their homes — about 200,000 more than the number who die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air outside, according to a study by the World Health Organization.

There’s no question that burning fossil fuels is leading to a warmer climate and that addressing this problem is important. But doing so is a question of timing and priority. For many parts of the world, fossil fuels are still vital and will be for the next few decades, because they are the only means to lift people out of the smoke and darkness of energy poverty. ...

... The developed world needs a smarter approach toward cleaner fuels. The United States has been showing the way. Hydraulic fracturing has produced an abundance of inexpensive natural gas, leading to a shift away from coal in electricity production. Because burning natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, this technology has helped the United States reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the lowest level since the mid-1990s, even as emissions rise globally. We need to export this technology and help other nations exploit it.

At the same time, wealthy Western nations must step up investments into research and development in green energy technologies to ensure that cleaner energy eventually becomes so cheap that everyone will want it.

But until then they should not stand in the way of poorer nations as they turn to coal and other fossil fuels. This approach will get our priorities right. And perhaps then, people will be able to cook in their own homes without slowly killing themselves.

14. NPR: Environmentalists Split Over Need For Nuclear Power

15. BBC: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

Harnessing fusion - the process that powers the Sun - could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.

But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive.

Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) could boost hopes of scaling up fusion. ...

 16. Popular Technology.net: 97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists' Papers, according to the scientists that published them

The paper, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' searched the Web of Science for the phrases "global warming" and "global climate change" then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.

To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists' papers as "endorsing AGW", apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors. ...

How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming

Scientific American: How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming

Nuclear power is one of the few technologies that can quickly combat climate change, experts argue.

...  Indeed, he has evidence: the speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and '80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid "dangerous" climate change in the estimation of Hansen and his co-authors in a recent paper in PLoS One. "On a global scale, it's hard to see how we could conceivably accomplish this without nuclear," added economist and co-author Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where Hansen works.

The only problem: the world is not building so many nuclear reactors. ...

... nuclear reactors are beginning to get the kind of scientific attention not seen since at least the end of the cold war. Novel designs with alternative cooling fluids other than water, such as Transatomic Power's molten salt–cooled reactor or the liquid lead–bismuth design from Hyperion Power, are in development. Alternative concepts have attracted funding from billionaires like Bill Gates. Transatomic Power even won the top prize from energy investors at the 2013 summit of the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA–E, in 2013. "The intellectual power of what's been done in the nuclear space should allow for radical designs that meet tough requirements," Gates told ARPA–E's 2012 summit, noting that the modeling power of today's supercomputers should allow even more innovation. "When you have fission, you have a million times more energy than when you burn hydrocarbons. That's a nice advantage to have."...

... With more money for development of novel designs and public financial support for construction—perhaps as part of a clean energy portfolio standard that lumps in all low-carbon energy sources, not just renewables or a carbon tax—nuclear could be one of the pillars of a three-pronged approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions: using less energy to do more (or energy efficiency), low-carbon power, and electric cars (as long as they are charged with electricity from clean sources, not coal burning). "The options for large-scale clean electricity are few in number," Sachs noted, including geothermal, hydropower, nuclear, solar and wind. "Each part of the world will have different choices about how to get on a trajectory with most of the energy coming from that list rather than coal."...

... But, as Hansen wrote in an additional assessment of his new analysis, "Environmentalists need to recognize that attempts to force all-renewable policies on all of the world will only assure that fossil fuels continue to reign for base-load electric power, making it unlikely that abundant affordable power will exist and implausible that fossil fuels will be phased out."

I'm not as convinced about the dangers as Hansen is, but if you are going to wipe out carbon, I think Hansen is right. It has to be a combination of energy efficiency, nuclear power, and converting to intermediate energy sources like natural gas that, while still a fossil fuel, are less of a problem than coal, and give time for renewable energy to mature.

 

'50 Social Innovations That Changed the World'

Atlantic: '50 Social Innovations That Changed the World'

They left BBQ off the list, but other than that, it is an interesting list

... 50 Social innovations that changed the world more or less in chronological order.  Rank order in top 10 shown in [ ]

1. Irrigation that
2. created a structured bureaucracy, land measurement and administration in Egypt and Mesopotamia
3. mathematics [3]
4. creation of nations as workable structures  
5. empires based  on bureaucracy and military discipline
6. writing, instructions could be sent over distance – Incas used knots [1]
7. written rules and laws - the lawyers and courts as independent
8. alphabet [11]
9. agriculture and and animal husbandry skills that could be recorder and spread
10. history as peoples myths and lessons ...

Science and Technology Links

1. 10 common scientific misconceptions

Did you grow up believing in any of these science myths? From baby birds to flushing toilets, we debunk common 'facts' that are often just a form of misconstrued science.

2. Inventions that were going to change the world – but didn’t

Every new invention is supposed to be the "next big thing" – and some are. The cellphone, the PC, the plane: all inventions that revolutionized the way we live our lives and far surpassed their initial hype. But some inventions don't quite measure up to the fanfare that precedes their release. These end up in the scrap bin of history. Check out what inventions we all thought would revolutionize our world... but only ended up on this website list. ...

3. The Top 7 Technology Trends That Will Dominate 2014

4. What is 4-D Printing?

An M.I.T. lab is tweaking the idea of 3-D printing with the help of smart materials that continue to change even after they leave the printer.

 5. Nano Energy Storage Could Make Conventional Batteries Obsolete

 ...Components are molded from a material consisting of carbon fiber in a polymer resin, nano-structured batteries and super capacitors. The result, says Volvo, is an eco-friendly and cost-effective structure that stands to substantially cut vehicle weight and volume.

Volvo is already at work with an S80 that uses components made form the material that serve structural functions and replace a conventional battery at the same time. The company says that by completely substituting an electric car’s existing components with the new material, overall vehicle weight could be reduced by more than 15 percent.

“The way it works is reinforced carbon fibers sandwich the new battery and are molded and formed to fit around the car’s frame such as door panels, the trunk lid and wheel bowl,” said the company in a statement. ...

6. This Radioactive Element Could Power the Planet

7. Green energy rethink: 'Paying huge amounts of money to do nothing'

Bjorn Lomborg: Very clearly we do want to fix global warming, but you aren’t fixing it if you end up paying an enormous amount of money to do very, very little good.  Now let’s remember that most of the subsidies that Europe gets go to wind and solar panels, but we already control that because we have an ETS (European Trading System) already in place. So whenever you buy an extra solar panel or whenever you subsidize an extra wind turbine you don’t actually cut carbon emissions, you simply make it cheaper for someone else to use more coal fire power. So the reality is that we just pay huge amounts of money to do virtually nothing.

8. New Scientist: First sign that humanity is slowing its carbon surge

2012 may go down in history as a remarkable year. For the first time, the maddening pace of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions showed signs of a global slowdown.

Importantly – and unlike the drop in emissions triggered by the 2008 recession – the let-off is happening at the same time as global wealth continues to swell. ...

9. The Grid: Wal-Mart Now Draws More Solar Power Than 38 U.S. States

Solar power and keg stands have one thing in common: Wal-Mart wants to profit from them.

In the race for commercial solar power, Wal-Mart is killing it. The company now has almost twice as much capacity as second-place Costco. A better comparison: Wal-Mart is converting more sun into energy than 38 U.S. states. ...

And a related story: Walmart, Safeway, Others Unplugging From Unreliable Power Grid

More large corporations have decided that the electric power grid is unreliable and are planning to unplug from it and generate their own electricity.

The Wall Street Journal has confirmed a story that Off the Grid News previously reported – and the newspaper found the practice is even more widespread than previously thought.

Off The Grid News had reported that several large corporations, including Walmart, Safeway, Google, Bank of America and Coca-Cola, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on systems to generate their own electricity. A Journal article indicates that many other large companies, too, are taking steps to generate their own electricity. ...

10. Nuclear Power Needed To Slow Climate Change, Experts Say

... Some of the world's top climate scientists say wind and solar energy won't be enough to head off extreme global warming, and they're asking environmentalists to support the development of safer nuclear power as one way to cut fossil fuel pollution. ...

11. UN highlights role of farming in closing emissions gap

Changing the way farmers plough their lands could have a big impact on global emissions of greenhouse gases. ...

12. Can LED Bulbs Make Nuclear Plants Obsolete?

... By a sheer coincidence, LED lights and nuclear power provide an intriguing way to study the issue. Nuclear power plants generate approximately 19% of the electric power in the U.S. Lighting accounts for approximately 19% of the power used.  Thus, you can argue the fleet of 104 commercial nuclear reactors exists to keep the lights on. If you want to increase functional capacity by 20 percent, you can build 21 nuclear reactors or reduce light power by 20 percent. ...

... So what’s the logical thing to do? Spoiler alert—bulbs win hands down. The Department of Energy estimates that solid-state lighting is already on track to cut lighting power by 46%. ...

13. WAPO: Israel knows water technology, and it wants to cash in

... Israel recycles more than 80 percent of its effluents, compared with about 1 percent in the United States, the governor said. ...

... Israel is a world leader in desalination of seawater. By next year, more than a third of Israel’s tap water will come from the Mediterranean Sea and a few briny wells. Israel’s total water consumption remains nearly at 1964 levels — even though its population has quadrupled to 8 million people, according to the economic ministry. ...

... Distel said that water used to be a kind of “dumb industry” dominated by low-tech and cheap water, distributed by centuries-old pipes and canals, employing irrigation technologies that dated to the ancient Egyptians. Municipal water systems such as those in Los Angles, London and New Delhi traditionally lost 20 percent or more of their water to leaks and evaporation.

But in a world dominated by scarcity, climate change and population growth, water is no longer being taken for granted. ...

14. Scientific American: Forget What You've Heard: Humans Are Not Using More Than 1 Planet

On a global level, the popular "footprint" metric used to measure people’s ecological impact may not be very a useful after all. ...

15. This 'Genome Hacker' Is Building Family Trees With Millions of Branches

Thanks to computer-aided genealogical analysis, your family may have 43,000,000 members. ...

16. A Cure for the Allergy Epidemic?

... My guide was Mark Holbreich, an allergist in Indianapolis. He’d recently discovered that the Amish people who lived in the northern part of the state were remarkably free of allergies and asthma. ...

... That yawning difference positions the Indiana Amish among the least allergic populations ever described in the developed world. This invulnerability isn’t likely to be genetic. ...

... Farming, Dr. Holbreich thinks, is the Amish secret. This idea has some history. Since the late 1990s, European scientists have investigated what they call the “farm effect.” The working hypothesis is that innocuous cowshed microbes, plant material and raw milk protect farming children by favorably stimulating their immune systems throughout life, particularly early on. ...

17. Economist: Trouble at the lab

Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not.

18. Zeer Pots: A Simple Way to Reduce Post-Harvest Food Waste

... In Zambia, storage containers are commonly built out of twigs, poles, or plastic bags. Unsealed, unrefrigerated containers such as these can allow contamination from pests, rodents, and fungi. In hot climates, perishable foods such as berries and tomatoes typically do not last longer than two days without refrigeration. Without proper storage facilities, rural farmers have to watch their ripened crops succumb to rot, infestation, and mold.

Practical Action, a nongovernmental organization that works with farmers in Southern Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, encourages the use of earthenware refrigerators called zeer pots to help prevent post-harvest food waste. The pot-in-pot refrigerator design keeps fruits and vegetables cool by harnessing the principle of evaporative cooling. These pots can extend the shelf life of harvested crops by up to 20 days by reducing storage temperature. ...

19. How Did English Get To Be The International Language Of Science?

More than 98 percent of all scientific articles published today are in English, but that hasn’t always been the case. ...

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/17/4560193/science-fiction-is-becoming-science.html#storylink=cpy

Science and Technology Links

1. Why We Should Look Forward To Living To 120 And Beyond

... Consider these facts:

• More than $1 trillion has been spent on biomedical research over the past 20 years. These investments should soon start yielding longevity dividends.
• The number of scientists working on extending the life span worldwide has increased exponentially as computer and communications technologies have entered the mainstream and China and India have joined the race.
• The life spans of some laboratory animals have already been extended more than tenfold.
• Innovations have already started: vital organs have been grown from patients’ own cells and several stem-cell therapies are being proven.
• Cancer survival rates have increased steadily over the past few years. A diagnosis is no longer a certain death sentence.
• Advances in laboratory diagnostics and biometrics are already providing valuable insight into disease prevention.
• Fast-food outlets have started offering healthier dishes and displaying caloric content and smoking rates in developed countries have declined.

Many people would not interpret these seven facts as a single trend leading to dramatic increases in life expectancy because the long-term effects are so unpredictable. But just two decades ago, nobody could imagine the possibility of the technology we use daily now. ...

2. Turning plastic bags into high-tech materials

University of Adelaide researchers have developed a process for turning waste plastic bags into a high-tech nanomaterial.

The innovative nanotechnology uses non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags to make 'carbon nanotube membranes' – highly sophisticated and expensive materials with a variety of potential advanced applications including filtration, sensing, energy storage and a range of biomedical innovations.

"Non-biodegradable plastic bags are a serious menace to natural ecosystems and present a problem in terms of disposal," says Professor Dusan Losic, ARC Future Fellow and Research Professor of Nanotechnology in the University's School of Chemical Engineering.

"Transforming these waste materials through 'nanotechnological recycling' provides a potential solution for minimising environmental pollution at the same time as producing high-added value products." ...

3. Nanotechnology researchers find new energy storage capabilities between layers of 2-D materials

(Nanowerk News) Drexel University nanotechnology researchers are continuing to expand the capabilities and functionalities of a family of two-dimensional materials they discovered that are as thin as a single atom, but have the potential to store massive amounts of energy. Their latest achievement has pushed the materials storage capacities to new levels while also allowing for their use in flexible devices. ...

4. Atomic Goal: 800 Years of Power From Waste

BELLEVUE, Wash. — In a drab one-story building here, set between an indoor tennis club and a home appliance showroom, dozens of engineers, physicists and nuclear experts are chasing a radical dream of Bill Gates.

The quest is for a new kind of nuclear reactor that would be fueled by today’s nuclear waste, supply all the electricity in the United States for the next 800 years and, possibly, cut the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation around the world. ...

5. Could power plants of the future produce zero emissions?

... But now Net Power, based in the US state of North Carolina, believes it can redesign the power plant so it can still run on coal or natural gas, but without releasing harmful fumes.

Rodney Allam, chief technologist at 8 Rivers Capital, which owns Net Power, says: "The perception has been that to avoid emissions of [carbon dioxide] CO2, we have to get rid of fossil fuels.

"But unfortunately, fossil fuels represent over 70% of the fuel that's consumed in the world and the idea that you can get rid of that in any meaningful sense is a pipe dream."

The Net Power system is different from currently operating power plants because carbon dioxide, normally produced as waste when making electricity, would become a key ingredient when burning the fuel. ...

6. Meet The Americans Who Don't Use The Internet

6. NASA preparing to launch 3-D printer into space

MOFFETT FIELD, California (AP) — NASA is preparing to launch a 3-D printer into space next year, a toaster-sized game changer that greatly reduces the need for astronauts to load up with every tool, spare part or supply they might ever need.

The printers would serve as a flying factory of infinite designs, creating objects by extruding layer upon layer of plastic from long strands coiled around large spools. Doctors use them to make replacement joints and artists use them to build exquisite jewelry.

In NASA labs, engineers are 3-D printing small satellites that could shoot out of the Space Station and transmit data to earth, as well as replacement parts and rocket pieces that can survive extreme temperatures. ...

