Leahgates

Pistachio, or Stach as his neighbors like to call him, is an energetic little pup. Whether he is inside playing with his large collection of toys or outside running after the big dogs, this guy will bring a smile to any dog lover's face. He might be small now but with all his wrinkles you know he has a lot of growing to do.

It’s Cyber Monday! All the good deals are gonna be gone! OK..let me check this.

This is OK..

Everything here looks good…

Ah. THIS thingy was loose. There we go.

Wait. Whadya mean that’s not my Amazon password? M-A-R-U. AARRRGH.

Via Guremike.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Thing One & Two

Snoremaddon

annlarimer:

jionttt:

The Black Angel Commands the Lightbulb

Let There Be Light

The Angels Beheld Intensively

It did not work as they hoped

And the Black Angel did say unto the Bulb, “Fiat Lux.” And the Bulb did nothing. But Old Woman Josie came unto the Angels who were gathered bewildered upon the Porch, and said to them, “You stick it in the socket up there and screw it in, to the right. Tighty-righty, lefty-loosey.” And the Black Angel did this, and the Angels were astonished at the wisdom of the Old Woman. And they did vow to remain at her side, for she had much to teach them, and gave them snacks.

superpyrrhocorax:

A spaceman arrives on earth and greets a local. They are from so far apart yet they sense a kinship.

++

I sat in his chair.  This was the compromise.

“A new study out this month looks at humor on the Supreme Court, concluding that the justices are funnier than transcripts have been giving them credit for.

In fact, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 200 percent funnier than court stenographers would have you believe, researchers say.”

- Tal Kopan, Supreme Court, now with more humor!, Politico (Oct. 29, 2013). (via notoriousrbg)

cooperschronicles:

A busy day at the Heath…met a few friends…admired their coats…sniffed a few greetings…

A person’s social network is a better predictor than race, age, gender, poverty, or gang affiliation of whether they will become a victim of gun homicide.

“Risk factors like race and poverty are not the predictors they have been assumed to be,” says Andrew Papachristos, associate professor of sociology at Yale University. “It’s who you hang out with that gets you into trouble. It’s tragic, but not random.”

Published in the American Journal of Public Health, the research likens gun violence to a blood-borne pathogen in that crime, like a disease, follows certain patterns.

People in the same social network are more likely to engage in similar risky behaviors—like carrying a firearm or taking part in criminal activities—which increases the probability of victimization.

“Generally, you can’t catch a bullet from just anyone,” Papachristos says. “Your relationship with the people involved matters. It’s not unlike needle sharing or unprotected sex in the spread of HIV.”

For the study, researchers examined police and gun homicide records from 2006 to 2011 for residents living within a six-square mile area that had some of the highest rates for homicide in Chicago.

They found that 6 percent of the population was involved in 70 percent of the murders, and that nearly all of those in the 6 percent already had some contact with the criminal justice or public health systems.

Risky networks

In addition, those in the 6 percent had a 900 percent increased risk of becoming a victim of gun homicide—suggesting that being part of a risky network might offer more insight into one’s chance of becoming a victim than other risk factors.

“You could easily identify who the dots are on these network maps and direct the resources accordingly,” Papachristos says.

Which is exactly what the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has done. In a new violence prevention initiative, the CPD is currently using network analysis to identify the area’s top 20 residents most likely to shoot someone or be shot.

A CPD police commander and the head of a community anti-violence program recently visited these high-risk individuals at their homes, explained how their history and networks landed them on the list, and delivered the message that their lives matter and they want them to stay out of trouble.

“The CPD is using this as a way to reach out to people, rather than just make arrests,” says Papachristos.

Better policing

While it is too early to know the approach’s long-term effects, other cities are taking notice and working on similar network models, including East Paolo Alto and Stockton in California, and Bridgeport and New Haven in Connecticut.

Papchristos has scaled up his study to the entire city of Chicago, a network of more than 170,000 individuals. He is currently expanding into other cities and also following the physical guns in social networks.

“Ultimately, we want to answer the question of how can we police better, smarter, and fairer,” he says.

Christopher Wildeman, was a co-author on the study, which was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Source: Yale University

The post The friends you keep can predict your risk of gun violence appeared first on Futurity.

Many people inside and outside engineering have emphasized the importance of training ethical, socially conscious engineers, but Erin Cech, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University wondered if engineering education in the US actually encourages young engineers to take seriously their professional responsibility to public welfare.

“There’s an overarching assumption that professional engineering education results in individuals who have a deeper understanding of the public welfare concerns of their profession,” she says. “My study found that this is not necessarily the case for the engineering students in my sample.”

Published in the journal Science, Technology and Human Values, a new study included more than 300 students who entered engineering programs as freshmen in 2003 at four US universities in the Northeast. Rice students were not included in the study.

Participants were surveyed in the spring of each year and at 18 months after graduation. In the surveys, students were asked to rate the importance of professional and ethical responsibilities and their individual views on the importance of improving society, being active in their community, promoting racial understanding and helping others in need.

In addition, the students were asked how important the following factors are to their engineering programs: ethical and/or social issues, policy implications of engineering, and broad education in humanities and social sciences.

Engineering code of ethics

As part of their education, engineering students learn the profession’s code of ethics, which includes taking seriously the safety, health, and welfare of the public. However, it appears that there is something about engineering education that results in students becoming more cynical and less concerned with public policy and social engagement issues.

Results showed that the students left college less concerned about public welfare than when they entered.

“The way many people think about the engineering profession as separate from social, political, and emotional realms is not an accurate assessment,” Cech says.

“People have emotional and social reactions to engineered products all the time, and those products shape people’s lives in deep ways; so it stands to reason that it is important for engineers to be conscious of broader ethical and social issues related to technology.”

This “culture of disengagement” is rooted in how engineering education frames engineering problem-solving.

“Issues that are nontechnical in nature are often perceived as irrelevant to the problem-solving process,” Cech says.

“There seems to be very little time or space in engineering curricula for nontechnical conversations about how particular designs may reproduce inequality—for example, debating whether to make a computer faster, more technologically savvy and expensive versus making it less sophisticated and more accessible for customers.”

Ignoring these issues does a disservice to students because practicing engineers are required to address social welfare concerns on a regular basis, even if it involves a conflict of interest or whistleblowing, Cech says.

“If students are not prepared to think through these issues of public welfare, then we might say they are not fully prepared to enter the engineering practice.”

The National Science Foundation funded the research.

Source: Rice University

The post For engineering students, a lesson in caring? appeared first on Futurity.

Using energy conservation, recycling, and the environment as social causes, researchers found that by drawing a face showing emotions on products increased support for each cause.

Companies often put a personal face on products in an attempt to reach a deeper connection with consumers. Now new research published in Psychological Science shows the same idea can be applied to social causes.

Putting a human face on the campaign for a social cause actually increases support for it, according to the study from an international team of researchers including University of Toronto Scarborough and Rotman School of Management professor, Pankaj Aggarwal.

The researchers found that anthropomorphizing social causes is effective because it appeals to people’s sense of guilt.

“We are not consciously aware of why seeing a face on a campaign has an impact, but we definitely feel a deeper connection to it,” says Aggarwal. “When we see an entity feeling pain we would feel guilty if we could have done something to prevent it. We also wouldn’t want that burden on ourselves so we would act accordingly to help that entity.”

People are not motivated to support social causes because it involves a personal sacrifice of time, money, and effort. It’s only when they stop to consider the consequences of not participating—and feel guilty as a result—that they begin to comply.

In one experiment the researchers put eyes and a mouth with a caption that read “Please feed me food waste” on a bin for organic waste. The face on the bin looks sad because of an apparent lack of participation in recycling food waste. Participants says they were more likely to place food waste in the bin with a human face compared to the ordinary, non-anthropomorphized bin.

“Not only did we find participants felt guilty about not complying with the social cause, but they also felt guilty about harming another being, in the form of an anthropomorphized light bulb, waste basket, or tree,” says Hae Joo Kim, assistant professor of Marketing at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Government agencies and charities use a variety of expensive and often ineffective financial instruments, such as fines, to encourage participation in social causes, says Aggarwal. Putting a human face on the cause may offer an inexpensive yet highly effective means of gaining more support.

Source: University of Toronto

The post ‘Facing’ it boosts support for environmental causes appeared first on Futurity.

“Digital activism” is most often nonviolent and tends to work best when social media is combined with street-level organization, new research shows.

“This is the largest investigation of digital activism ever undertaken,” says Philip Howard, professor of communication, information, and international studies at the University of Washington. “We looked at just under 2,000 cases over a 20-year period, with a very focused look at the last two years.”

Howard and coauthors Frank Edwards and Mary Joyce, both doctoral students, oversaw 40 student analysts who reviewed news stories by citizen and professional journalists describing digital activism campaigns worldwide.

A year of research and refining brought the total down to between 400 and 500 well-verified cases representing about 150 countries.

A main finding of the report: Digital activism tends to be nonviolent, despite what many may think.

“In the news we hear of online activism that involves anonymous or cyberterrorist hackers who cause trouble and break into systems,” Howard says. “But that was two or three percent of all the cases—far and away, most of the cases are average folks with a modest policy agenda” that doesn’t involve hacking or covert crime.”

Other findings include:

• Digital activism campaigns tend to be more successful when waged against government rather than business authorities. There have been many activist campaigns against corporations, but they don’t seem to have succeeded as well as those that had governments for a target.

• Effective digital activism employs a number of social media tools. Tweeting alone is less successful. No single tool offers a guarantee of campaign success.

• Governments still tend to lag behind activist movements in the use and mastery of new social media tools. They sometimes use the same tools, but it’s always months after others have tried them.

These factors, taken together, “are the magic ingredients, especially when the target is a government—a real recipe for success.”

In time, the data gathered for this work might yield more insight into the world of digital activism, Howard says.

Unanswered questions include why there are regional disparities among digital tool use, why phones are prevalent but text messaging is rare in digital campaigns, and whether external political, social, or cultural phenomena influence patterns and the effectiveness of digital activism.

Funding for the research came from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Washington department of communication.

Source: University of Washington

The post What drives success in digital activism? appeared first on Futurity.

Black Friday is a busy time for big-box retailers, as well as the warehouse workers that move their products. But despite claims that the industry provides middle class wages for blue-collar jobs, a recent study finds that warehouse workers in the Inland Empire area of California average $23,000 per year for men and $19,000 per year for women.

Contrast that with $45,000 per year—the figure cited by an industry model developed by the Southern Californian Association of Governments, says Juan De Lara, author of the study and an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

The figures raise the question of what this means for the economies of regions like Southern California, where logistics plays a vital role and has been touted by business and government leaders as a path towards economic advancement.

President Barack Obama raised the question earlier this year when he visited an Amazon.com shipping facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as part of a tour entitled “A Better Bargain for the Middle Class.” It took De Lara by surprise.

“When the president gets up there and says that this is an economic model that will allow us to move forward as a country, I immediately thought, ‘Right, except there’s a huge section of the workforce that doesn’t actually make the money touted in these industry-wide wages,’” he says.

Third-party employers

He says the discrepancy can largely be attributed to the fact that many warehouse workers aren’t actually employed by major retailers such as Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target.

Workers directly employed by them—which also include large numbers of white-collar workers—might earn an average of $45,000 per year. But most warehouse workers are actually employed by third-party logistics companies.

Many of them have been fined for labor law violations that appear to be systemic problems in the industry, De Lara says.

Southern California workers

His study highlights the critical role that logistics has played in the Southern California economy. The industry employed more than 500,000 people in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties in 2012, and has long been seen by policymakers as a way to create blue collar jobs in the aftermath of post-1980s manufacturing declines.

Private and public investments in port infrastructure led to a booming warehouse industry. About half of warehouse space needed to meet future port capacity in Los Angeles and Long Beach was expected to be built in inland counties.

Past warehouse and residential construction has made the Inland Empire into one of the fastest growing metropolitan regions in the country during the past 30 years, De Lara says.