7. What Is the 'Internet of Things'?

... In the '90s computers invaded our homes. In the 2000s computers invaded our pockets. This decade, all our clothing, accessories, vehicles, and everything (?!) appear on the verge of computerization.

Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Currently the idea of the IoT has many definitions. Most include a world in the not-too-distant future where most objects are computerized and seamlessly integrated into our information network, creating "smart" grids, homes, and environments. ...

8. The Bill Gates-backed company that's reinventing meat

... This presents a big opportunity for someone who can devise a tasty and affordable plant-based substitute for meat. That is exactly what Ethan Brown, the founder and chief executive of a California-based startup called Beyond Meat, aims to do, and he has persuaded some smart people to put their money behind him. Beyond Meat makes vegan "chicken-free" strips that it says are better for people's health (low-fat, no cholesterol), better for the environment (requiring less land and water), and better for animals (obviously) than real chicken; most important, if all goes according to plan, they will cost less to produce than chicken. Fortune has learned that Bill Gates is an investor; he sampled the product and said he couldn't tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken. "The meat market is ripe for invention," Gates wrote in a blog post about the future of food. Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, made Beyond Meat its first investment in a food startup. "KP is looking for big ideas, and this qualifies as a big idea," says Amol Deshpande, a former Cargill executive and a partner at the venture firm. "The single biggest inefficiency in agriculture is how we get our protein." Other investors include Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the founders of Twitter; Morgan Creek Capital Management; and the Humane Society of the United States, an animal-welfare group. ...

 

Science and Technology Links

1. The ten most important innovations of all time

1. Paper (105AD – Europe 10th century – Germany 1400)
2. Printing Press (1450)
3. Telegraph (1837) ...

What would you remove/add to the list?

2. Natural Gas May Be Easier On Climate Than Coal, Despite Methane Leaks

3. Internet Archaeologists Reconstruct Lost Web Pages

The Internet is disappearing. And with it goes an important part of our recorded history. That was the conclusion of a study Technology Review looked at last year, which measured the rate at which links shared over social media platforms, such as Twitter, were disappearing.

The conclusion was that this data is being lost at the rate of 11% within a year and 27% within two years.

Today, the researchers behind this work reveal that all is not lost. Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., have found a way to reconstruct deleted material, and they say it works reasonably well. ...

4. 5 Huge Industries That Are Already Feeling The Effects Of 3-D Printing

Earlier this week we presented the thesis from Credit Suisse that not only is 3-D printing not a flash in the pan, existing market research reports have actually understated its potential market. 3-D printing is exactly what it sounds like: making 3-D objects from a device that's conceptually more like a printer than from a typical manufacturing process.

But we wanted to get a little bit more specific about where exactly this is going to happen.

So with the help of an excellent report from consulting firm CSC, we now present five industries that are already feeling the effects of 3-D printing's imminent dominance — for better or worse. ...

5. Innovation of the Week: A Low-Cost Composting Toilet

... The WAND Foundation has developed several dry composting toilet models, some of which were recognized at the 2011 Tech Awards at Santa Clara University. At the conference, Cora Zayas-Sayre, executive director of the WAND Foundation, explained that by using local materials, the organization has been able to build 275 toilets at a cost of US$30 per toilet. She added that this innovation has already impacted the lives of 3,000 people.

This innovation simultaneously addresses two challenges that prevail in developing countries: the unsustainable and costly use of water-sealed toilets, and the hygienic management of human waste. Water-sealed toilets require pumping mechanisms to transport water and sewage between 300 and 500 meters away from the home, a method that is economically and environmentally unsustainable. Inadequate management of human waste can lead to a host of health problems in developing areas, and dramatically impact quality of life. ...

6. World continues 'enormous progress' against AIDS

New infections each year are down 33% since 2001.

7. Rooftop Farming Is Getting Off The Ground

... The green-roof movement has slowly been gaining momentum in recent years, and some cities have made them central to their sustainability plans. The city of Chicago, for instance, that 359 roofs are now partially or fully covered with vegetation, which provides all kinds of environmental benefits — from reducing the buildings' energy costs to cleaning the air to mitigating the

Late this summer, Chicago turned a green roof into its first major rooftop farm. At 20,000 square feet, it's the largest soil-based rooftop farm in the Midwest, according to the Chicago Botanic Garden, which maintains the farm through its program. ...

8. Interesting piece using driverless cars as an example and the inability of some people to see the potential innovations: The third industrial revolution

... In fact, these possibilities are only the tip of the iceberg. Autonomous vehicles' most transformative contribution might be what they get up to when people aren't in the vehicles. One suddenly has access to cheap, fast, ultra-reliable, on-demand courier service. Imagine never having to run out for milk or a missing ingredient again. Imagine dropping a malfunctioning computer into a freight AV to be ferried off to a repair shop and returned, all without you having to do anything. Imagine inventories at offices, shops and so on refilling constantly and as needed: assuming "shops" is still a meaningful concept in a world where things all come to you.

The really remarkable thing about such possibilities is that the technology is basically available today. It isn't cheap today, but that may change very quickly. If the public lets it, of course. When it comes to AVs stagnation, if it occurs, will be the fault of regulatory rather than technological obstacles.

Saturday Links

 1. Population Reference Bureau has a great resource that maps their 2013 World Population Data Sheet on an interactive map. Here is one example:

2. Modern family redefined: Say 'goodbye' to the typical American family

A New York Times story looking at the skyrocketing rate of birth outside of marriage among women under 30 (now over 50 percent of such births) pointed up one of the key differences between marriages and cohabitating couples:

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

The research, in aggregate, says that things are changing for the American family, and quickly. There may be ways for the government to address the trend: increased financial benefits for getting and staying married, for example, or a macro-effort to actively battle rising economic inequality, but systematic change will be a long hard fight. The research seems to suggest that such a fight is worth the effort.

3. The Aging of the Baby Boom and the Growing Care Gap: A Look at Future Declines in the Availability
of Family Caregivers

4. Young People Are Still Dropping Out Of The Labor Force

Kids are likely staying in school for longer (or avoiding work altogether) thanks to a tough labor market. On the other hand, the 65-and-over crowd has seen the sharpest uptick in participation. The financial crisis bled retirement savings, forcing older Americans to stay on the job for longer.

5. How Big Data Is Transforming The Mobile Industry

6. Millennials Now Bringing Their Parents Along On Job Interviews

7. Why Bigger Is No Longer Better

Every manager and entrepreneur wants to grow their business.  Get bigger and more powerful, the thinking goes, and you'll have it made. The added heft will give you the upper hand in negotiations with suppliers and the doors of customers will swing wide open.

That used to be true to a certain extent, but not so much anymore. Digital technology has markedly evened out the playing field. Startups become billion dollar companies overnight while venerable brands like Kodak and Blockbuster hit the skids.

This turn of events presents considerable challenges for managers.  While there are still some advantages to scale, the disadvantages often outweigh them.  You have lots of customers, a large workforce and stodgy institutional investors to keep happy, all of which contribute to strategic rigidity.  To compete in the new economy, we need a new playbook. ...

8. Can For-Profit Corporations Have Religious Purposes?

...Okay, some may respond (e.g., here), churches and other organizations have free exercise rights, but for-profit corporations do not.  But why would this be?  An individual sole proprietor — of, say, a kosher deli, to use Will's example — would clearly be able to press a religious liberty claim, whether or not she hopes the deli will make her rich (and whether or not she commits to donate her earnings to a religious charity).   Does this individual lose such rights if she incorporated?   Does that somehow make her religious motivations any less sincere? Any less judicially cognizable?  I can't see how.   What, then, if the deli owner formed a partnership with her equally devout brother?  Would that matter?  And, again, if an informal partnership would be okay, why would the adoption of a corporate form and limited liability matter?

The consequence of the "no religious liberty for corporations" position is that individuals who would like to go into business are penalized if they seek to go into business without any potential recourse, under RFRA or otherwise.  The choice presented by the state is go into business or stay true to your religious beliefs.  Although I suggested otherwise before, it seems to me this approach imposes a substantial burden on the exercise of religion.  Whether this burden can be justified in a given case is a separate question, but the burden is there. ...

9. Five Insights About Private Property from Aquinas

1. God designed creation to support life, especially human life. ...
2. Private property engenders good stewardship. ...
3. Private ownership supports order in society. ...
4. Private property helps maintain peace in communities. ...
5. Private property benefits the community. ...

10. Germans Revolt Against Germany's Green Energy Revolution

11. Brussels fears European 'industrial massacre' sparked by energy costs

Europe's industry is being ravaged by exorbitant energy costs and an over-valued euro, blighting efforts to reverse years of global manufacturing decline.

12. What If Roads Lasted Twice As Long?

If there were a better way to take care of roads in the Lone Star State, it would be a very valuable idea.

Enter Sahadat Hossain, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington and the man behind a new state program to shore up crumbling roads using an underground support system of recycled plastic pins.

"Just think about it," Hossain says. "You need one million dollars to repair something. Or you can use a sustainable recycling material and do it for $200- or $300,000. You don't need to be an engineer to see that."

The scheme's low price is matched by its high effectiveness. In a two-year feasibility study that concluded this August, sections of Texas Route 287 with 10-foot-long pins drilled into the roadway slope moved only one to two inches. The control sections, left unsupported, moved 15 to 16 inches. ...

... The input cost of the pins, which have previously been tested in Missouri, is less than 50 percent that of traditional highway support measures like retaining walls. And because they are made from recycled plastic—each pin contains about 500 soda bottles—the pin concept turns plastic's non-decomposition from an environmental headache to an engineering solution. ...

13. This Map Shows Which Countries Are Going To Make The World Cup, According To Nate Silver's Prediction Model

 

Learn About Tableau

14. Why So Many Articles Have Terrible Headlines Online

15. The 11 Most Common Grammatical Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

16. What would happen if your church was reviewed on TripAdvisor?

Churches spend a lot of time on the big things, like a glorious anthem and prophetic preaching. But a UMC pastor says small details matter, too, like lights that burn brightly, signs that make sense and greeters who greet. ...

Saturday Links

1. A College Kid, A Single Mom, And The Problem With The Poverty Line

Rico Saccoccio is a junior at Fordham University in the Bronx. He's from a middle-class family in Connecticut and he spent the summer living at home with his parents, who cover about $15,000 a year in his college costs. ...

...There's broad agreement that the way the U.S. measures poverty has some fundamental flaws — a topic that's likely to come up next month, when the new poverty numbers are released. Here are three key problems, as explained to me by Christopher Wimer, a researcher at Columbia.

1. It doesn't account for geographic differences. The poverty line is the same, no matter where you live — whether it's in New York City or rural South Dakota.

2. It's based on a 50-year-old formula that assumes Americans spend about a third of their income on food. But, after adjusting for inflation, the price of food has fallen significantly in the past 50 years. Today, people spend only about a sixth of their income on food. But they spend a bigger chunk of their income on other items, like child care and medical expenses.

3. It doesn't consider the value of of government benefits, such as food stamps and tax credits. ...

2. There are better anti-poverty tools than the minimum wage

... But raising the minimum wage may not be a policy idea deserving of the passion it generates. It’s not a well-targeted, poverty-fighting weapon. Only 3% of workers age 25 and over earn the minimum wage or less. About half of all minimum wage (or less) workers are age 24 or younger, many of whom presumably live at home with their parents. The 2010 study “Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor?” by researchers Joseph Sabia and Richard Burkhauser found that a federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour — higher than the $9 that President Obama has proposed — would raise incomes of only 11% of workers who live in poor households.

In a 2012 study, Sabia and Robert Nielsen found ”no statistically significant evidence that a higher minimum wage has helped reduce financial, housing, health, or food insecurity among the poor.” Why? You have to earn a wage to benefit and 55% of poor, less-educated individuals between ages 16 and 64 don’t work. Indeed, nearly 90% of the wage earners who benefited from the 40% increase in the federal minimum wage between 2007 and 2009 were not poor. They lived in households with an income two or three times the poverty level. ...

3. Debunking Myths About Who Pays No Federal Income Tax

4. A Brief History of How Living Alone Came to Seem Totally Normal

5. Baby boomers may have no one to care for them in old age

Baby boomers may have no one to care for them in their old age.

Shifting demographics mean that aging boomers will have fewer friends and family members to take care of them as they get into their 80s, according to a new study by AARP.

In other words, even though you may be supporting your own elderly parents, the chances of someone being there for you are numerically diminished.

The ratio of potential caregivers to boomers needing care will sink from 7.2 to 1 in 2010 to 2.9 to 1 by 2050, according to the study. ...

6. World population map at Gizmodo.

7. How Our Ancestors Used to Sleep Twice a Night and Highlighting the Problem of Present Shock

8 hour sleeping is a modern invention.

Imagine you are a denizen of the 18th century. It’s just past 8:30 P.M., you’ve got your night-cap on. You blow out your candles and fall asleep to the smell of the wax and the wick, which gently fills the air around your bed. Some hours pass. 2:30 AM. You awaken, grab your coat, and visit the neighbors because they, too, are up. Doing quiet reading, prayer, or even having sex. Well, apparently before the age of electricity, sleeping twice a night was completely ubiquitous.

Back in those times, we slept twice a night, getting up for an hour or two for recreation before heading back to bed until dawn. ...

8. So you hate GMO’s because they are untested. What about feelbetteramine from the health store?

... Most opponents of GMOs don’t seem to have a problem eagerly loading up their shopping carts with all kinds of exotic stuff from the health supplement aisle in the local supermarket. How many Whole Foods (and Whole Foods is just an example here, and probably one of the more benign ones) store assistants – many of whom are far from being trained in nutrition or pharmacology – have convinced these people that feelbetteramine is right for their gout, or for their insomnia, or for the “cognitive deficit” that they feel everyday at work? What kind of evidence of long-term safety exists for feelbetteramine that allows these GMO opponents to embrace the wondrous effects of this non FDA-approved concoction with alacrity? And proponents of health supplements are often big on anecdotal evidence; why don’t they, at the very least, admit anecdotal evidence about the benefits of GMOs (especially when the evidence is concrete, as in case of VAD) into their belief system?

To me there clearly seems to be a discrepancy between the reflexive rejection of untested GMOs by the anti-GMO crowd and their rapid embrace of the equally or more untested latest health supplement. All things being equal, as a scientist I at least know what the express purpose of Golden Rice is, compared to the hazy reports on salutary effects of feelbetteramine. So it seems to me that if I am really against GMOs because they are insufficiently tested, I need to mostly steer clear of the health supplement aisle. And did I mention that feelbetteramine can also set your love life on the path to glorious bliss?

 9. Renewed Trust In Nuclear Power

Michael Golay, a nuclear engineering professor at M.I.T., has noted that many new technologies are initially slow to receive public acceptance, such as railroads and cars, in part because of fear of the unknown.  But also, early versions sometimes have serious safety issues.  The first trains, with wood burning locomotives, showered sparks on passengers and the countryside, for instance.  As the public becomes accustomed to them and the designs improve, they become accepted as part of every day life.

This is clearly the case with nuclear power, which in the 1970s faced massive public resistance in Europe and the U.S., with huge demonstrations opposing its use and lengthy legal delays that ran construction costs skyward.  The accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl clearly made the public wary in most, though not all, countries.

But it would seem that the public, over the long term, is capable of understanding and then accepting even complex systems.  Predictions of massive increases in cancer rates from nuclear power failed to come true, and Three Mile Island became a tourist attraction.  Combined with rising concerns about global warming and better reactor designs, expectations of a ‘nuclear revival’ became prominent in the U.S. ...