Latinos moving into the region has largely driven this growth. Nearly 80 percent of Inland Empire newcomers were Latinos. What does the future hold for this demographic group, California’s largest?

“Most Latinos in the region work in blue occupations—more than 50 percent of Inland Southern California’s adult Latino population doesn’t have a college degree,” De Lara says. “So what’s the economic future for them in a region where warehouses and retail stores—both sectors with relatively low wages—are major employers?”

Wal-Mart’s power

While policymakers certainly have a role to play, the real decision-makers may be the corporate retailers driving the industry. Wal-Mart in particular has incredible power when it comes to determining this economic structure, De Lara says.

Pressure put on them by advocacy groups and the media has changed its behavior in the past. Wal-Mart has shifted to purchasing more American-made products and locally grown food due to increased media attention, as well as increasing its energy efficiency.

When $2.8 million in labor law fines were imposed on logistics contractors this year, Wal-Mart moved to distance itself from those companies.

It’s in its interest to do so, De Lara explains. “When Wal-Mart makes a decision to make these types of changes, it has a tremendous effect, not only across the industry but across the economy,” De Lara says. The question remains: “Will it turn a blind eye or take a leadership position and really have a positive effect on workers at large?”

Source: USC

The post Despite Black Friday boom, logistics workers get sold short appeared first on Futurity.

Research has suggested that a particular gene in the brain’s reward system contributes to overeating and obesity in adults. The new study links this same variant to childhood obesity and tasty food choices, particularly for girls.

Contrary to “blaming” obese individuals for making poor food choices, Professor Michael Meaney of McGill University and his team suggest that obesity lies at the interface of three factors: genetic predispositions, environmental stress, and emotional well-being.

These findings, published in the journal Appetite shed light on why some children may be predisposed to obesity and could mark a critical step towards prevention and treatment.

“In broad terms, we are finding that obesity is a product of genetics, early development, and circumstance”, says Meaney, who is also associate director of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute Research Centre.

The work is part of the MAVAN (Maternal Adversity Vulnerability & Neurodevelopment) project, headed by Meaney and Hélène Gaudreau, project coordinator. Their team studied pregnant women, some of whom suffered from depression or lived in poverty, and followed their children from birth until the age of ten.

For the study, researchers tested 150 four-year-old MAVAN children by administering a snack test meal. The children were faced with healthy and non-healthy food choices. Mothers also completed a questionnaire to address their child’s normal food consumption and preferences.

“We found that a variation in a gene that regulates the activity of dopamine, a major neurotransmitter that regulates the individual’s response to tasty food, predicted the amount of ‘comfort’ foods—highly palatable foods such as ice cream, candy, or calorie-laden snacks—selected and eaten by the children,” says Patricia Silveira of McGill University.

“This effect was especially important for girls who we found carried the genetic allele that decreases dopamine function.”

“Most importantly, the amount of comfort food eaten during the snack test in the four-year-olds predicted the body weight of the girls at six years of age,” says Meaney.

“Our research indicates that genetics and emotional well-being combine to drive consumption of foods that promote obesity. The next step is to identify vulnerable children, as there may be ways for prevention and counseling in early obesity stages.”

Robert Levitan of the University of Toronto is also a co-author of the study.

Source: McGill University

The post Snack test links gene to childhood obesity appeared first on Futurity.

Children who have lower English-language abilities than their peers benefit the most from programs like Head Start and public preschool—but researchers say they aren’t yet sure exactly how or why.

New research involving young Latino and Spanish-speaking children confirms that widely available public programs help dual-language learners make important academic gains.

“We know that early childhood is a critical period for children who are dual-language learners,” says Virginia Buysse, senior scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Many of them face the difficult task of learning a new language while acquiring essential skills to be ready for kindergarten.”

Dual-language learners represent a large and rapidly growing group of children in the US, Buysse says. In 2006, nearly one in three children enrolled in Head Start or Early Head Start lived in a household in which a language other than English was spoken.

Dual-language learners enter kindergarten with skills that differ substantially from their peers, says co-author and fellow FPG senior scientist Ellen Peisner-Feinberg.

Learning gap widens

“English proficiency has been linked to school performance, educational attainment, and the future economic mobility of Latino students. These children lag behind their peers when they begin school, though, and the gap only widens as they grow older.”

Improving language skills in turn provides a foundation for learning in other content areas, Buysse says. “But relatively few studies have evaluated the effects of early care and education programs for dual-language learners.”

In 2007, the National Task Force on Early Childhood Education for Hispanics had referred to this knowledge gap as one of the most important unanswered questions within the field of early childhood education.

Buysse and Peisner-Feinberg wanted to gauge the current state of research and conducted a comprehensive review of the latest studies, screening 4,000 initial candidates from several academic databases before determining 25 that met their rigorous selection criteria.

Their findings are published in the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

The dearth of top-caliber research itself was an important finding, Buysse says. “This is a surprisingly small group of studies, given the number of children under the age of five in this country who do not speak English as their home language.”

Head Start works

Almost all of the studies focused on Latino or Spanish-speaking children who were 3–5 years old. Most were in enrolled in center-based early childhood programs.

On the basis of these scientifically sound studies, the researchers did find evidence to suggest that dual-language learners benefit from attending widely available, well regulated early child-hood programs, such as Head Start or state-funded public pre-k.

Moreover, these programs may be more beneficial for children who begin school with lower English-language abilities and less exposure to English—findings consistent with previous research.

“We also found some support across several studies both for using English as the language of instruction and for incorporating the home language into strategies that focused on language and literacy,” Buysse says.

“And none of the studies detected any negative effects of early education programs and instructional practices that target dual-language learners.”

The researchers say the small sample sizes and other methodological challenges necessitate more research in order to demonstrate exactly which interventions truly hold the most promise for dual-language learners.

Researchers from Boston College and Temple University contributed to the study.

Source UNC-Chapel Hill

The post Head Start narrows academic gap for Latino kids appeared first on Futurity.