10. The Five Best Tricks To Remember Names

 

Saturday Links

1. Does Wealth Breed Narcissism: The New' Mirror, Mirror on the Wall' Study

... I wanted to test the relationship between wealth, entitlement and narcissism, guided by our earlier work suggesting that people who are wealthier, or who feel richer, tend to be a little more self-focused and self-interested than others. We found that wealthier participants reported significantly greater psychological entitlement. They were more likely to see themselves as deserving of good things in life and entitled to a bigger piece of the pie than others. We even found that students whose parents were wealthier and better educated (in other words, people who hadn't done anything themselves to be wealthy) felt more psychologically entitled. Further, we found that wealthier individuals not only feel more entitled, but they also report more narcissistic tendencies on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, endorsing statements like, "I like to be the center of attention," "I find it easy to manipulate people" and "I like to show off my body."...

2. How Candles Are Making New Opportunities for Women in Haiti

3. A U.S. manufacturing comeback won't rebuild the middle class

"... The reality is U.S. factories rely more on machines than actual workers, says Jesse Rothstein, public policy and economics professor at University of California Berkeley. Machines produce more for less, and with bargaining powers of U.S. unions not being what they once were, it becomes less likely workers will earn more.

In a 2012 study, Rothstein found that hires by manufacturers of durable goods (items lasting three years or more) were paid an average of 0.3% less in 2010 and 2011 than workers newly hired in 2007 and 2008.

A similar trend plays out if we look at manufacturing overall: The average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees were $8.43 for 2012, lower than $8.70 in 2009 and $8.75 in 2003, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To be sure, some higher-skilled manufacturing jobs, such as welding, have seen wages rise.

The Boston Consulting Group notes the U.S. is steadily becoming one of the cheapest places in the developed world to manufacture. By 2015, average labor costs will be about 16% lower in the U.S. than in the U.K., 18% lower than in Japan, 34% lower than in Germany, and 35% lower than in France and Italy.

If the firm is right, it's likely that many more manufacturers will return jobs to the U.S., as it predicts. However, if trends in pay continue, it probably won't rebuild the middle class."

4. An affinity for lavish funerals is proving costly for Africa's poor

While insurance companies in the US, UK and Europe make the bulk of their money covering cars, homes and other material goods, their African counterparts are cashing in on the continent's custom of hosting pricey funerals.

In Africa, big, dignified burials are signs of prosperity, and small, restrained ceremonies are just the opposite. So Africans stretch their finances, often to unseemly ends, to fund funeral insurance so relatives can have a proper burial.

On average, funerals in Africa cost a staggering 40% of annual household expenditures, according to Foreign Policy, and include elaborate coffins, food for guests, requisite new clothing, and transportation to and from the ceremony. Funeral insurance hedges their ability to cover expenses. At Sizo Funeral Directors, a small funeral-insurance company based out of Soweto, South Africa, the cheapest package affords a $500 funeral, and covers up to 14 people for as little as $12 dollars a month. Larger packages run upwards of $50 dollars a month, and often much more. Consider that in South Africa, the continent's wealthiest country, non-farm workers make less than $1,500 a month. Funeral insurance policies tend to be bought on behalf of households, meaning that many Africans are covered for large portions of, if not most of their lives. ...

5. Minimum wage at $15 an hour: Would it help or hurt?

... A big question, though, is whether pushing up the minimum wage would dim the employment prospects of many who need jobs the most: young or unskilled workers.

In economics, the general rule is that if something becomes more expensive, people will buy less of it. In this case, critics warn that minimum-wage hikes will cause employers to scale back on hiring – using alternatives such as automation or foreign outsourcing wherever they can.

A countering view, held by backers of the Seattle wage push, is that if more US workers had decent incomes, consumer spending would rise and help fuel a virtuous cycle for the economy – including new hiring.

Economists haven't reached a consensus on the optimum minimum wage policy. White House economist Alan Krueger is known as a proponent of the idea that the minimum can be raised without having adverse effects on employment.

But when two other economists, David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board, surveyed studies that have been done over the past two decades, they found the evidence weighted toward the view that boosting the minimum wage has at least modest negative effects on job creation.

Some supporters of greater wage support for low-income workers favor moves such as expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit – a move that doesn't directly burden employers with new costs. ...

6. For nuclear, good things come in small packages

... But the days of the behemoth light water reactor plants may be numbered.

The challenge comes from what are known as small modular reactors (SMRs), rated at under 300 MWe. Stimulated by a total of $452 million in matching funds from the U.S. Department of Energy, the race is on for these smaller reactors. Call them the new, improved, front-wheel drive reactors. ...

... Whatever the design, one of the big advantages the new entrants will have is that they will be wholly or partly built in factories, saving money and assuring quality. (Related article: Will Moribund Uranium Prices Rebound?)

Some designs, like those of Babcock & Wilcox (which won the first round of funding) and Westinghouse, are sophisticated adaptations of light water technology.

Others, like General Atomics' offering, called the Energy Multiplier Module, or EM2, are at the cutting-edge of nuclear energy. It relies on a high operating temperature of 850 degrees Centigrade to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and even to use nuclear waste as fuel. It is designed to work for 30 years without refuelling, relying on a silicon carbide fibre ceramic that will hold the fuel pellets.

"The ceramic does not melt and if it is damaged, the material tends to heal itself," says John Parmentola, senior vice president at General Atomics, which developed the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle and the electromagnetic launch system for aircraft carriers, which replaces the steam catapult.

Others designs include thorium fuel instead of uranium, the use of molten salt as a moderator and coolant. Three of them, including General Atomics' design are so-called fast reactors, where a moderator is not used to slow down the neutrons as they collide with the target atoms. Think fission on steroids. ...

7. Africa and Pakistan Face Polio Outbreaks, in Blow to Global Fight

8. A Majority of Black Americans Feel They're Treated Unfairly by Just About Every Major Civic Institution

...Of particular note are a set of questions posed in the survey about how blacks are treated today by some of the most important civic institutions in society: police departments, the justice system, public schools. Pew asked 2,231 nationally representative adults if they believed blacks in their communities were treated less fairly than whites by these and other elements of the community, including restaurants and stores.

Seventy percent of blacks felt this way about the police (no wonder). Meanwhile, only 37 percent of whites felt blacks were treated unfairly by police. Suspicion among blacks (and a stark divide in opinion with whites) remains notably high for elections as well (ahem). ...

9. Loneliness Is Deadly

Social isolation kills more people than obesity does—and it's just as stigmatized. ...

... Loneliness has doubled: 40 percent of adults in two recent surveys said they were lonely, up from 20 percent in the 1980s. ...

Saturday Links

Pickings have been slim this week, and I'm late getting the links posted. Hopefully, we will get back on track this week.

1. Hidden environmentalists: India's waste pickers

In Pune, India, a city that suffered a waste disposal crisis in 2010, an alliance of waste pickers has established an inclusive, sustainable model for solid waste management that presents a potential blueprint for the future.

... They formed SWaCH – India's first wholly-owned cooperative of self-employed waste pickers. Since 2005, SWaCH has worked in partnership with city authorities, providing door-to-door collection for a small fee and – unlike other contractors that favor landfills and incineration units – recycling and composting the city's rubbish.

However, as Vishnu, head of operations, explains, it is an initiative driven primarily by social, rather than environmental forces. Before SWaCH, waste pickers rummaged through landfills to find scraps to sell. "They were not working in a clean area – there are snakes and pigs and dogs. And they were not getting enough sellables to sustain their families." By incorporating waste pickers into the municipal mechanism for waste collection and formalizing what had previously been a completely unregulated economy, SWaCH has provided increased economic security and social uplift for thousands of families in Pune. ...

2. Discover asks How Many People Ever Lived?

While I was writing The Cancer Chronicles, I came to a point, early on, where I wondered how many people had ever been alive in the world. The best answer I could find came from a study by an organization called the Population Reference Bureau: 108 billion.

I was stunned by the magnitude of the number. It is still common to hear that more people are alive today than have ever lived. Or an even more extreme claim: that 75 percent of everyone who ever walked the earth is living today. But that is not even close to being correct. By the Population Reference Bureau's reckoning, the proportion of living to dead is only about 6 percent. ...

3. The Rise Of The Renting And Sharing Economy Could Have Catastrophic Ripple Effects

... "The potential impacts of renting/leasing as a long-term trend, though, are worrisome: Renting and sharing could lead to lower home sales (and, subsequently lower home values and net worths), as well as lower auto and retail sales," write the strategists. "The ripple effects could also be catastrophic: Adjusting to a consumer who does not necessarily buy, but rather rents, would necessitate a shift in production, sales, and even employment structures. Everything interesting in economics happens at the margin, so if the nth consumer chooses to rent an apartment instead of buying a house or making do with a car-share program instead of purchasing a new vehicle, then demand for new houses and cars drops."...

4. Lawrence Berkeley National Labs: Solar Costs Continue To Fall

... Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL) recently released their report summarizing the trends in installed costs of solar installations from 1998 to 2012. They looked at over 92,000 installations over the past two years, and found that the cost dynamics continue to move strongly downward.

Some of the main findings:

Installations in the U.S. more than quadrupled from 2009 to 2012, going from 7,000 megawatts to 31,000.

Costs continue to fall at a healthy clip, with the most recent year-over-year declines of 14% for systems less than 10 kilowatts (kW), 13% for systems in the 10 – 100 kW range, and 6% for systems larger than 100 kW. Median installed prices were $5.3, $4.9, and $4.6 per watt respectively. LBNL attributes these declining U.S. prices mainly to falling module prices, which accounted for 80% of the total price drop.

The trend in 2013 appears to be continuing. The initial data available from the California Solar Initiative shows prices falling by 10-15% in the first six months of this year.

LBNL did note that the module prices appeared to be stabilizing in 2013, but the report also commented that experience from other countries suggests the price declines can and will continue. The median installed price of small residential PV systems last year (without tax) was $2.6 in Germany (fully half the price in the U.S.), $3.1 in Australia, and $3.1 per watt in Italy.

Many of these additional gains will come about as a result of reductions in soft costs, as permitting becomes streamlined, and companies develop more efficient customer acquisition and financing tools. ...

5. Germany Fights Population Drop

... In its most recent census, Germany discovered it had lost 1.5 million inhabitants. By 2060, experts say, the country could shrink by an additional 19 percent, to about 66 million. ...

... Germany, however, an island of prosperity, is spending heavily to find ways out of the doom-and-gloom predictions, and it would seem ideally placed to show the Continent the way. So far, though, even while spending $265 billion a year on family subsidies, Germany has proved only how hard it can be. That is in part because the solution lies in remaking values, customs and attitudes in a country that has a troubled history with accepting immigrants and where working women with children are still tagged with the label "raven mothers," implying neglectfulness.

If Germany is to avoid a major labor shortage, experts say, it will have to find ways to keep older workers in their jobs, after decades of pushing them toward early retirement, and it will have to attract immigrants and make them feel welcome enough to make a life here. It will also need to get more women into the work force while at the same time encouraging them to have more children, a difficult change for a country that has long glorified stay-at-home mothers....

... Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs. They say recent data show that growth in fertility is more likely to come from them. ...

6. A Surprising Map of the World Shows Just How Big China's Population Is

In order to comprehend what it means for one country to have one-fifth of the world's population, this nifty map (from the indispensable @Amazing_Maps on Twitter) divides the world into five regions, each with the same population of China.

Saturday Links

1. Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness

People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity.

2. Blacks, Hispanics more optimistic than whites

... After years of economic attitudes among whites, blacks and Hispanics following similar patterns, whites' confidence in their economic future has plummeted in the last decade, according to the analysis. Blacks and Hispanics, meanwhile, have sustained high levels of optimism despite being hit hard in the recent recession. ...

... The AP-NORC analysis of data from the General Social Survey, a long-running biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, found just 46 percent of whites say their family has a good chance of improving their living standard given the way things are in America, the lowest level in surveys conducted since 1987. In contrast, 71 percent of blacks and 73 percent of Hispanics express optimism of an improved life - the biggest gap with whites since the survey began asking. ...

3. The Book of Mormon: Why the world’s most capitalist religion breeds so many entrepreneurs

... The Mormon religion, however, stresses more than just self-reliance. Its emphasis on hard work, staying focused, and giving back to the Church also stirs entrepreneurial inclinations. The almost-mandatory missions carried out by its young men and women before they start their careers forge an ability to withstand rejection and disappointment while also fostering communication skills that help not only with sales jobs but also in starting companies. All the while, an unrelenting focus on the family means that Mormons are incentivized to “follow the rules” and earn money to feed many mouths, while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

And so the US is riven with examples of what appears to be a disproportionately high number of business and entrepreneurial success stories to emerge from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members account for just 1.7 percent of the US population. ...

4. A Record Number Of Young Adults Are Still Hunkered Down With Mom And Dad

... In 2012, 21.6 million young adults aged 18-31 lived at home with their parents, up from 18.5 million just before the recession, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. 

"This is the highest share in at least four decades and represents a slow but steady increase over the 32% of their same-aged counterparts who were living at home prior to the Great Recession in 2007 and the 34% doing so when it officially ended in 2009," the report says. ...

5. U.S. Marriage Rates Keep Declining

Marriage rates in America are at an all-time low. And the median age at which women say "I do" is the highest it's been in a century.

Charles Blow had these observations about Marriage and Minorities.

6. The Long-Term Effects Of Poverty Linger Even After People Become Wealthy

"Scientists find [people who grew up poor] are more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age."

7. The other killer. Hepatitis kills more people than HIV in most countries.

8. India’s Garment Industry Gets Respun

As cost increases in China and concerns over labor conditions in Bangladesh push manufacturing firms away, India is gearing up its own garment industry to try to capitalize on the opportunity and boost its faltering economy. India has so far failed to fully take advantage of its huge potential labor force living out in the countryside. This may soon change, with companies like Aravind Mills planning to open dormitories for workers. Additionally, the Indian government, taking a page from China’s development model, has plans to create textile parks, with space designated for worker housing. ...

9. The Missouri Table: A Response to Ethical Foodies From a ‘Factory Farmer’

... One caller to a radio show I appeared on recently desribed the people who patronize fast food restaurants as "sheeple." That kind of derision leads me to believe that the caller will only feel good about himself if he believes I eat hamburgers several times a month at a place with cheesy uniforms and kid’s meals. I’m happy to oblige, but it is hard for me to take him seriously. He’s not as interested in making the world better as he is in feeling superior to people who can’t afford to eat the diet he believes necessary to living an ethical and sustainable life. He’s not nearly as concerned about the future of the planet as he is at being noticed, approvingly, by the kind of people who worry about the proper way to boil lentils, raise a few heritage pigs in their backyard, and are always available to be interviewed by NPR and the New York Review of Books. ...

A little harsh but a lot true.

 10. The Slower Rise in Health Care Costs

The rate at which health care costs are rising had slowed down in recent years, and perhaps not unexpectedly, Obama's economic advisers have sought to draw the link that "As ACA Implementation Continues, Consumer Health Care Cost Growth Has Slowed." But an array of evidence suggests that something beyond that legislation--which after all, is mostly not yet implemented--is the cause.

1) The slowdown in the rise of health care spending was already being noted in newspaper articles back in early 2012. ...

2) The slowdown in rising health care costs since the recession is international, as a press release with the OECD Health Report 2013 explains. ...

3) There's some reason to be dubious as to whether the slower rate of growth in health care spending will persist. ...