Scientists study birds for many reasons—to build better robots or to learn how to live longer. What they often discover is that most birds are quite amazing. Here are six birds we think are pretty cool, including the bird of the day: the turkey.

1. Crows

Like humans, crows recognize faces and form associations with them—and to accomplish this, the two species’ brains appear to work in similar ways.

“The regions of the crow brain that work together are not unlike those that work together in mammals, including humans,” says John Marzluff, University of Washington professor of environmental and forest sciences. “These regions were suspected to work in birds but not documented until now.”

Previous research on the neural circuitry of animal behavior has been conducted using well-studied, often domesticated, species like rats, chickens, zebra finches, pigeons, and rhesus macaques—but not wild animals like the 12 adult male crows in this study.

The crows were captured by investigators all wearing masks that the researchers referred to as “the threatening face.” The crows were never treated in a threatening way, but the fact they’d been captured created a negative association with the mask they saw.

Then, for the four weeks they were in captivity, they were fed by people wearing a mask different from the first—this one called “the caring face.” The masks were based on actual people’s faces and both bore neutral expressions so the associations made by the crows was based on their treatment.

2. Falcons

Two falcon genomes reveal how intense evolutionary pressure made them into daredevil predators.

“This is the first time birds of prey have had their genomes sequenced and the findings are truly revelatory, particularly in the evolution of Peregrine falcons—the fastest species in the animal kingdom,” explains Mike Bruford, author of the study and a professor at the Cardiff University School of Biosciences.

“Our research shows that under strong selection pressures, Peregrines have had to adapt very rapidly to survive.

“We have been able to determine that specific genes, regulating beak development have had to evolve to withstand the pressure of impacting their prey at a speed of up to 300km/h.

“The shape of the falcon beak has also had to evolve to be capable of tearing at the flesh of its prey.”

3. Gannets

Colonies of northern gannets, which fly far out to sea to feed, are reshaping our understanding of how animals forage.

Gannets colonies maintain vast exclusive fishing ranges, yet they do nothing to enforce territory or communicate boundaries.

“The accepted view is that exclusive foraging territories are associated with species such as ants, which aggressively defend the feeding areas around their colonies, but this opens the door to a completely new way of thinking about territory,” says Ewan Wakefield, postdoctoral researcher in the University of Leeds’ faculty of biological sciences.

4. Hummingbirds

In order to build a robot that can fly as nimbly as a bird, David Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, used an ultra-high-speed Phantom camera that can shoot upwards of 3,300 frames per second at full resolution, and an amazing 650,000 at a tiny resolution.

The technology allows scientists to visualize the biomechanical wonders of bird flight on an incredibly fine scale.

Anna’s hummingbirds beat their wings about 50 times per second, which is nothing but a green blur to human eyes. “Our camera shoots 100 times faster than humans’ vision refresh rate,” Lentink says. “We can spread a single wing beat across 40 frames, and see incredible things.”

Students Andreas Peña Doll and Rivers Ingersoll filmed hummingbirds performing a never-before-seen “shaking” behavior: As the bird dived off a branch, it wiggled and twisted its body along its spine, the same way a wet dog would try to dry off. At 55 times per second, hummingbirds have the fastest body shake among vertebrates on the planet—almost twice as fast as a mouse.

The shake lasted only a fraction of a second, and would never have been seen without the aid of the high-speed video.

5. Macaws

By sequencing the complete genome of a Scarlet macaw, researchers hope to learn more about the genetics behind the bird’s longevity and intelligence.

Macaws are found in tropical Central and South America, from southern Mexico to northern Argentina. Trapping of the birds for the pet trade, plus loss of habitat due to deforestation in their native lands, has severely decreased their numbers since the 1960s. There are 23 species of macaws, and some of these have already become extinct while others are endangered.

Macaws can live 50 to 75 years and often outlive their owners.

“They are considered to be among the most intelligent of all birds and also one of the most affectionate—it is believed they are sensitive to human emotions,” says Ian Tizard, of the Schubot Exotic Bird Health Center at Texas A&M University.

“Possessing stunning feathers that are brightly colored, some macaws have a wingspan approaching four feet. They also usually mate for life and can fly as fast as 35 miles per hour.”

6. Turkeys

To determine how human muscles and tendons work in tandem, researchers at Brown University and UC Davis studied turkeys, whose legs have a muscle-tendon structure similar to humans and whose walking posture (with the legs under the body) largely mimics our own.

The researchers outfitted turkeys with special sonar sensors embedded in a calf muscle that recorded changes in muscle fascicle length at 1,000 times per second as the turkey landed from a jump. Other devices measured the force on the muscle from landings, while a slow-motion video camera caught the changes in leg configuration upon landing to understand how muscles and tendons were flexed and stretched.

They found that tendons in the legs act as shock absorbers, offering protection at the moment of impact with muscles stepping up less than a second later to absorb the remaining energy.

The post These 6 birds are simply amazing appeared first on Futurity.

Previous studies have underestimated methane emissions in the United States, particularly from cattle farming and fossil fuel production, a new analysis shows.

The work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could provide a baseline for establishing new regulations of the greenhouse gas.

Like carbon dioxide, methane is a potent greenhouse gas that plays a significant role in trapping heat in the atmosphere and raising global temperatures. Methane also plays a key role in facilitating the formation of ozone in large cities.

Although there are several natural causes of methane emissions, roughly 60 percent of the global output can be traced back to human activities. Primary culprits include the extraction and refining of oil and natural gas, coal mining, landfills, cattle farming, and manure management.

Two of the prevailing inventories of methane emissions—by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the international Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)—came to their conclusions by estimating the amounts of methane produced per cow or per unit of fossil fuel produced and extrapolated them to calculate total emissions.

“We call this a bottom-up approach,” says study co-author Anna Michalak, an Earth scientist in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and an associate professor by courtesy in Stanford University’s Department of Environmental Earth System Science. “It is essentially a book-keeping approach, and the uncertainties of the individual line items can compound when they are added up to estimate total emissions.”

Huge discrepancy

The new analysis, which was led by Scot M. Miller, a graduate student at Harvard University, is based on a “top-down” methodology developed by Michalak and her research group.