11. ‘Saudi America’ was the world’s No. 1 petroleum producer in April for the 6th straight month

12. Efficiency Drove U.S. Emissions Decline, Not Natural Gas, Study Says

Aggressive energy efficiency efforts by households, companies and motorists led to the decline in carbon dioxide emissions from energy use in the United States, according to a recent report. The controversial finding contradicts recent studies that say the power sector's shift away from coal to cheap natural gas caused the bulk of reductions.

U.S. emissions last year fell by 205 million metric tons, or 4 percent, from 2011 levels. CO2 Scorecard Group, a small environmental research organization, says that nearly half the decline came from energy-saving measures such as retrofits and smarter appliances in homes and offices, as well as from Americans driving fewer miles, and using more fuel-efficient vehicles. 

Natural gas is responsible for only about one-quarter of last year's emissions drop, CO2 Scorecard Group asserts....

As the article notes, other reputable research disagrees, attributing most of the drop to shale.

13. Millennials and Leaving Church: Really?

... Before you either quote the reports or the responses to the reports, read Brad Wright’s book: Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…and Other Lies You’ve Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media.

Here are some highlights from Wright’s 3d chp, one asking if we (think we) are losing our youth.

Josh McDowell: “It is clear that we have all but lost our young people to a godless culture.” Josh’s statement is typical.

It’s also not in tune with good social-scientific data. For instance, there was a widely circulating rumor (I heard it) that said 4% of our evangelical youth will be evangelicals when they get older. Wright chased the number into bad stats. Here are some better ones:

1. Young adults are less religious, but what does this mean?
2. 12% in the 70s and 80s were unaffiliated; now 25% are. But this is the same number as with other age groups.
3. Currently, 22% of young adults are evangelicals; that’s up from 21% in the 70s but down from 25% in the 90s.
4. Negatively, unaffiliated has increased for young adults.
5. Positively, the number who are affiliated with churches has remained the same.
6. Those affiliated with Evangelicals, Black Prots, and RCC are the same as in the 70s. (Mainliners are down.)
7. No sign of cataclysmic or big changes....

 

Saturday Links

1. Public Religion Research Institute: Survey | Do Americans Believe Capitalism and Government are Working?: Religious Left, Religious Right and the Future of the Economic Debate

2. Gallup reports Sub-Saharan Africa Is Wildly Optimistic About Its Future

3. U.S. could lead world oil production by 2017, study says

Domestic shale oil production could shoot up to 5 million barrels per day by 2017, making the United States the top oil producing country in the world, according to a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School.

4. Will Europe Hit a Demographic Tipping Point?

... In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s doomsday tome The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation and civilizational collapse in much of the world due to overpopulation. But the more serious problem – particularly in traditionally higher-income countries – today is actually too few, not too many new people. The pivot to seeing this as the problem has come through something very basic: pension math. Across the developed world, public pension systems built on the assumption of continued population growth are now facing an actuarial day of reckoning as the bills come due while birth rates have plummeted.

A society needs a total fertility rate – that is, the average number of children born to each woman – of 2.1 just to maintain its population without immigration. Some European countries like France (2.03) and the UK (1.98) are in reasonably good shape, but they are the exception. The total fertility rate in Greece is 1.43, in Germany 1.36, in Spain 1.36, in Portugal 1.30, and in Poland 1.30. Much of southern and central Europe hovers near the so-called “lowest-low” rate of 1.3 in which the population is naturally being cut in half every 45 years.

Simple birth rates alone have caused some to posit a societal going out of business sale in Europe. However, just as extrapolation of high population growth rates in the past led to wildly alarmist claims that proved false, so today we must be careful about not proclaiming Europe is doomed. But with the population on tap to be halved every generation, the runway to turn things around is difficult to conjure. And while we’ve seen many countries make the shift from high to low birth rates, there isn’t a huge track record of success in the other direction. ...

5. Hunger Makes People Work Harder, and Other Stupid Things We Used to Believe About Poverty

The article includes this interesting graph:

6. Forget Microlending. India Needs Basic, Competent Credit Reporting - Businessweek

Development economists talk a lot about credit. Figure out a way to get it to people in a developing economy, rather than just large companies or the state itself, and you can encourage small-scale risk-taking. Microlending offers very small loans to individuals, often $100 or less. The idea won Muhammad Yunus a Nobel Prize in 2006. More recently, microfinance and mobile banking have offered ways to save and insure on a small scale, allowing people take risks with their own money. Speaking in Mumbai earlier this month, K. C. Chakrabarty, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, offered an additional way to expand credit: better credit reporting. No shepherds with phones, no happy mothers of four with new sewing machines. Just credit reporting, plain old attention to detail, and administrative competence.

7. Why We Need to Treat America's Poorest Neighborhoods Like Developing Countries

The article includes maps showing life expectancy across several metropolitan areas. Here is the one for my hometown, Kansas City.

8. Racial Disparities in Life Spans Narrow, but Persist

The gap in life expectancy between black and white Americans is at its narrowest since the federal government started systematically tracking it in the 1930s, but a difference of nearly four years remains, and federal researchers have detailed why in a new report.

9. The Unsettling Link Between Sprawl and Suicide

A new scientific working paper (spotted by Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile) contends that as population density decreases, the suicide rate among young people increases. This effect becomes particularly pronounced below 300 inhabitants per square kilometer — roughly the density of San Diego County.

10. Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World's Data Generated Over Last Two Years

11. The one event that destroyed the PC industry

12. Tweets that got people arrested

13. Religion & Wikipedia: The 'Edit Wars' Rage On

Scientists have analyzed page edits in 10 editions of Wikipedia to determine the topics most often fought over by editors of the open encyclopedia. The most debated topics included many religious subjects, like Jesus and God, according to research done by Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész.

Rather than merely citing pages that changed a lot, they identified pages involved in "edit wars," that involved editors making changes that were almost instantly undone by another contributor. This proved the best method of finding controversial pages, as pages often updated could simply belong to a rapidly changing field or topic. However, pages with words and phrases constantly removed and reinserted indicated a passionate disagreement surrounding the issue at hand.

The most controversial pages across all ten editions of Wikipedia were:

• Israel
• Adolf Hitler
• The Holocaust
• God

Other controversial subjects were Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, and Christianity.

14. The curious case of the fall in crime

... Cherished social theories have been discarded. Conservatives who insisted that the decline of the traditional nuclear family and growing ethnic diversity would unleash an unstoppable crime wave have been proved wrong. Young people are increasingly likely to have been brought up by one parent and to have played a lot of computer games. Yet they are far better behaved than previous generations. Left-wingers who argued that crime could never be curbed unless inequality was reduced look just as silly.

There is no single cause of the decline; rather, several have coincided. Western societies are growing older, and most crimes are committed by young men. Policing has improved greatly in recent decades, especially in big cities such as New York and London, with forces using computers to analyse the incidence of crime; in some parts of Manhattan this helped to reduce the robbery rate by over 95%. The epidemics of crack cocaine and heroin appear to have burnt out.

The biggest factor may be simply that security measures have improved. Car immobilisers have killed joyriding; bulletproof screens, security guards and marked money have all but done for bank robbery. Alarms and DNA databases have increased the chance a burglar will be caught. At the same time, the rewards for burglary have fallen because electronic gizmos are so cheap. Even small shops now invest in CCTV cameras and security tags. Some crimes now look very risky—and that matters because, as every survey of criminals shows, the main deterrent to crime is the fear of being caught. ...

15. By 2030, Half of All Colleges Will Collapse

 

Saturday Links

1. The Myth of a Stagnant Middle Class

A favorite "progressive" trope is that America's middle class has stagnated economically since the 1970s. One version of this claim, made by Robert Reich, President Clinton's labor secretary, is typical: "After three decades of flat wages during which almost all the gains of growth have gone to the very top," he wrote in 2010, "the middle class no longer has the buying power to keep the economy going."

This trope is spectacularly wrong. ...

... Americans are also much better able to enjoy their longer lives. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, spending by households on many of modern life's "basics"—food at home, automobiles, clothing and footwear, household furnishings and equipment, and housing and utilities—fell from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.

One underappreciated result of the dramatic fall in the cost (and rise in the quality) of modern "basics" is that, while income inequality might be rising when measured in dollars, it is falling when reckoned in what's most important—our ability to consume. Before airlines were deregulated, for example, commercial jet travel was a luxury that ordinary Americans seldom enjoyed. Today, air travel for many Americans is as routine as bus travel was during the disco era, thanks to a 50% decline in the real price of airfares since 1980. ...

2. Grow, Baby, Grow! GMOs And the Future of Industry

... We can imagine a future in which GMO agriculture is producing a whole range of things we now think of as industrial products and chemicals. Over the 21st century we seem headed for dramatic, and even mind-blowing, progress in gene technology. It's not too much to think that this revolution will be as big in the future as IT is today. This will be a much more efficient way to create a complex array of substances without the kind of environmental impact that refineries have today. Solar power's future may be much less about replacing oil as a way of producing electricity than about circumventing traditional industrial processes: the fusion of the factory and the farm may be the chief technological business of the new century.

This whole process opens the door to a huge reduction in the costs, economic and environmental, of producing the materials we need for civilized life. It will further reduce the need for human employment in the extractive, refining and processing industries. It will also represent a growing challenge to countries with extraction based economies, much as the development of synthetic rubber was a challenge for rubber tree plantations in places like Malaysia and Brazil. Like all truly powerful new technologies, this one is going to cause massive social change and upheaval in all kinds of hard-to-predict ways. ...

3. Economists Have A One-Page Solution To Climate Change

... "If you let the economists write the legislation," Jacoby says, "it could be quite simple." He says he could fit the whole bill on one page.

Basically, Jacoby would tax fossil fuels in proportion to the amount of carbon they release. That would make coal, oil and natural gas more expensive. That's it; that's the whole plan. ...

4. World GDP Change, 1998 to Present

5. 24/7 Wall St has great piece on the oldest U. S. company logos. The oldest?

6. Why Machines That Can Do Human Things Won't Replace Us Anytime Soon

I believe the answer lies in a fundamental understanding (or lack thereof) of what automated technology is supposed to do for us as a society. In a nutshell, it's like this: Automated technologies are supposed to help human beings become better human beings, not help machines become better human beings.

7. 60% Of Self-Proclaimed Vegetarians Ate Meat Yesterday

A poll conducted by CNN surveyed 10,000 Americans about their eating habits, and roughly 6% of the respondents self-identified as vegetarians. The researchers then asked individuals to describe their eating habits, and 60% of the "vegetarians" reported having eaten meat within the last 24 hours.

Okay, that could've have been a fluke (or just a really, really dumb sample group). Then the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a similar study. This time, they telephoned approximately 13,000 Americans, and 3% claimed to be vegetarians. When they followed up a week later, 66% of the self-proclaimed veggie-lovers had eaten meat the day before.

8. New Online Christian Magazine Offers Funding for Entrepreneurs

New Christian entrepreneur magazine goes live online with plans to offer seed funding for new startups and small businesses.

The online format of hot new Christian entrepreneur publication G-Code Magazine has gone live featuring an exclusive interview with Christian music artist and songwriter Cornell Jermaine, and a mission to provide startup capital to at least 100 new small businesses in the next 18 months.

9. Things for United Methodist laity to unlearn — from a layperson's POV

1.  While our church leaders, Pastor, church staff, are responsible to give vision, direction and guidance, they are not charged with keeping us happy. ...

2.  The church building does not belong to us; it is an asset for ministry.....

3.  Worship on Sunday is not entertainment, and we are not the audience.   Worship is a time for us to gather, hear God's word, get filled up, and go in the power of the Spirit to change the world. ...

4.  There are a lot more of us (laity) than there are of them (clergy).  Why did we ever decide sharing the Gospel was only for the 'professionals'? ...

10. Two Paths for Charitable Giving: From the Head or From the Heart

Mr. Friedman said donors who give emotionally were like people who spend money on an expensive dinner. "It's too focused on the donor so it will naturally not be focused on the most effective causes," he said. "It's being directed by some other criteria. There is nothing wrong with that. I describe it as consumption."

Mr. Tempel said that it was fine to ask organizations to be accountable, but that it could go too far. "People who follow their head looking at return on investment — they will be most disappointed if they have unrealistic expectations on what is possible," he said. "Some things are just difficult to deal with, like solving illiteracy in a community."

11. Pew Research with an interesting piece on Americans' reading habits over time

The population of e-book readers is growing. In the past year, the number of those who read an e-book in the past year increased from 16% of all Americans ages 16 and older in December 2011 to 23% in November 2012. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who read a printed book in the previous 12 months fell from 72% of the population in 2011 to 67% in 2012.

12. Just in case you have been living under a rock, the Supreme Court made same big decisions this week. One Catholic leader, Msgr. Charles Pope, has an interesting response to the decisions on gay marriage:

Msgr. Charles Pope lamented that since 1969, when it became easier to divorce, contraception became widely available and now that the legal standing of gay marriages had been put on equal footing of those of heterosexual couples, that the word 'marriage' no longer has resonance within the Catholic faith.

It is a simple fact that word “marriage” as we have traditionally known it is being redefined in our times. To many in the secular world the word no longer means what it once did and when the Church uses the word marriage we clearly do not mean what the increasing number of states mean.

The pastor of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian then went on to suggest that the Catholic church drop the word marriage altogether and use "Holy Matrimony" in its place.

I propose that we should exclusively refer to marriage in the Church as “Holy Matrimony.” According to this proposal the word marriage would be set aside and replaced by Holy Matrimony. It should be noticed that the Catechism of the Catholic Church refers to this Sacrament formally as “The Sacrament of Matrimony.”

13. How Much Time Do Pastors Spend Preparing a Sermon? The median time spent in preparation is 13-15 hours.

14. What Happened to the Mysterious Humans of the Sahara 7,000 Years Ago?

15. DNA Buried 7,000 Centuries Is Retrieved

16. Mouse cloned from a drop of blood

Saturday Links

1. Climate change: A cooling consensus

... Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that "we cannot afford to wait". More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus. ...

2. The 40 Biggest Economies In The World

3. How the world's population has changed

4. Americans are giving less money to God

Americans donated $316 billion to charitable causes in 2012, a 3.5% increase from 2011, a new report by the Giving USA Foundation found. But while charitable donations to education increased 7% to $41 billion, religious donations dropped slightly (by 0.2%) to $101.54 billion. "Americans continue to be the most generous people in the world, despite discretionary income percentages nearing all-time lows," says Eileen Heisman, CEO of the National Philanthropic Trust. But donors are writing the checks to different recipients.

5. I'm not endorsing this analysis, but here is The Capitalist's Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.

6. Gil Press says The 'End Of Innovation' Crowd Doesn't Get IT

In one camp are economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen that tell us that we have reached "a technological plateau." We are experiencing today the waning of the economic impact of the technological revolutions of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The IT revolution, they argue, is different from earlier technological revolutions in its more limited impact on productivity growth and standards of living.

In the other camp are economists such as Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who recently told the graduating class at Bard College:"…innovation, almost by definition, involves ideas that no one has yet had, which means that forecasts of future technological change can be, and often are, wildly wrong. A safe prediction, I think, is that human innovation and creativity will continue; it is part of our very nature. Another prediction, just as safe, is that people will nevertheless continue to forecast the end of innovation."

7. How Technology Is Changing The Future Of Capitalism From Competing To Sharing

Can't get a loan from a bank to start your business? You can create a Kickstarter and raise all the money you need from the people who'd be interested in your product in the first place.