The researchers combined concentrations of atmospheric methane, as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy, with meteorological data of temperatures, wind, and other factors that could influence the methane’s atmospheric movements.

They entered this combination in their computer model and, essentially, ran its statistical algorithms in reverse to trace the methane to its origins.

The results highlighted a huge discrepancy between the actual emissions seen in the atmosphere and those predicted by the inventories, Michalak says.

50 percent higher

Looking at the country as a whole, the scientists found that actual methane emissions were 50 percent higher than the EPA and EDGAR inventories predicted.

The scientists paired regional methane emissions with activity plots—farming, fossil fuel production, etc.—to identify sources that were previously undervalued.

In the south central United States, for instance, total emissions are 2.7 times higher than the EDGAR inventory. Livestock, predominantly cattle, was a primary contributor, via animal flatulence and manure.

Emission from oil and gas production and refining was 4.9 times higher than the inventory would suggest for this region.

Such significant increases could suggest areas and practices that could benefit from improved regulation.

Fingerprint of the source

This new data complements the inventories, Michalak says, and will clue scientists to which estimates in those inventories need improvement—or which factors are being completely overlooked—in order to create a more accurate analysis of the overall methane budget of the country.

In some cases, the spatial footprints of the observed emissions did not match those of any economic sectors as represented in the inventories, but the researchers were able to trace the origins using information about other atmospheric gases.

Methane emissions are often coupled with other gases, and the mix of those gases differs depending on the source, creating a sort of fingerprint of the source.

For example, a particular large plot over the south central United States didn’t map well on any known sources, but registered significant amounts of propane.

“We know that oil and gas production and refining, which is prevalent in this region, is coupled with large propane emissions,” Michalak says. “This further supports our conclusion that this methane was coming from oil and gas production, and not cows or some other unidentified source.”

Although the goal of the new study was not to influence or directly inform emissions regulations or climate policy, Michalak says that the robust estimates of current methane emissions provide a valuable baseline upon which to base future predictions and actions.

Source: Stanford University

The post US emits 1.5 times more methane than predicted appeared first on Futurity.

Exposure to air pollution appears to increase the risk for autism among people who carry a genetic disposition for the neurodevelopmental disorder.

“Our research shows that children with both the risk genotype and exposure to high air pollutant levels were at increased risk of autism spectrum disorder compared to those without the risk genotype and lower air pollution exposure,” says the study’s first author, Heather E. Volk, assistant professor of research in preventive medicine and pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) and principal investigator at The Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is highly heritable, suggesting that genetics are an important contributing factor, but many questions about its causes remain.

“Although gene-environment interactions are widely believed to contribute to autism risk, this is the first demonstration of a specific interaction between a well-established genetic risk factor and an environmental factor that independently contribute to autism risk,” says Daniel B. Campbell, assistant professor of psychiatry and the behavioral sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the study’s senior author.

“The MET gene variant has been associated with autism in multiple studies, controls expression of MET protein in both the brain and the immune system, and predicts altered brain structure and function. It will be important to replicate this finding and to determine the mechanisms by which these genetic and environmental factors interact to increase the risk for autism.”

Independent studies by Volk and Campbell have previously reported associations between autism and air pollution exposure and between autism and a variant in the MET gene. The current study, which is scheduled to appear in the January 2014 edition of Epidemiology, suggests that air pollution exposure and the genetic variant interact to augment the risk of ASD.

Campbell and Volk’s team, including Irva Hertz-Picciotto of the University of California, Davis, studied 408 children between 2 and 5 years of age from the Childhood Autism Risks From Genetics and the Environment Study, a population-based, case-control study of preschool children from California. Of those, 252 met the criteria for autism or autism spectrum disorder.

Air pollution exposure was determined based on the past residences of the children and their mothers, local traffic-related sources, and regional air quality measures. MET genotype was determined through blood sampling.

Campbell and Volk continue to study the interaction of air pollution exposure and the MET genotype in mothers during pregnancy.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the MIND Institute, and Autism Speaks supported the research.

Source: USC

The post Air pollution and genes combine to boost autism risk appeared first on Futurity.

A magnetic stud lets Jason DiSanto, who is paralyzed from the neck down, use his tongue like a joystick to drive a wheelchair.

DiSanto took part in a recent study to test the effectiveness of the Tongue Drive System. Since a diving accident in 2009 he’s been using a sip-and-puff system—the most popular assistive technology for controlling a wheelchair.

“With the sip-and-puff system, there is always a straw in front of my face. With the Tongue Drive, people can see you, not just your adaptive equipment,” says DiSanto.

Results from the study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, show that wheelchair users were able to access computers and execute commands for their wheelchairs at speeds that were significantly faster than those recorded in sip-and-puff wheelchairs, but with equal accuracy.

With the Tongue Drive System, sensors in the tongue stud relay the tongue’s position to a headset, which then executes up to six commands based on the tongue position.

“It’s really easy to understand what the Tongue Drive System can do and what it is good for,” says study co-author Maysam Ghovanloo, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Now, we have solid proof that people with disabilities can potentially benefit from it.”

Point-and-click task

The research team had subjects complete a set of tasks commonly used in similar clinical trials. Subjects in the trials were either able-bodied or people with tetraplegia.

“By the end of the trials, everybody preferred the Tongue Drive System over their current assistive technology,” says Joy Bruce, manager of Shepherd Center’s Spinal Cord Injury Lab and co-author of the study. “It allows them to engage their environment in a way that is otherwise not possible for them.”

Researchers compared how able-bodied subjects were able to execute commands either with the Tongue Drive System or with a keypad and mouse.

For example, targets randomly appeared on a computer screen and the subjects had to move the cursor to click on the target. Scientists are able to calculate how much information is transferred from a person’s brain to the computer as they perform a point-and-click task. The performance gap narrowed throughout the trial between the keypad and mouse and the Tongue Drive System.

For the first time, the research team showed that people with tetraplegia can maneuver a wheelchair better with the Tongue Drive System than with the sip-and-puff system.

On average, the performance of 11 subjects with tetraplegia using the Tongue Drive System was three times faster than their performance with the sip-and-puff system, but with the same level of accuracy, even though more than half of the patients had years of daily experience with sip-and-puff technology.

Why tongue piercing?

The idea for piercing the tongue with the magnet was the inspiration of Anne Laumann, professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a lead investigator of the trial there. She had read about an early stage of Tongue Drive System using a glued-on tongue magnet. The problem was the magnet fell off after a few hours and aspiration of the loose magnet was a real danger to these users.

“Tongue piercing put to medical use—who would have thought it? It is needed and it works!” Laumann says.

The experiments were repeated over five weeks for the able-bodied test group, and over six weeks for the tetraplegic group. All of the subjects with tetraplegia were able to complete the trial.

The tetraplegic group was using the Tongue Drive System just one day each week, but their improvement in performance was dramatic.

“We saw a huge, very significant improvement in their performance from session one to session two,” Ghovanloo says. “That’s an indicator of how quickly people learn this.”

The Tongue Drive System isn’t quite ready for commercialization, but Ghovanloo’s startup company, Bionic Sciences, is working with Georgia Tech to move the technology forward.

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and the National Science Foundation funded the research. Additional scientists from Shepherd Center in Atlanta, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and Northwestern were involved in the study.

Source: Georgia Tech

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Telemedicine consultations from pediatric specialists reduce the number of drug errors in rural emergency departments, new research shows.

Rural physicians face distinct disadvantages when providing critical care for severely ill or injured pediatric patients, researchers say. In addition to lacking pediatric specialty training and experience treating children, emergency physicians in small rural hospitals often lack access to electronic medical records, computerized order entry, and 24-hour pharmacist coverage.

Previous studies have confirmed that children are at greater risk when treated in rural emergency rooms.

“In children, there’s a higher risk of medication errors because the drug doses are based on weight,” says Madan Dharmar, assistant research professor in the Pediatric Telemedicine Program at the University of California, Davis. “Because many of these physicians are not specialists in the treatment of children, there tends to be more errors.

“We wanted to look at medication errors and see how telemedicine consultations impacted those rates, compared to telephone consultations or no consultations at all,” adds Dharmar.

“We know that having a specialist treat children lowers the risk of medication errors. However, no one had ever studied whether specialists could use telemedicine to have the same effect.”

Visual telemedicine improves care

Published in the journal Pediatrics, the study looked at the care provided to 234 patients.

In 73 cases (31 percent), a pediatric critical care specialist conferred, over a secure connection, with an emergency physician, the patient, a nurse and a parent or guardian (when available). In 85 cases (36 percent), the specialty consultations were conducted by telephone. In 76 cases (32 percent), the emergency department team received no specialist consult.

The results highlight how well these telemedicine consultations reduce medication errors. The error rate for the telemedicine group was 3.4 percent compared to 10.8 percent for telephone consultations and 12.5 percent when there were no consults. The most common errors were incorrect doses. Telemedicine patients had far fewer dosage errors.

“Our results clearly show that using telemedicine to increase specialist presence lowers the risk of medication errors among seriously ill children,” Dharmar says.

In particular, the contrast between the telemedicine and telephone error rates seems to indicate that visual interaction is a key component to improving care.

The eight rural hospitals in the study were provided telemedicine services, high-resolution monitors, and secure power supplies to facilitate the consultations. In addition, pediatric critical care specialists were available around-the-clock to provide the consults.

98,000 preventable deaths

To determine the error rates, researchers looked at charts from the eight hospitals. Patients were older than one day and younger than 17 years and were chosen based on their high level of illness or injury. Emergency department physicians made their own decisions on whether to take advantage of the telemedicine tools.

The findings could have a significant impact on care for all patients. According to the Institute of Medicine, hospital medical errors cause 98,000 preventable deaths each year.

“It’s a win-win for both the specialist, who can see the patients and provide better assessments and care,” says Dharmar, “and for the rural provider, who can deliver a higher level of care right there in their community.”

Researchers from UC San Francisco and UC Irvine contributed to the study that was funded the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Emergency Medical Services for Children, Office for the Advancement of Telehealth, the California Healthcare Foundation, and the William Randolph Hearst Foundations.

Source: UC Davis

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People who live with chronic pain may need to build a new relationship with their body, rather than try to maintain their regular lifestyle.

Researchers say patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain often struggle with a sense of self and may find it difficult to justify their condition to themselves and to those around them.

For a new study published in the journal Health Services and Delivery Research, scientists compiled the findings of 77 studies of chronic musculoskeletal pain to understand the experiences of patients who suffer from the condition.

Key findings include:

• Patients may struggle with the fundamental relationship with their body and have a sense that it is no longer “the real me.”
• Patients may experience a loss of certainty for the future, and be constantly aware of the restrictions of their body.
• Patients feel lost in the health care system and believe there is no answer to their pain.
• Patients find it impossible to “prove” their pain and worry “if I appear ‘too sick’ or ‘not sick enough’ then no one will believe me.”

“Being able to collate this vast amount of information from patients paints a worrying picture about the experiences they have with chronic non-malignant pain,” says Kate Seers, professor of health research at the University of Warwick Medical School.

Legitimize pain

“Our goal has to be to use this information to improve our understanding of their condition and, consequently, the quality of care we can provide.

“Having patients feel that they have to legitimize their pain, and the sense that doctors might not believe them, is something that should really concern us as health care professionals.”

To move forward with their lives, researchers say people with chronic pain need to build a new relationship with their body and redefine what is “normal,” rather than try to maintain the same lifestyle. By developing an understanding of what their body is capable of, patients can become confident to make choices that will help them live with the pain.

“This paper shows there can be value in discussing the condition with other people who are going through the same experience and knowing that you are not alone,” says Francine Toye, of Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust.

“Of course you can learn about your condition from various sources, but sharing your experience seems to really help people to move forward.”

Source: University of Warwick

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Throughout the now nearly five year history of this blog, I’ve written extensively about the dynamics of rape, who the rapists are, how they operate and what has to happen in the culture to make them stop.  Much of this is broad, and involves decades of change.  In the words of an old Jewish saying imparted to me by Jaclyn Friedman, “it is not yours to complete the work; neither is it yours to desist from it.”