It's amazing to see the ways people are coming up with to better take advantage of the web to collaborate on and share the things that we used to have to pay for ourselves.

8. U.S. for first time in 50+ years a net gasoline exporter

9. U.S. Sustains Support For Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

Despite the political fallout from the Fukushima crisis, the U.S. Department of Energy remains committed to commercializing small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) technologies.

10. Houses that flip and fold into place

Turns out, prefab may be the most environmentally friendly way to build a house. When a house is built in a factory there's less waste -- materials can be precision measured and cut -- plus a prefab structure can be erected within a couple of weeks -- avoiding months and months of workmen driving greenhouse gas spewing trucks to the site. One speaker at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference earlier this year, Bill Haney -- founder and CEO of Blu Homes, cited another advantage of prefab housing: "No one can build a traditional house on time or on budget. Psychology Today cited a study that said it's more painful to build a house than it is to have a loved one die."

Haney has added a high-tech element to his prefab green houses. Applying technology developed at MIT, Blu Homes designs its modern structures using steel frames that fold on hinges much like a card table. Today, most prefab homes must be delivered at great expense on wide-load trucks that are too big to travel on many roads and have to be accompanied by escort cars. A Blue Home, by contrast, can be folded up to fit on an 18-wheeler, allowing the house to be shipped relatively cheaply and easily from the company's factory in Vallejo, Calif.

11. 71% Of Millennials Want Their Co-Workers To Be A 'Second Family'

12. Demographic Changes Impact Religious Institutions

13. A fascinating piece on Why Men Die Younger Than Women: The 'Guys Are Fragile' Thesis

14. Scientists discover why leprosy disappeared from Europe

The material they found was "a mixture of human DNA, microorganisms and contaminating DNA from other bones and surrounding soil," said Cole, but they were able to fully reconstruct a 600-year-old strain of leprosy and map its genome, only to find that it is essentially identical to living leprosy infecting people in the developing world today.

Cole told NPR, "If the explanation of the drop in leprosy cases isn't in the pathogen, then it must be in the host, that is, in us."

The scientists believe that a certain gene that makes people highly resistant to leprosy spread through the population of Europe, gradually conveying a kind of mass immunity.

15. World's last telegram to be sent next month

16. Top 10 People with Only One Known Photograph

17. Psychologist Analyzes Superheroes

18. Joel Willitts on "Storied Typology" – A possibly more biblical way of thinking about the relationship between the OT & NT

Admittedly, I'm just beginning to work this out, but if we think of Bible as Story and we read the earlier bits as indispensible building blocks in the narrative development toward its resolution than there's no need to denigrate the earlier in view of the later bits of the story. Each part has its place in the story bringing it to its final act, although even this analogy must be carefully delimited. Because "final" in this sense does not mean "The End, but a new stage of the story. So because of the earlier blocks of the story, later scenes and characters become "narratological necessities" (to quote my good friend Daniel Kirk). Furthermore, if there is something of an "incompleteness" to the earlier parts of the story, it is incomplete only as earlier scenes are incomplete without subsequent ones. It is correct then to see the Bible's story as progressive. In Stephen Wellum's words, "it is a word-act revelation that is progressively given" (Kingdom Through Covenant, 90). Instead of using the label "progressive revelation" it may be more useful in stressing the storied nature of the development to call it "storied revelation"- Scripture is a story that unfolds. All of this, of course assumes that God has generated His Story and that story is contained in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian canon.

Saturday Links

1. More deaths than births among whites

Last year, more people who are white and not Hispanic died than were born, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. That group is still the USA’s largest but its share of the total has been shrinking for years.

2. Human Population Growth Creeps Back Up

Earth's human population is expected to coast upward to 9.6 billion by 2050 and 10.9 billion by 2100, up from 7.2 billion people alive today, a United Nations agency has projected.

The U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs yesterday released revised numbers for the coming century, raising median estimates for population growth in 2050 and 2100. The agency's prior best guess had humanity at 9.3 billion in 2050 and 10.1 billion in 2100. ...

3. New homes still getting bigger

At 2,306 square feet, the typical new home is about 50% larger than its 1973 counterpart while the typical family is 10% smaller and the typical household 15% smaller. The Census Bureau defines a family as two or more people living in the same home who are related by birth, marriage or adoption. A household consists of anyone living in a home regardless of their relationship.

4. American Suburbia Is Shrinking For The First Time Ever

The population of rural and small-town America contracted over the past two years for the first time on record as young people left to search out work in the cities and birth rates fell, according to official data.

An analysis of US Census Bureau data by the Department of Agriculture found that although population growth in America’s rural heartland has risen and fallen for decades with changes in the US economy, the pace of decline accelerated in the years 2010-2012. And for the first time, the so-called “natural increase” in population – total births minus deaths – was insufficient to offset the loss from those migrating away.

5. Business Insider says Online Courses Have Reached A Turning Point That Should Scare Colleges but Mashable says Millennials Prefer Traditional Classrooms Over Online Ones.

6. NYT: Data Reveal a Rise in College Degrees Among Americans

7. Homeschooling Growing Seven Times Faster than Public School Enrollment

A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.

8. The Wedding Industry’s Pricey Little Secret

In 2012, when the average wedding cost was $27,427, the median was $18,086. In 2011, when the average was $27,021, the median was $16,886. In Manhattan, where the widely reported average is $76,687, the median is $55,104. And in Alaska, where the average is $15,504, the median is a mere $8,440.

 And speaking of weddings, here is an excellent piece on the economics of wedding dresses.

9. Why Men Still Are Still Scared To Take Paternity Leave

But even when offered paternity leave, studies show most men won’t take it. A 2012 study of tenured track college professors found that only 12% of fathers took paid parental leave when it was offered compared with 69% of mothers. When new dads in the study did take paternity leave, many were still involved in projects at the office.

10. Dads, Feel Your Babies Kicking With Huggies Pregnancy Belt

11. Online Petitions Combat Corruption Abroad

According to Change.org, 44% of international petitions among the 100 largest petitions on the site target government corruption. In stark contrast, none of the petitions among the 100 largest campaigns that originated in the U.S. focus on corruption.

12. Wanting Expensive Things Makes Us Happier Than Actually Buying Them

The evidence is unequivocal: Money makes you happy. You just have to know what to do with it.

So what should you do with it?

Stop buying so much stuff, renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert told me in an interview a few years ago, and try to spend more money on experiences.

13. Nuclear power seemed to be back in the news this week. New Yorker says Time to Go Nuclear, New Geography says No Solar Way Around It: Why Nuclear Is Essential to Combating Climate Change, and The Energy Collective had a great piece The Bigger Picture: Nuclear Energy vs. Fossil Fuels.

14. Nicaragua Congress approves ocean-to-ocean canal plan

15. China's Plan To Build The World's Tallest Skyscraper In 90 Days Is 'Revolutionary'

16. Singapore's Vegetable Towers

With more than 5 million people crammed into 274 square miles, commercial land values in Singapore are among the highest in the world. Therefore, the island nation needs to get creative when it comes to growing food in a limited space.

17. US breweries have exploded, from 89 in the late 1970s to more than 2,400 today, a 2,600% increase

18. The 'Star Trek' Medical Scanner Is About To Become A Reality

The small device is similar to the medical tricorder scanners featured in Star Trek, and is used by simply placing it against your forehead. 

A few seconds later you can see your blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, respiratory rate, and body temperature.

The Scout then records and stores the information on your smartphone, allowing you to track your vitals or share them with a doctor.

19. The Economy Is Not 'Only Creating Bad Jobs'

While not strong, the pace has not been any weaker than the pace for wages in the fixed-weighted employment cost index—the ECI. That pattern disproves the widespread impression that mainly “bad” below-average-wage jobs are being created. Average hourly earnings would be declining relative to wages in the ECI if job growth were disproportionately weighted toward below-average-wage jobs.

20. A Christian Walmart for the poor? Willow Creek's new care center

Consider the Chicago-area Willow Creek Community Church, one of the bigger "brands" in the non-denom world, which just built a new "care center" where those in need can come and "shop" for food, children's clothing, even eyeglasses. It's 60,000 square feet are laid out, according to the Chicago Tribune, "less like a thrift shop or food pantry, and more like an upscale mall, complete with cheery colors, welcoming seating areas and designer lighting," according to the Chicago Tribune. Clients pay something if they are able--$5 to visit the children's "boutique," for example, or a $20 copay for an eye exam.

Consider the Chicago-area Willow Creek Community Church, one of the bigger "brands" in the non-denom world, which just built a new "care center" where those in need can come and "shop" for food, children's clothing, even eyeglasses. It's 60,000 square feet are laid out, according to the Chicago Tribune, "less like a thrift shop or food pantry, and more like an upscale mall, complete with cheery colors, welcoming seating areas and designer lighting," according to the Chicago Tribune. Clients pay something if they are able--$5 to visit the children's "boutique," for example, or a $20 copay for an eye exam. - See more at: http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/201306/christian-walmart-poor-willow-creeks-new-care-center-27430#sthash.OhuyPOdG.dpuf

A Christian Walmart for the poor? Willow Creek's new care center - See more at: http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/201306/christian-walmart-poor-willow-creeks-new-care-center-27430#sthash.OhuyPOdG.dpuf

The Economy Is Not 'Only Creating Bad Jobs'

The Economy Is Not 'Only Creating Bad Jobs'

When America Stops Importing Energy

New York Times: When America Stops Importing Energy

... The numbers tell the story: U.S. oil production has reversed its 30-plus year decline; U.S. imports from OPEC producers have fallen more than 20 percent in the past three years; U.S. natural gas reserves and production are up significantly and prices have dropped 75 percent in the past five years. The International Energy Agency forecasts that the United States could become the world’s largest oil producer by 2020 and may be energy self-sufficient by 2035. That’s a game changer.

While this is not a free lunch, it should not be feared. The production process is complicated and expensive, and if the industry is not careful there can be risks to the environment. But the potential is staggering. Significant domestic job growth and economic expansion has begun.

But let’s look beyond the impact on the United States and consider a few of the more profound implications for the rest of the world, because this revolution is also a game changer for international politics and the global economy. ...

... Like all revolutions, America’s new energy bonanza raises some fascinating questions. How might a lighter U.S. presence and heavier Chinese involvement change the world’s most volatile neighborhood? What can the next generation of Saudi leaders expect for their country’s future in a world where OPEC has lost much of its market power? Will Qatar’s support for Muslim Brotherhood governments in other Arab states and China’s interest in using the United Arab Emirates as an offshore trading center for its currency leave the Saudis dangerously isolated? Can Iran’s revolution survive the need to build a more modern economy?

A world in which the United States is less involved in answering these questions is a new world indeed.

Saturday Links

Some weeks the pickin's are thin. Not this week.

1. Asians are now the largest immigrant group in Southern California: New Suburban Dream Born of Asia and Southern California

2. Surge in unwed mothers: Deep in the stats, it's not what you think

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, 42 percent of children will have lived with cohabitating parents by the time they are 12 years old, almost twice as many who will have divorced parents. And this particular sort of family structure is on the rise, a number of studies show.

3. In a sharp trend reversal, highway fatalities rise

"The news, while disheartening, is not surprising," said Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association. "With the improving economy and historically low levels of motor vehicle deaths in recent years, we expected deaths to increase. Highway deaths have been declining significantly in recent years."

4. We live in a house that is 105 years old. IMO, most houses built after 1940 are boring. How Americans' Taste in Houses Has Evolved Over the Last Century

5. Are we purging the poorest?

In a new book, MIT urbanist Lawrence Vale examines the downsizing of public housing.

6. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have been popping up everywhere promoting their new book, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. Here is a PBS interview:

Watch Google's Schmidt, Cohen Describe a 'New Digital Age' on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

7. Love this story: Alleviating Poverty with a Washing Machine Powered by Your Feet

The GiraDora uses the principles of a salad spinner to make cleaning clothes less back-breaking and time-consuming work for millions of people in poverty.

8. Amen to this article. Good charities spend more on admin but it is not money wasted

The popular idea that charities fritter money on unnecessary admin has been proven wrong. You must spend to be effective.

9. Why US firms are turning to Mexico, leaving China behind

 ... Mexico has more international trade deals than any other country, and exports as many goods as the rest of Latin America combined.

There has always been an electronics manufacturing hub in Tijuana, but Chinese competition damaged its business a decade ago.

Now rising wage costs in Asia and a higher exchange rate are prompting many companies targeting the US market to take another look at Mexico. ...

...The new Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto wants to put a new spin on the country with the image of a booming economy and as a good place to do business.

Security and the drugs problem still dominate talks between the US and Mexico, but its southern neighbour's increasing importance in the global economy is changing the relationship. ...

10. The Manufacturing Cost Components For A Bunch Of Different Things

11. Five Innovative Technologies that Bring Energy to the Developing World

12. No-Wash Shirt Doesn't Stink After 100 Days

13. Craig Stanford, 'Planet Without Apes' Author, Says Eco-Tourism Could Save The Primates

A slice of the money that tourists pay can run $500 an hour at some of the sites in East Africa and goes to build hospitals and hire teachers." Although it's not philosophically or altruistically driven, the bottom line is the animals are more valuable alive than dead, since there's an incentive to protect them.

14. Approaching Nutrition From An Investor's Mindset

How does one succeed in nutrition when nobody seems to agree on anything? How can one get the benefits that arrive in the early stages of a diet without staying too long and compromising their health? What has worked well for me is thinking about nutrition like an investor thinks about investment opportunities.

15. The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard.

The QWERTY configuration for typewriters can be traced, actually, to the telegraph.

16. Money Buys Happiness and You Can Never Have Too Much, New Research Says

Here again we have to revisit the differences between happiness, joy, meaning, and satisfaction.

17. Baseball as a Road to God

Watch Baseball and Religion on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

18. Why Older Minds Make Better Decisions

Recent research has already challenged what we thought we knew about the capability of the brain. What has become clear, says Dr. Gregory Samanez-Larkin of Vanderbilt University, one of the network's co-directors, is that despite a decline in some types of cognitive function, "older people often make better decisions than younger people."

19. Moon Landing Faked!!!—Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories

New psychological research helps explain why some see intricate government conspiracies behind events like 9/11 or the Boston bombing.

20. Scot McKnight answers the question So What's an Anabaptist?

21. Beneath the stereotypes, a stressful life for preachers' kids

22. When and Where Is It Okay to Cry?

23. 10 Reasons Why Humor Is A Key To Success At Work

24. Scientists May Be On Brink Of Major Discovery In Hunt For HIV Cure

Danish scientists are expecting results that will show that "finding a mass-distributable and affordable cure to HIV is possible."

They are conducting clinical trials to test a "novel strategy" in which the HIV virus is stripped from human DNA and destroyed permanently by the immune system.

Saturday Links

1. Research Digest reports that Students motivated by wealth are just as likely as others to help in an emergency

"... Seventy-eight per cent of the business students offered some kind of help to the stranger. Sixty-six per cent went so far as refusing to leave the stranger or giving him/her their mobile phone. The degree to which the students reported being wealth-driven was not associated with their levels of helping. Neither was their self-reported willingness to accept an illegal stock trading tip off. Being in a hurry also made no difference, neither did the content of the speech they were about to give. A factor that was linked with helping behaviour was "intrinsic religiosity" - that is, pursuing religion as an end in itself, not for the sake of status or other gain. ..."

2. American progressives are fond of pointing to the Scandinavian economic model as a model for the United States. As I've noted in other posts, Sweden has been moving steadily away from the model progressives champion for years. (for example, see Free Market Sweden, Social Democratic America and Are free markets the secret to Sweden's success? Now the New York Times reports that Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault.