But rape the social problem takes decades to solve, and the rapes that happen to us or our friends or the people we love don’t happen over decades, they happen all of a sudden.  When people read things like my responses to Emily Yoffe, they want to know, “I don’t have decades.  What do I do now?”

The activist answer to this question, in the broadest terms, is really easy.  You do what you can, with what you have, where you are.  What does that mean practically?  Here is what I think it means, today, and starting tomorrow.  Because this is coming up on the context of the Yoffe piece, I’m going to primarily address one common area where repeat-offender acquaintance rapists operate, adult and young adult social environments in the US, especially those where alcohol is the social drug of choice.  This leaves out stranger rape, where the dynamics are very different.  It also leaves out a whole slew of other circumstances that repeat rapists use.  For example, in institutional settings, like inpatient facilities and prisons, or in the armed forces, or in the certain sports environments or workplaces, there are very different dynamics and, probably, very different solutions.  I am not going to try to address those, though, because I don’t know enough about them.

What To Do Today: Cockblocking Rapists

The paradigmatic repeat rapist uses a set of tactics that work, and they go like this:  push alcohol, test boundaries, physically isolate the target, and narrow the target’s options.  Look for that, and break it up.  In the rapes of juveniles now being reported in Missouri, what did the older boys do?  The girls were already smashed, but they pushed more alcohol, they put them in separate rooms, isolated from each other and with no friendly faces around.  The person looking to get the drunk drunker, and then alone, is not to be trusted.

Spot The Boundary Testing

Look for the boundary testing.  If a rapist wants to buy someone a drink, and doesn’t take no  for an answer, what he got for his money is that the target can be talked out of “no.”

Not everyone who pushes boundaries is a rapist.  Some people think they can touch without asking, because they have absorbed some terrible ideas, or because they are in social circumstances –like some highly sexualized environments — where they think they can touch whoever and however they want.  That’s boorish, but it’s not the same thing as what the rapist does because the motive is different.  Someone who gropes or smacks like they have permission even when they don’t may think it’s funny, may think it’s cute, may think it’s a good way to get laid.  I have a problem with that, because that behavior makes it tougher for everyone else to see what the rapists are doing. But what the rapists do, they do for a different reason.

What the rapists do is target selection. They are looking for someone whose boundaries they can violate, and who won’t or can’t stand up for themselves.  The best targets, the ones who offer the rapists the best chance of getting away with it, are those who won’t report — or who will never even admit to themselves that what happened was rape.  The way the rapist finds those people is to cross their boundaries again and again, progressively testing and looking for resistance.

That’s the pattern to look for.  If somebody seems to be testing to see if one of your friends can be pushed off of “no,” has a limited ability to stand up for themselves, that’s the red flag.

The most important thing you can do if you see this pattern is tell the target you see it.  Forewarned is forearmed.  In fact, somebody who is being targeted and pushed and tested may think they see the pattern, but may not trust their own instincts.  If they know you see it, too, then they may trust a bad feeling that they are already feeling.

Offer Options

If you think someone is acting like a rapist, sizing up a target — encouraging intoxication, testing boundaries — then one of their best tools they have is to limit the target’s options.  The rapist wants to get the target isolated.  But when “hey, let’s go be alone somewhere” isn’t working, it may be because the target already has a bad feeling.  If the target needs something — a ride home, a place to sleep, that sort of thing — then they may be willing to overlook misgivings if the rapist is the one offering it.  A rapist will always want to be the target’s only ride home, only place to stay, etc.

It’s pretty easy to keep that from happening.  If the drunkest person in the room has been left by their ride, and the person who has been pushing them to drink more is offering to take them home, they may not want to go, but they may not have a better option.  Providing that option may be what gets your friend away from the potential rapist.

Protect The Drunks

Of course, people don’t only get drunk or high because someone pushes them to.  Lots of people get drunk or high because they want to.  Longtime readers will know that I don’t, but it’s part of the culture and it would be unrealistic to ignore it.  Lots of people want to get drunk or high.  And lots of people want to do that and then be sexual with someone.  Now, that’s not how I roll.  I wish alcohol had a less prominent place in our culture, and I wish there were a lot less overlap between sex and substance use.  But that’s a really hard problem to change, and the whole point of this post is to talk about what to do today and tomorrow, not what to change over the next couple of decades.

So maybe you have a friend who wants to get fairly drunk, and then finds someone to have some sexytime with.   That’s fine.  But just like we tell our friends when they’re too drunk to be driving, shouldn’t we tell our friends when they are too drunk to hook up?  Nobody can really take the keys away, but there’s a point past which we’re all pretty clear something shouldn’t happen.  People who can’t walk or form a sentence clearly can’t consent, and if we let people wander off like that with a potential partner, we’re abdicating responsibility to people who have no ability to exercise it.  People can make their own decisions when they are capable of making their own decisions.

What To Do Tomorrow: Make Sure Everyone Knows

The thing is, rapists absolutely need one thing to operate.  They need people to believe they are not rapists.  Stranger rapists do that by trying to hide that they are the person who committed the rape.  Acquaintance rapists do that by picking targets who won’t say anything about what happened, or by using tactics that, if the survivor does speak up, people will decide don’t really count as rape.  If you want to do something about rapists, make sure people know they are rapists.

I’m talking right-now solutions, literally something you can do tomorrow, so I don’t mean that over time we can change the culture so that alcohol-facilitated assaults are understood as rape.  Lots of people are working on that.  What I mean is that you can tell everyone you know that the person that you know raped someone, because the survivor told you and maybe only a few other people, is a rapist.  You may not be able to say how you know, because you may not have the survivor’s permission to talk about it.  But you can quietly tell your friends.

Cliff Pervocracy wrote about this in 2012: someone that, within a tight-knit community, lots of people know or suspect is a rapist, so much so that they kind of work around that person:

Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it?  Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it?  “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there’s a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings.  But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”

Some people are like that missing stair.

And what people do is, without being able to prove it, sort of take for granted that this person can’t be trusted, stick someone on them to monitor them and keep them from being able to commit rape.  Cliff was very critical of this, as effectively if unintentionally covering for the rapist.  And I agree.  What communities need to do with the rapists in their communities is not to find a workaround; they need to actually deal with them, catch them and hold them accountable or throw them out.  But that has to start somewhere.  It starts with sharing information about the rapist.  It starts with the new people knowing what the allegations are, the old people knowing what the allegations are, the leaders knowing what the allegations are, and all the people who would make excuses for the rapist knowing what the allegations are.

Because of the way people work around rapists in social circles now, the communities keep kicking the can down the road.  New people often don’t find out until they’ve been around for a while, and some people know part of the story but not the whole story, and other people have a story about how one survivor isn’t credible but never have to deal with the commonalities between the several survivors’ accounts.

I drew a flowchart for my There’s A War On series, which dealt with consent violations, rape and abuse in kinky communities.  Here’s the flowchart.  What it shows is that if the stories of each individual survivor exist in isolation, the problem never gets dealt with.  The survivors are each on their own, and the fear or the reality of resistant community reactions will tend to silence them.  When those silos get broken down, the community can (and may be forced to) consider all the evidence together, which is really important to getting the fence-sitters and defenders to recognize that the behavior they are looking at is a pattern of abuse.

In the first instance, telling people what has been said, to the extent you can, will lead to the “missing stair” phenomenon, where people are wary of the accused rapist but feel like they can’t take decisive action, and so work around the person like a broken stair tread.  But what happens is that letting the stories grow legs will bring other stories out.  The serial rapists leave a trail of survivors; if the all speak up at once, the rapists can’t hide what they’ve done.

What can people do with unsubstantiated accusations?  Quite a lot, actually.  If you’re watching someone pushing one of your friends to have another round and getting handsy, would it be better to know if another person in your social circle said, “that person raped me”?  Yeah, that would be important to know.  And if two different people said it?  And, given the silence around rape and the low reporting rates, one story is often an important catalyst for another.  Once one story is out there, others tend to come up.  The more data, the easier it is to compare, and evaluate credibility based on multiple data points.  And what then?  Then, accountability.  That can look like a lot of different things.  It can look like prosecution.  It can look like some model of transformative justice, though I won’t try to make a pitch for transformative justice models because I won’t do it as well as its advocates would.*  It might look like ostracization, because any social group, when someone harms its members, ought to be able to say, “you’re not welcome here anymore.”

Some people will say that’s rumormongering.  Yes.  Yes, it is.  If stopping rape isn’t a good enough reason to spread rumors to you, then you and I have nothing further to discuss.

Some people will say that it’s unfair to do that, to simply take the survivor’s word, to say things about people without due process.  Well, due process is for the government, to limit their power to lock people up or take their property.  You don’t owe people due process when you decide whether to be friends with them.  You don’t have to have a hearing and invite them to bring a lawyer to decide whether to invite them to a party.  And let’s be honest, most of us repeat things that one person we know did to another person we know based on nothing more than that one participant told us and we believe them.  We do it all the time, it’s part of social interaction.

So if you want to do something, take the label, plant it on the missing stair in your social circle, and make it stick.

It Can’t All Be On The Survivors

I’ve seen the following two things happen:

(1) someone gets sexually assaulted, whether raped or violated in another way, and people say to the survivor, “you have to do something!  If you don’t do something, who will protect the next victim?”

(2) someone gets sexually assaulted, whether raped or violated in another way, and the survivor yells and shouts for people to deal with it, and the people who are friendly with both the survivor and the violator shrug their shoulders and try to stay “neutral.”

What these two things have in common is that in each case, the people around the situation place all the responsibility on the person who most needs help and can least be expected to go it alone.

That’s lazy, and that’s selfish, and it’s really easy.  It’s really easy because it requires nothing of the bystanders.  The people who are friends with both people may not want to accept that their friend, someone they are close to and think highly of, could do such an awful thing, because it calls into question their ability to judge people.

Or, they may just be afraid to confront people.  Confronting people is emotionally taxing, and it often irreparably ends the friendship.  In fact, about something as serious as rape, it invariably irreparably alters the friendship.  If you believe that your friend raped your other friend, and you say, “hey, you raped my friend,” then the old friendship is gone forever as soon as the words leave your mouth.  What remains is either enmity, or a relationship of holding someone accountable, just as tough and taxing as staying friends with a substance abuser who is trying to get clean and sober.  That’s not easy.  That’s a lot of work, and most people are not up for it.

The option most people choose, because it gets them out of that, is to choose to not make up their minds about what happened.  Now, you might think that people can do that with one accusation.  But believe me, people, that I could name several people who still “don’t know what happened” about a person — not the same person, but different ones — who has been accused not once, not twice, but at least three times of similar violations by three different people.

Just think about that.  “Hey, you’re still friends with Boris.  But X said Boris raped her.”  “Well yeah, but I don’t know what to believe.”  “Well, but you know what Y said, and Y’s account was a lot like X’s.”  “Yeah, but I don’t know what to believe.”  “But Z said Boris violated consent, too, and that’s three people …” “Well, I’ve been friends with Boris a long time, so I kind of don’t know what to think …”  (Trust me when I tell you, folks, I’m not making that up.)

What can you do tomorrow?  Don’t let your communities do that shit.  Hold your friends to a higher standard.

Now you may be saying to yourself that this isn’t relevant to you, that you never are in social circumstances where you see someone pushing people’s boundaries and pushing alcohol and looking to be the one to take the drunk “home.”  Or that in your community you don’t have someone who everyone kind of knows but doesn’t want to know is not to be trusted.  Or that you never see the bystanders sitting on their hands and making rape an issue between the survivor and the rapist.

And if that’s true, it must be nice where you live.

*I’m not a fountain of good references for transformative or restorative justice, either, but the restorative justice Wikipedia entry looks like a good place to start, and Tranformative Justice Law Project, and RestorativeJustice.org might also be useful reading.

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