... Already the government has reduced various early-retirement plans. The unemployed used to be able to collect benefits for up to four years. Now it is two.

Students are next up for cutbacks, most intended to get them in the work force faster. Currently, students are entitled to six years of stipends, about $990 a month, to complete a five-year degree which, of course, is free. Many of them take even longer to finish, taking breaks to travel and for internships before and during their studies....

... It is proposing cuts to welfare grants for those under 30 and stricter reviews to make sure that such recipients are steered into jobs or educational programs before they get comfortable on government benefits.

Officials have also begun to question the large number of people who are receiving lifetime disability checks. About 240,000 people — roughly 9 percent of the potential work force — have lifetime disability status; about 33,500 of them are under 40. The government has proposed ending that status for those under 40, unless they have a mental or physical condition that is so severe that it keeps them from working. ...

3. Business Insider has a slide presentation of graphs highlighting 12 Popular Myths About The US Economy. Here is one about the degree of the U.S. offshoring work to low wage countries.

4. Yuval Levin makes an excellent point about how conservatives frequently respond poorly with arguments against dependency when progressives talk about "community."

... We [conservatives] reach for the idea of dependency because of the kind of arguments we often respond to from the left—arguments that seem like calls for common action instead of individual action. But we should look more carefully at those arguments. The problem with the "you didn't build that" mindset, as becomes particularly clear if you read what the president said before and after that line, is not just that it denies the significance of individual initiative (though that's an important part of the problem, and our culture of individual initiative, which is far from radical individualism, is a huge social achievement in America) but also that it denies the significance of any common efforts that are not political. The president took the pose of a critic of individualism, but in fact the position he described involves perhaps the most radical individualism of all, in which nothing but individuals and the state exists in society. ...

 ... The utopian goal of the most radical forms of liberalism has always been the complete liberation of the individual from all unchosen "relational" obligations—obligations to the people around you that are a function of the family and community in which you live. Resentment against such obligations was a central and powerful motive in the radical late-18th century thought that gave us some (though not all) forms of modern libertarianism and the modern Left, and the defense of such obligations was central to the counter-arguments that yielded modern conservatism. ...

5. Pew Research has a report on the Public's Knowledge of Science and Technology. You can take the test here. (I got a gold star, though I confess I had two lucky guesses.) And on a related note, 4th-Grade Science Test' Goes Viral: Creationism Quiz Claims Dinosaurs Lived With People. Oye!

6. Tyler Cowen looks at two reports on Why did Cuba become healthier during the economic meltdown of the 1990s? From one report:

This "abrupt downward trend" in illness does not appear to be because of Cuba's barefoot doctors and vaunted public health system, which is rated amongst the best in Latin America. The researchers say that it has more to do with simple weight loss. Cubans, who were walking and bicycling more after their public transportation system collapsed, and eating less (energy intake plunged from about 3,000 calories per day to anywhere between 1,400 and 2,400, and protein consumption dropped by 40 percent). They lost an average of 12 pounds.

It wasn't only the amount of food that Cubans ate that changed, but also what they ate. They became virtual vegans overnight, as meat and dairy products all but vanished from the marketplace.

And this report:

During the special period, expensive habits like smoking and most likely also alcohol consumption were reduced, albeit briefly. This enforced fitness regime lasted only until the Cuban economy began to recover in the second half of the 1990s. At that point, physical activity levels began to fall off, and calorie intake surged. Eventually people in Cuba were eating even more than they had before the crash. The researchers report that "by 2011, the Cuban population has regained enough weight to almost triple the obesity rates of 1995."

 7. The Coming Demographic Crisis: What to Expect When No One Is Expecting

... A strain of anti-humanism has always run through population paranoia, a notion that human beings are a problem rather than a resource. But as Jonathan Last documents in his new book What to Expect When No One's Expecting, it is not overpopulation that threatens the well-being of the human race, it is under-population. As Last writes, "Throughout recorded human history, declining populations have always been followed by Very Bad Things." Particularly for our modern, high-tech, capitalist world of consumers who buy, entrepreneurs who create wealth and jobs, and workers whose taxes fund social welfare entitlements, people are an even more critical resource. ...

8. 21 Maps Of Highly Segregated Cities In America. I remember doing a less sophisticated version of dissimilarity analysis for Kansas City back in 1988 without the benefit of a computer. Here is the map for Detroit, the most segregated city in America:

9. Christianity Today asks Who Volunteers the Most? Answer? "Graduates of Protestant high schools, apparently."

10. In 2012, America had the most energy efficient economy in US history

11. Climate change inspires a new literary genre: cli-fi. "Cli-fi, or 'climate fiction,' describes a dystopian present instead of a dystopian future. And don't call it 'science fiction.' Cli-fi is literary fiction."

12. Organic Prices: Food Label Just An Excuse To Charge More, Majority Of Consumers Say In New Poll

13. Business Insider with Ten Technologies That Will Shape the Future

14. Atlantic Cities has a great piece on the future of the payphone: The Payphone of the Future Is Calling

15. Business Insider also had a couple of very interesting retro articles: The First Email, The First Tweet, And 13 Other Famous Internet Firsts and These Huge Brands' Early Websites From The 1990s Looked Terrible.

16. Stonehenge archaeologists reveal new theory of why monument was built. "Stonehenge may have been built on a site occupied by hunters for roughly 5,000 before its construction."

17. Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine

The technologies powering cars of the future are about to change

Economist: Tomorrow's ride

(Click on the link to see the one minute long video.)

US CO2 emissions per capita in 2012 were the lowest since 1964

Carpe Diem: US CO2 emissions per capita in 2012 were the lowest since 1964

"... Last year, CO2 emissions in the US fell to an 18-year low, the lowest level since 1994, and C02 emissions from coal fell to a 26-year low, the lowest since 1986. Further, as the WSJ reported this week (“Rise in U.S. Gas Production Fuels Unexpected Plunge in Emissions“) the US now leads the world in reducing CO2 emissions thanks to the shale revolution. At the same time that America is using less coal and more shale gas and reducing C02 emissions, Europe and Asia are becoming more coal-dependent for electricity generation, and increasing C02 emissions.

Compared to the last time that CO2 emissions were at 2012′s levels — back in 1994 — real GDP in 2012 was 55% higher and the US population was 17.5% larger, making the drop in greenhouse gas emissions to an 18-year low in 2012 even more impressive. Adjusted for the population, CO2 emissions per capita last year were the lowest since 1964, almost 50 years ago (see chart above, data here and here). According to Department of Energy forecasts, the decline in per capita CO2 emissions is expected to continue so consistently that within about 20 years, greenhouse gas emissions per person in the US will be below the level in 1949! ..."

Saturday Links

1. What a horrific week for Boston and west Texas people. Our prayers are with the many people who have been so deeply traumatized and injured in these events. Regarding how we respond to such events in public discourse, I thought this article from Slate was especially good. Be Meaningful or Be Quiet

"... We need more restraint and less wild guessing. Free-flowing debate in the search for meaning is a part of these moments and a part of the human condition, but what I'm talking about is using tragedy for evidence shopping. That people reach immediately for their pet political theory at moments like this highlights what's wrong with a lot of political debate. But perhaps this moment also offers a useful sorting technique. If you can't shut up now, when either reason, decency, or good taste requires it, you disqualify yourself from the conversation in calmer times. ...

... Political debate about facts is fine. When the White House puts out a picture of the president in the situation room, it's fine to point out that it's propaganda they never put out on Benghazi. But a person who uses tragedy as new evidence in an existing political fight is probably incapable of keeping this window open. They can't pause to honor the solemnity of a moment of tragedy or wait until the facts come in, which means that the facts never really mattered much to them at all. These partisans are ever on alert to advance their relentless claim—whatever it is. Michael Moore immediately fingered Tea Party types after the bombing. In the hours after attack, when authorities questioned a man of Saudi dissent (who was later released), Rep. Steve King tied it to the comprehensive immigration reform he opposes. Nate Bell, an Arkansas state lawmaker, tweeted, "I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine? #2A" There was lots of this from partisans on both sides on Twitter. ..."

2. Are We Losing the Young? Evangelicals by Age Since 1972

3. David Murrow asks Are sermons becoming obsolete?

... So, what does this mean for the church? Is the lecture style sermon going the way of the dinosaur?

Yes and no. There will always be live sermons. But will anyone be listening?

Just as universities are re-thinking the lecture, it might be time for churches to re-think the sermon. Thom and Joani Schultz polled churchgoers and found that just 12 percent could recall the topic of the last sermon they heard. Only five percent of men credited sermons as their primary source of knowledge about God.

So if sermons are becoming obsolete, what will take their place?

Discipleship. Our generation may be drowning in ideas, but we're starving for real human contact.

The problem is, our churches are structured to deliver sermons and music. If there's any energy left, we disciple people. ...

4. First, there was this article about Self-Employment An Escape From Long-Term Joblessness For Some Older Workers. It may work for some who are out of jobs, but Hiranya Fernando warns Why You Shouldn't Quit Your Day Job To Pursue Your Dream. 

To be sure these are inspiring stories. They make us hope and dream. And I support anyone who is dissatisfied with desk jobs and corporate gigs and is now thinking of other options. But my advice is to take the time to understand your specific situation before you do anything purely because "it feels right" or because "it's a childhood dream."

And don't do it because everyone else is. Don't do it because the neighbor's second cousin and Aunt Maggie's daughter are doing it, and it sounds so easy. Even people who are relatively happy in their jobs think something is wrong with them because everywhere they go they are bombarded with "How I quit my day job and started a million-dollar leaf-raking business."

5. Walter Russell Mead Warns There's No Comeback for the PhD

Drezner says that there are really only two reasons why you might get a Ph.D. One, you're crazy; or two, you're crazy about the subject you will be studying. But even the latter is becoming a kind of luxury for those lucky few who can afford to spend several years on a degree without any guarantee of future employment. All others should heed Drezner's advice before surrendering the money, years, blood, and tears it takes to earn the right to be called "Doctor."

6. I suspect the J C Penny fiasco is going to become an important case study for business schools: Sometimes, We Want Prices to Fool Us

7. Max Baucus warns about Obamacare: Obamacare Architect Warns "Huge Train-Wreck" Ahead

8. Eric Wemple quotes Mark Lamont Hill in Gosnell case: HuffPost host says left 'made a decision' to not cover trial

"For what it's worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it'll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there's a direct connection between the media's failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it's a bad idea, I think it's dangerous, but I think that's the way it is."

9. Mother Jones has a great piece on the social psychology of our political leanings: How Science Can Predict Where You Stand on Keystone XL

10. Atlantic Cities says The More Diverse a Metro Is, the More Segregated It's Likely to Be

11. Christian Science Monitor: Babies are conscious? Science confirms what moms know.

Babies are aware of what's going on, not just reflexively reacting to it, scientists concluded after a series of experiments on babies as young as 5 months.

12. Are e-readers hurting our reading comprehension?

13. The future of the car: Clean, safe and it drives itself. See the Economist video about driverless cars.

Yet many people already travel, unwittingly, on planes and trains that no longer need human drivers. As with those technologies, the shift towards driverless cars is taking place gradually. The cars' software will learn the tricks that humans use to avoid hazards: for example, braking when a ball bounces into the road, because a child may be chasing it. Google's self-driving cars have already clocked up over 700,000km, more than many humans ever drive; and everything they learn will become available to every other car using the software. As for the liability issue, the law should be changed to make sure that when cases arise, the courts take into account the overall safety benefits of self-driving technology.

14. University of Illinois: Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries a boost for electronics

 With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies – imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available.

"Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery – until now," King said. "Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick, and it's connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now the battery is also tiny."

Now, the researchers are working on integrating their batteries with other electronics components, as well as manufacturability at low cost.

15. What was old is new again: The Beat Goes On: How Vinyl Records Are Making A Comeback

"Vinyl manufacturing plants are bursting at the seams," said Kurtz. "We took a nascent industry – vinyl – breathed life into it and now we can't even handle the amount of business we are creating."

Cleaning Coal May be Possible

Energy Biz: Cleaning Coal May be Possible

"... Eliminating 99 percent of the pollution from coal, the Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL) technique will have a significant impact on the rate of global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency has found that in 2010, coal-burning power plants were responsible for about one-third of the country's carbon dioxide, equivalent to 2.3 billion metric tons. If energy can be obtained from coal without burning it, this number should drop considerably.

Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of Ohio State's Clean Coal Research Laboratory, explains the process, "We found a way to release the heat without burning. We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the coal never burns--it is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor." The metal from the iron-oxide is recyclable and the only waste products are coal ash and water. If everything goes according to plan, Fan is confident that his discovery can be used to power energy plants within the next 10 years. ..."

Fuel from carbon dioxide: Is it too good to be true?

Christian Science Monitor: Fuel from carbon dioxide: Is it too good to be true?

Researchers have found a way of using microorganisms to turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into energy, Ingram writes, essentially replicating the processes found in plant life. Fuel from carbon dioxide has promise, he adds, but isn't yet developed into something that can work on a large scale.

... Biomass Magazine reports the researchers have found a way of using microorganisms to turn atmospheric CO2 into energy--essentially replicating the processes found in plant life. 

During photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugars that the plants use for energy.

The same process takes place in a microorganism called Pyrococcus furiosus--the poetically-named "rushing fireball". Its name stems from its preferred home--next to super-heated geothermal vents in the oceans.

By manipulating the rushing fireball's genetic material, the Georgia team has created an organism that is able to feed at much lower temperatures, on carbon dioxide.

"We can take carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the inefficient process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass," explains the University of Georgia's Michael Adams. ...

Saturday Links

1. The Economist has an interesting graph showing that capitalism has led to greater happiness in member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union countries excluding the three baltic countries.)

2. AEI has an informative piece on economic mobility in the United States: How's the American Dream doing? Well, which one?

There are two ways to define economic mobility: 1) absolute mobility, whether each generation is financially better off than the one before; and 2) relative mobility, whether you can change your income rank  vs. your parents. Most Americans probably think both measures important. We want to be more prosperous than mom and dad, but also be able to change our circumstances and make our dreams come true. ...

... A San Francisco Fed study – using data tracking families since 1968 — looks at both versions of the American Dream, finding one healthier than the other. Looking at absolute mobility, researchers Leila Bengali and Mary Daly find the United States "highly mobile." Over the sample period, 67% of US adults had higher family incomes than their parents, including 83% of those in the lowest birth quintile, or bottom 20% (versus 54% for children born into the top quintile, or top 20%.) ...

3. Concerning gender income inequality, Mark Perry says 'Studies' that compare average wages by gender, without controlling for demographic factors, can't be taken seriously

4. Clive Crook thinks an ownership society may be the answer to reducing wealth inequality: Liberals Should Embrace the Ownership Society

... It's true that conservatives' standard proposals for privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare would shift risk onto beneficiaries -- but this plainly isn't a necessary consequence of the basic principle. I agree with Konczal that adequate insurance against economic risk, underwritten by the government, is essential. I also agree that most conservatives aren't interested in providing that guarantee. That's exactly why liberals ought to take up the ownership society themselves.

Ownership entails risk, it's true, but insurance can minimize it. Ownership also provides control, independence and self-respect -- things it wouldn't hurt liberals to be more interested in. And when it comes to inequality and stagnating middle incomes, ownership can give wage slaves a stake in the nation's economic capital.

Done right, an equity component in government-backed saving for retirement could be the best idea liberals have had since the earned-income tax credit (oh, sorry, that started out as a conservative idea as well). ...

5. Scientific American: Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science

6. Scientific American also has an interesting piece on how Brain Researchers Can Detect Who We Are Thinking About

FMRI scans of volunteers' media prefrontal cortexes revealed unique brain activity patterns associated with individual characters or personalities as subjects thought about them.

7. Gizmodo reports that Sex in Space Could Be Deadly.

Researchers already knew humans, animals and plants have evolved in response to Earth's gravity and they are able to sense it. What we are still discovering is how the processes occurring within the cells of the human and plant bodies are affected by the more intense gravity, or hypergravity, that would be found on a large planet, or the microgravity that resembles the conditions on a space craft.

8. Walgreens Building First Self-Powered Store

According to estimations, engineers expect the the store to generate around 265,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. Store operation will only require 200,000 kWh, so perhaps that extra wattage could be pumped back into the grid or used to power nearby utilities.

9. CNN reports on How online ruined dating ... forever

When people can browse potential dates online like items in a catalog, geo-locate hook-ups on an exercise bike just seven feet away, arrange a spontaneous group date with the app Grouper or arrange a bevy of blind dates in succession with Crazy Blind Date, it makes me wonder if all this newfound technological convenience has, in fact, made romance that much more elusive. Now, we may be more concerned with what someone isn't rather than what they are. And as that twenty-something entrepreneur reminded me over coffee, services like OkCupid, and even Facebook, sap a lot of the mystique out of those first few dates. So, sure, it may be easier than ever to score a date, but what kind of date will it really be?

10. Interesting piece on Why Do People Use Nope Even Though No Is Shorter?

11. Is the New Pope More Liberal Than the Last Two? Why It's Hard to Tell. Emily Chertoff offers some insightful analysis.

12. Michael Bird offers this quote from Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's "The Drama of Scripture" in his post The Importance of the Narrative of Scripture.

Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits – theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented way, we ignore it's divine author's intention to shape our lives through its story. All humanity communities live out some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. Idolatry has twisted the dominant cultural story of the secular Western world. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture. Hence the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshippers! (p. 12).

13. Scot McKnight has a great piece on what constitutes legalism: Legalism: Old and New Perspectives

14. Thom S. Rainer on Ten Things Pastors Wish They Knew Before They Became Pastors

1. I wish someone had taught me basic leadership skills. "I was well grounded in theology and Bible exegesis, but seminary did not prepare me for the real world of real people. It would have been great to have someone walk alongside me before my first church."
2. I needed to know a lot more about personal financial issues. "No one ever told me about minister's housing, social security, automobile reimbursement, and the difference between a package and a salary. I got burned in my first church."
3. I wish I had been given advice on how to deal with power groups and power people in the church. "I got it all wrong in my first two churches. I was fired outright from the first one and pressured out in the second one. Someone finally and courageously pointed out how I was messing things up almost from the moment I began in a new church. I am so thankful that I am in the ninth year of a happy pastorate in my third church."...

Read the whole thing.

15. Joseph Sunde rates the 5 TV Shows That Demonstrate the Importance of Ordinary Work

Saturday Links

1. The United States had its financial bubble. Europe is having one too. Is China next? If it is, it could reshape the global economy and radically reshape the Chinese government. Here is an interesting piece about China's real estate bubble.

2. Robert Tracinski thinks we are in the midst of a Third Industrial Revolution.

... I like the idea of a breaking the Industrial Revolution into stages, but I would define them in more fundamental terms. The first Industrial Revolution was the harnessing of large-scale man-made power, which began with the steam engine. The internal combustion engine, electric power, and other sources of energy are just further refinements of this basic idea. The second Industrial Revolution would be the development of interchangeable parts and the assembly line, which made possible inexpensive mass production with relatively unskilled labor. The Third Industrial Revolution would not be computers, the Internet, or mobile phones, because up to now these have not been industrial tools; they have been used for moving information, not for making things. Instead, the rise of computers and the Internet is just a warm-up for the real Third Industrial Revolution, which is the full integration of information technology with industrial production.

The effect of the Third Industrial Revolution will be to collapse the distance between the design of a product and its physical manufacture, in much the same way that the Internet has eliminated the distance between the origination of a new idea and its communication to an audience. ...

3. Tyler Cowen has some thoughts about the impact of our technological revolution as well Are we living in the early 19th century?

... Eventually all of the creative ferment of the industrial revolution pays off in a big "whoosh," but it takes many decades, depending on where you draw the starting line of course.  A look at the early 19th century is sobering, or should be, for anyone doing fiscal budgeting today.  But it is also optimistic in terms of the larger picture facing humanity over the longer run.

4. You may have seen a deeply flawed viral video about wealth inequality this past week. I am working on my own response, but economist Mark Perry's response is here.  In response to the viral 'Wealth Inequality in America' video

5. What are the contours of income inequality in the United States? This 40-minute video by Emmanuel Saez offers some important insights.

6. Futurist Ray Kurzweil is a little too sensationalist for my taste, but this vid offers interesting food for thought about nanotechnology and the future of sports. Will we even be able to have meaningful sports competitions?

7. Atlantic takes up a frequently perpetuated myth. 'Women Own 1% of World Property': A Feminist Myth That Won't Die

8. First, there was I, Pencil. Then I Smartphone. Now "I Coke." What Coke Contains

9. U.S. household wealth regains pre-recession peak but ...

The recovered wealth - most of it from higher stock prices - has been flowing mainly to richer Americans. By contrast, middle class wealth is mostly in the form of home equity, which has risen much less.

10. When looking at decisions in your own context, Seth Godin explains why Macro trends don't matter so much

11. It's a big, fat myth that all scientists are religion-hating atheists.

Whether or not you think science is wonderful, the stereotype of all scientists being atheists is unrealistic. There is, however, a special dance.

12. I consider this good news. Old Earth, Young Minds: Evangelical Homeschoolers Embrace Evolution

More Christian parents are asking for mainstream science in their children's curricula.

13. Remember to keep Syria and Egypt in your prayers. Nearly 1 in 20 Syrians are now refugees

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/03/07/4106038/us-household-wealth-regains-pre.html#storylink=cpy

Saturday Links

1. Christian History magazine has an entire issue devoted to Christians in the New Industrial Economy: The World Changed, the Church Responded. It is a priceless collection of essays on how various religious traditions responded to (or failed to) the challenges of the Industrial Revolution.

Issue 104 examines the impact of automation on Europe and America and the varying responses of the church to the problems that developed. Topics examined are mission work, the rise of the Social Gospel, the impact of papal pronouncements, the Methodist phenomenon, Christian capitalists, attempts at communal living and much more.

2. Orange County Register says Don't count out mainline Protestants yet.

As flocks shrink, denominations that once defined America fight to stay relevant with new ways of reaching out.

3. The Washington Post reports that Megachurches thriving in tough economic times.

"Despite the tough economy, many of the nation’s largest churches are thriving, with increased offerings and plans to hire more staff, a new survey shows.

Just 3 percent of churches with 2,000 or more attendance surveyed by Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church think tank, said they were affected “very negatively” by the economy in recent years. Close to half — 47 percent — said they were affected “somewhat negatively,” but one-third said they were not affected at all. ..."

4. Harvard Business Review: Steve Blank on Why Big Companies Can't Innovate

... It's not surprising that younger entrepreneurial firms are considered more innovative. After all, they are born from a new idea, and survive by finding creative ways to make that idea commercially viable. Larger, well-rooted companies however have just as much motivation to be innovative — and, as Scott Anthony has argued, they have even more resources to invest in new ventures. So why doesn't innovation thrive in mature organizations? ...

... First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. In contrast, the main job of a start-up is to search for a workable business model, to find the right match between customer needs and what the company can profitably offer. In other words in a start-up, innovation is not just about implementing a creative idea, but rather the search for a way to turn some aspect of that idea into something that customers are willing to pay for. ...

... discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed ...

... Finally, Blank notes that the people who are best suited to search for new business models and conduct iterative experiments usually are not the same managers who succeed at running existing business units. ...

5. A fascinating, if sobering, look at the conflict over islands off the coast of East Asia. Trouble at sea

6. The rise of post-industrial China? (Economist)

7. New Geography thinks U.S. LATE TO THE PARTY ON LATIN AMERICA, AFRICA.

"President Barack Obama's proposed tilt of U.S. priorities toward the Pacific – and away from the historical link to Europe – represents one of the most encouraging aspects of his foreign policy. Although welcome, we should recognize that this shift comes about three decades too late and that it may miss the rising geopolitical centrality of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The emergence of these longtime historically impoverished backwaters has been largely missed as American policy-makers and businesses are now obsessed with the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, India. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over the past decade has produced six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. Through 2011-15, according to the International Monetary Fund, seven of the fastest-growing countries will be African, and Africa as a whole will surpass the slowing growth rates in Asia, particularly China.

This growth has caused the region's poverty rates, still unacceptably high, to fall from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today. Further growth will likely push poverty levels down further."

8. New Geography also asks, Is the Family Finished? Some interesting thoughts about the impact of declining birthrates in the U.S.

9. A Portrait of U.S. Immigrants

Pew Research Center has compiled key findings from a new analysis of the nation’s foreign-born population, based on U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey.

10. Marketing Daily says More Latinos See Themselves As Bicultural

With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a Latino market perceived to be homogenous?

11. Committee on Economic Development has an interesting piece looking at both the ideological and economic aspects underlying the debate about the minimum wage. Raising the Minimum Wage: “Which Side Are You On?”

"It is an easy call if you are either (a) a strict libertarian or (b) an enthusiastic advocate of the less fortunate with limited concern about the scarcity of resources.  (If you belong to both of those groups, there is little advice that I can offer.)  However, in between those poles of opinion, things become rather murky, rather quickly."

12. Being a Republican or a Democrat may all be in your head: Republican Brains Differ From Democrats' In New FMRI Study

... Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.

Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with "theory of mind," or the ability to understand what others might be thinking. ...

... The functional differences did mesh well with political beliefs, however. The researchers were able to predict a person's political party by looking at their brain function 82.9 percent of the time. In comparison, knowing the structure of these regions predicts party correctly 71 percent of the time, and knowing someone's parents' political affiliation can tell you theirs 69.5 percent of the time, the researchers wrote. ...

13. Health Care Without the Doctors Coming to a Walmart Near You

STERLING, Va. - Perched by a computer monitor wedged between shelves of cough drops and the pharmacy in a bustling Walmart, Mohamed Khader taps out answers to questions such as how often he eats vegetables, whether anyone in his family has diabetes and his age.

He tests his eyesight, weighs himself and checks his blood pressure as a middle-aged couple watches at the blue-and-white SoloHealth station advertising "free health screenings." ...

... As Americans gain coverage under the federal health law, putting increased demand on primary care doctors and spurring interest in cheaper, more convenient care, unmanned kiosks like these may be part of what their manufacturer bills as a "self-service healthcare revolution." ...

14. Is this a case of marketing going too far? Young Japanese Women Rent Out Their Bare Legs as Advertising Space

15. Nanotechnology Rebuilds the Periodic Table

Recent developments in the field of nanotechnology might give new meaning to the phrase “nothing gold can stay.” Atoms and bonds developed not by Mother Nature, but by scientists, are gaining momentum as the building blocks for cutting-edge materials.

Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” Chad Mirkin, the director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for Nanotechnology, is constructing his very own periodic table. So far Mirkin has built more than 200 distinct crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. ...

16. ExtremeTech says NASA’s cold fusion tech could put a nuclear reactor in every home, car, and plane.

17. Atlantic Cities has some great maps showing the impact of railroads on travel time in the early 19th Century, thus shrinking the nation. A Mapped History of Train Travel in the United States

18. A soccer goalie's worst nightmare.

19. You might want to think twice before a game of horse with this cheerleader.

Saturday Links

1. I love maps and charts. Naturally, I was drawn to this: 36 Maps That Explain The Entire World. Here is just one example:

2. Roger Pielke, Jr., says It's Time to Bury the Easterlin Paradox.

"The Easterlin paradox suggest that in terms of human happiness -- a squishy concept to be sure -- there is a limit to economic growth beyond which there really is just no point in attaining more wealth. Further, a decoupling between income and happiness at some threshold would imply that GDP would not be a good measure of welfare, we would need some other metric.

A recent paper (PDF) by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argues that the Easterlin paradox is also wrong. ..."

3. John Danforth thinks We Need Less Religion in our Politics and Less Politics in our Religion.

4. I opined about this in yesterday's post, but I'm linking it again. One of the better Salon pieces I've read. When liberals ignore injustice

"Why isn't there more outrage about the president's unilateral targeted assassination program on the left?"

5. Arnold Kling with an interesting piece on the role of Jews in the rise of the modern urbanized economic order. The Unintended Consequences of God

"In those days, most people were farmers, for whom literacy’s costs generally outweighed its benefits. However, in an urbanized society with skilled occupations, literacy pays off. As urbanization gradually increased in the late Middle Ages, Jews came to fill high-skilled occupations. Botticini and Eckstein argue that literacy, rather than persecution, is what led Jews into these occupations."

6. New Geography wants to know Is Urbanism The New Trickle-Down Economics?

"But while progressives would clearly mock this policy [trickle-down economics], modern day urbanism often resembles nothing so much as trickle-down economics, though this time mostly advocated by those who would self-identify as being from the left. The idea is that through investments catering to the fickle and mobile educated elite and the high end businesses that employ and entertain them, cities can be rejuvenated in a way that somehow magically benefits everybody and is socially fair."

7. NPR has a nice piece on mini-reactors. Are Mini-Reactors The Future Of Nuclear Power?

8. Mark Perry excerpts a quote from green libertarian John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market.

“Capitalism is the greatest creation humanity has done for social cooperation. It has lifted humanity out of the dirt. In statistics we discovered when we were researching the book, about 200 years ago when capitalism was created, 85% of the people alive lived on $1 a day. Today, that number is 16%. Still too high, but capitalism is wiping out poverty across the world. 200 years ago illiteracy rates were 90%. Today, they are down to about 14%. 200 years ago the average lifespan was 30. Today it is 68 across the world, 78 in the States, and almost 82 in Japan. This is due to business. This is due to capitalism. And it doesn’t get credit for it. Most of the time, business is portrayed by its enemies as selfish and greedy and exploitative, yet it’s the greatest value creator in the world.”

9. Economist Gavin Kennedy with some interesting thoughts on the relationship between the state and the economy in developing nations:

The problem is to achieve the right balance between a competitive market economy and an effective state:  markets where possible; the state where necessary.

10. Climate Change: Key Data Points from Pew Research. Highlights some interesting shifts in the public's priorities.

11. Great piece about yet another way family life is changing. Yes, I’m a Homemaker

I’m a guy. My wife works. We’ve got no kids. I’m a stay-at-home dude.

"... What a sweet picture this conjures: the stay-at-home dad nurturing his children, looking after the house and helping support his wife in her budding career and shelving his own big ambitions for later. Now it gets a little awkward. There is no adorable kid, nor plans to have one. No starter home that needs knocking into shape. I'm not just doing this temporarily until I find something meaningful to do. I’m actually a full-time homemaker ... not stay-at-home dad but stay-at-home dude. A conversational pause. Where do you mentally file this guy? Usually I just change the subject. ..."

12. The Atlantic reports that Women Are Often Remarkably Reluctant to Ask for Help Around the House

A new study shows that high-earning women are more likely to let their houses be messy than to hire a housekeeper or get their husbands and kids to pitch in. ...

... "You can purchase substitutes for your own time, you can get your husband to do more, or you can all just do less," Killewald says. "Whether women outsource housework in particular has less to do with resources, but whether or not paid labor is viewed as an appropriate strategy for undertaking domestic work.

Doing less housework seems to be a popular option. ...

13. Business insider reports on a finding that is no shock to me: Men Really Do Have A Harder Time Reading Other People's Emotions.

Psychiatrists have concluded that males take longer to assess facial expressions as their brains have to work twice as hard to work out whether another person looks friendly or intelligent.

14. Daniel Kirk with a thoughtful piece Homosexuality under the Reign of Christ

15. Facebook Unfriending Has Real-Life Consequences

In particular, researchers found that 40% of people say they would avoid someone who unfriended them on Facebook, while 50% say they would not avoid a person who unfriended them. Women were more likely than men to avoid someone who unfriended them, the researchers found.

16. The Future of Librarians in an EBook World

... Libraries are responding to the decline of print in a variety of creative ways, trying to remain relevant – especially to younger people – by embracing the new technology. Many, such as New York’s Queens Public Library, are reinventing themselves as centers for classes, job training, and simply hanging out. In one radical example, a new $1.5 million library scheduled to open in San Antonio, Texas, this fall will be completely book-free, with its collection housed exclusively on tablets, laptops, and e-readers. “Think of an Apple store,” the Bexar County judge who is leading the effort told NPR. It’s a flashy and seductive package.

But libraries are about more than just e-readers or any other media, as important as those things are. They are about more than just buildings such as the grand edifices erected by Carnegie money, or the sleek and controversial new design for the New York Public Library’s central branch. They are also about human beings and their relationships, specifically, the relationship between librarians and patrons. And that is the relationship that the foundation created by Microsoft co-founder’s Paul G. Allen is seeking to build in a recent round of grants to libraries in the Pacific Northwest. ...

17. 3-D Printing just gets more amazing. A 3D Printer That Generates Human Embryonic Stem Cells

3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more, but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human embryonic stem cells. Using stem cells as the "ink" in a 3-D printer, researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a specific pattern.

Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection

Wall Street Journal: Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection

Fear-mongering exaggeration about effects of global warming distracts us from finding affordable and effective energy alternatives.

In his second inaugural address on Monday, President Obama laudably promised to "respond to the threat of climate change." Unfortunately, when the president described the urgent nature of the threat—the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms"—the scary examples suggested that he is contemplating poor policies that don't point to any real, let alone smart, solutions. Global warming is a problem that needs fixing, but exaggeration doesn't help, and it often distracts us from simple, cheaper and smarter solutions.

For starters, let's address the three horsemen of the climate apocalypse that Mr. Obama mentioned.

Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%. Estimates published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that even with global warming proceeding uninterrupted, the level of wildfires will continue to decline until around midcentury and won't resume on the level of 1950—the worst for fire—before the end of the century.

Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought. A study published in Nature in November shows globally that "there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years." The U.N. Climate Panel in 2012 concluded: "Some regions of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia."

As for one of the favorites of alarmism, hurricanes in recent years don't indicate that storms are getting worse. Measured by total energy (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), hurricane activity is at a low not encountered since the 1970s. The U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century—the last Category 3 or stronger storm was Wilma, more than seven years ago. ...

... In the long run, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide because it causes global warming. But if the main effort to cut emissions is through subsidies for chic renewables like wind and solar power, virtually no good will be achieved—at very high cost.

Instead of pouring money into subsidies and direct production support of existing, inefficient green energy, President Obama should focus on dramatically ramping up investments into the research and development of green energy. Put another way, it is the difference between supporting an inexpensive researcher who will discover more efficient, future solar panels—and supporting a Solyndra at great expense to produce lots of inefficient, present-technology solar panels.

When innovation eventually makes green energy cheaper, everyone will implement it, including the Chinese. Such a policy would likely do 500 times more good per dollar invested than current subsidy schemes. But first let's drop the fear-mongering exaggeration—and then focus on innovation.

Amen!

Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?

Associated Press: Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?

... To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs and workers who are competing with smarter machines.

The AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. Jobs that form the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6 million midpay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008 through last June.

Those jobs are being replaced in many cases by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.

"Everything that humans can do a machine can do," says Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Things are happening that look like science fiction."...

... So machines are getting smarter and people are more comfortable using them. Those factors, combined with the financial pressures of the Great Recession, have led companies and government agencies to cut jobs the past five years, yet continue to operate just as well.

How is that happening?

-Reduced aid from Indiana's state government and other budget problems forced the Gary, Ind., public school system last year to cut its annual transportation budget in half, to $5 million. The school district responded by using sophisticated software to draw up new, more efficient bus routes. And it cut 80 of 160 drivers. ...

... -In South Korea, Standard Chartered is expanding "smart banking" branches that employ a staff of three, compared with an average of about eight in traditional branches. ...

... -The British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced plans last year to invest $518 million in the world's first long-haul, heavy-duty driverless train system at its Pilbara iron ore mines in Western Australia. The automated trains are expected to start running next year. The trains are part of what Rio Tinto calls its "Mine of the Future" program, which includes 150 driverless trucks and automated drills.

Like many technologically savvy startups, Dirk Vander Kooij's furniture-making company in the Netherlands needs only a skeleton crew - four people ...

... -Google's driverless car and the Pentagon's drone aircraft are raising the specter of highways and skies filled with cars and planes that can get around by themselves. ...

... "Trying to keep it from happening would have been like the Teamsters in the early 1900s trying to stop the combustion engine," Lavin says. "You can't stand in the way of technology."

The upside of emerging technology is that most will make goods and services less expensive. That improves our living standard. The downside is that much of the work we used to do to earn wages to buy goods and services is rapidly changing. As the last sentence of the article notes, this is not the first time we have been in these circumstances. Years ago, I read that in 1885, approximately 80% of everything we consumed in the U.S. was produced at home. By 1915, 80% was produced outside the home. It created massive economic dislocations. Each time these disruptions occur, it is hard for the people living at that time to foresee the new economic order.

Christian thinkers must wrestle with the challenges of technological innovation. Creative destruction (the market dynamic where jobs and industries are destroyed in the wake of creating new ones) has always been difficult for ethics. It is painful, but other alternatives' social cost is also quite high. Anti-technological calls to abandon consumerism or just saying that "the market will sort it all out" are not legitimate responses. I think topics like this should be central to our theological reflection about human labor and the economy.

How Social Entrepreneurs Use Rice Husks to Power India

PBS: How Social Entrepreneurs Use Rice Husks to Power India

Some excerpts:

… FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Despite billions of dollars in new infrastructure, power interruptions are chronic in India. Consumers large and small rely on backup systems, at huge cost to both the environment and economy, says energy expert Kirit Parikh. He traces the problem to policies that never really took into account the cost of power and gave it away to some consumers.

KIRIT PARIKH, energy expert: We started out with saying that farmers should get cheap and free electricity. This was 30 years ago, when we wanted farmers to really adopt more modern technologies. It was considered a good way to promote green revolution.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Power was distributed cheaply or free to farmers and other groups whose votes politicians courted. Little effort was made to meter it. That prompted many people to hook themselves up illegally. Parikh says a third of all power is stolen off the grid. …

… FRED DE SAM LAZARO: … But to anywhere from a third to a half of them, it really didn't matter, because they have never been hooked up to the electric grid.

Vast swathes of rural India remain off the grid or get minimal, unpredictable service from it. …

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Ratnesh Yadav has tried to tackle at least this part of the problem. He and a partner founded a company called Husk Power. Their idea? Village-based micro-grids.

At this one in the village of Patelli (ph) in the northeastern Bihar state, tractors arrive with rice husks, the byproduct of milling this region's staple crop. It is poured into a hopper, about 100 pounds per hour, and gassified to run a simple turbine. Each evening, 700 customers have access to power for five hours. …

… MAN (through translator): We used to work with a gas light. This is much cheaper. We used to stay open until 9:00 in the evening. Now we stay open until 10:00 or 10:30, so it's a benefit. …

… FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In five years, Husk Power has installed 75 of these simple plants. Their networks cover an area no bigger than a couple of square miles, with wires strung on poles made from bamboo, a renewable resource like the rice husk fuel.

RATNESH YADAV: The good thing about this rice husk is, it has no alternate uses. It doesn't burn easily, so you can't use it for cooking. You cannot feed it to cattle because it has high silica in it. So it is a waste. It has no value for anybody else. And that is why -- and it is in plenty. …

… ERIC BERKOWITZ, investor: As people increase income, which hopefully they will, that will create new livelihood opportunities, they will have opportunities to incrementally increase electricity that they will take from these kind of solutions, and maybe add maybe two lights, three lights, a radio, a TV, a refrigerator.

It's not the only solution. There's other solutions that involve solar technologies. And Husk Power is actually looking at those kind of solutions as well.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Renewable fuel plants also qualify for subsidies from India's government and possibly credits in a global carbon trade. Power expert Parikh appreciates what micro-plants can provide, but he doesn't see them as a long-term solution. …

China blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium

Telegraph: China blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium

The Chinese are running away with thorium energy, sharpening a global race for the prize of clean, cheap, and safe nuclear power. Good luck to them. They may do us all a favour.

... The aim is to break free of the archaic pressurized-water reactors fueled by uranium -- originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s -- opting instead for new generation of thorium reactors that produce far less toxic waste and cannot blow their top like Fukushima. ...

... The thorium story is by now well-known. Enthusiasts think it could be the transforming technology needed to drive the industrial revolutions of Asia -- and to avoid an almighty energy crunch as an extra two billion people climb the ladder to western lifestyles.

At the least, it could do for nuclear power what shale fracking has done for natural gas -- but on a bigger scale, for much longer, perhaps more cheaply, and with near zero CO2 emissions. ...

... The beauty of thorium is that you cannot have a Fukushima disaster. Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University, who anchor's the UK's thorium research network ThorEA, said the metal must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the process. "There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam," he said. ...

... Yet it leaves far less toxic residue. Most of the mineral is used up in the fission process, while uranium reactors use up just 0.7pc. It can even burn up existing stockpiles of plutonium and hazardous waste.

Cambridge scientists published a tantalising study in the Annals of Nuclear Energy in February showing that it is possible to "achieve near complete transuranic waste incineration" by throwing the old residue into the reactor with thorium.

In other words, it can help clean up the mess left by a half a century of nuclear weapons and uranium reactors, instead of transporting it at great cost to be encased in concrete and buried for milennia. It is why some `greens' such as Baroness Worthington -- a former Friends of the Earth activist -- are embracing thorium. Though there are other reasons.

The thorium molten salt process takes place at atmospheric pressures. It does not require the vast domes of conventional reactors, so costly, and such an eyesore.

You could build pint-size plants largely below ground, less obtrusive than a shopping mall, powering a small town the size of Tunbridge Wells or Colchester. There would be shorter transmission lines, less leakage, and less risk of black-outs. The elegance is irresistible....

Saturday Links

(Like the Kruse Kronicle on Facebook if you want links to daily posts to appear in your Facebook feed.)

1. Several articles I saw this week reflect on data presented in The Pew Forum's The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Major Religious Groups as of 2010. Here is one interesting chart from the survey showing what percentage of each religion's adherents live in minority religious status in their own country.

2. This is really fascinating. Smithsonian: Why Japan is Obsessed with Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas. “Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii!” (Kentucky for Christmas!)

3. Four Harvard and MIT grads are experimenting with direct aid to the poor. "GiveDirectly, the brainchild of four Harvard and MIT graduate students, is so simple, it's genius. Give poor Kenyan families $1,000 -- and let them do whatever they want with it." Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever?

4. From the Guardian, Private healthcare: the lessons from Sweden

"... Despite its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of the health service.

Their success is envied by the centre right in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006. The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right government had been re-elected after serving a full term.

As the state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all welfare services are now owned by private equity firms". ..."

5. Scott Annan writes in The Future Of Business Is Morality, And The Future Is Now

"... We have reached a point in our economy where it is becoming increasingly clear that businesses are being measured not just for their profit, but also for their impact. And I'm not just talking about writing a check or funding a charity; I'm referring to business models for which community involvement and inspirational brand building are the profit centers. (Think Warby Parker, TOMS, and startups such as SOMA.) I recently went to a conference where the founders of a startup posited a powerful idea: the future of marketing is philanthropy. But I think the even bigger idea is the future of business is morality. My grandfather saw this early on.

At a time when the moral framework of America appears to be fractured – or at the very least confused – businesses are in the propitious position to espouse cultural standards that can help restore values that our youth can use to build the next generation of positive enterprise. In fact, whether businesses succeed in creating and promoting positive cultures might determine whether they stay in business at all. The future of business is morality, and the future is now.

Whether it's the job of the corporation or not to set the moral tone for society, the expectation is trending towards companies setting the right example for others to follow. With the sharp rise in entrepreneurship, young companies have the opportunity to establish strong cultures early on and share them with their communities. Money must have a moral center, and from greater consciousness in business, greater profit will follow. ..."

6. Scientific American asks, After 40 Years, Has Recycling Lived Up to Its Billing?

7. AOL has a short piece about the rise of small nuclear reactors. The Next Big Thing in Nuclear Power: Going Small

8. Scientific American has a list of The Top 10 Science Stories of 2012.

9. Depression Surpasses Asthma as Top Disability Problem among U.S. and Canadian Teens

"New data show an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teens in the U.S. and Canada over the past two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe."

10. Robotic arm controlled by the mind allows paraplegic woman to feed herself

11. Interesting piece on Why We Prefer Masculine Voices (Even in Women).

12. Atlantic Cities looks into The Mystery of Our Declining Mobility.

13. People Are Leaving California In Record Numbers

More people moved out of California in 2011 than moved in, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau, signaling that the Democrat-run state's economic woes continue to drive residents away.

Most statisticians attribute California's net loss of 100,000 people last year to its high cost of living, increased population density and troubling unemployment rate.

The widening middle class in Mexico is also encouraging some immigrants to remain in that country instead of moving to California.

Texas — home to lower taxes, less regulation and what the Manhattan Institute calls a "labor pool with the right skills at the right price" — is one of the most attractive destinations for companies departing from California, according to the Census Bureau. ...

14. The United States Has Seen A Huge Drop In Executions Since 2000.

"The country reported 85 executions in 2000 but only 43 in 2012, according to a new report released by the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus, far fewer people are being sentenced to death row in the first place. The year 2000 saw 224 new inmates sentenced to death, while 2012 saw only 78, according to the report."

15. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had a great piece: Why 'If We Can Just Save One Child ...' Is a Bad Argument, referring to President Obama's statement at Newtown, CT. When dealing with complex topics like gun control, we always talk about tradeoffs. For instance, I know how we can save more than 30,000 lives. There were 32,367 traffic fatalities last year. Let's set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. Nearly all those lives would be saved. Should we do this "if we can save just one more life"? I, like Friedersforf, am not advocating any particular policy. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of making such statements, as politicians often do.

16. The New York Times has an opinion piece by John Dickerson, The Decline of Evangelical America

"I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive. The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old evangelicalism whimper and wane."

He speaks of an Evangelical "collapse" having happened. That may be a bit premature, but his articulation of trends is right.

17. I saw two interesting posts on the sociology Facebook this week. The New York Times had a piece about announcing bad news on Facebook: On Facebook, Bad With the Good. Mashable reports that Socioeconomic Status Predicts Number of Facebook Friends.

18. Gangnam Style hits one billion views on YouTube. K pop rules!