Diffusion Tensor Imaging Becoming Super Brain Assessment Tool

“While particular brain regions are important for specific functions, the capacity of information flow within and between regions is also crucial,” said study leader Scientia Professor Perminder Sachdev from UNSW’s School of Psychiatry.

“We all know what happens when road or phone networks get clogged or interrupted. It’s much the same in the brain.

“With age, the brain network deteriorates and this leads to slowing of the speed of information processing, which has the potential to impact on other cognitive functions.” _Science Alert

University of New South Wales researchers have utilised advanced diffusion tensor imaging (PDF research article) along with powerful computational tools to assess the efficiency of the total brain network of white matter, and watched overall brain processing speeds as they slow due to ageing.

The research team, led by Scientia Professor Perminder Sachdev from the UNSW School of Psychiatry, has mapped the network of fibres or ‘white matter’ for the first time, allowing them to examine the strength of connections between different cortical regions, or ‘grey matter’, which are responsible for specific functions. In the past, most research has focused on the more complicated grey matter without looking at how information flows between separate regions.

A new type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) combined with powerful computers allowed the team to create the map and see the whole network in great detail.

“Using a mathematical theory you can see how strongly the different regions are connected to each other,” Professor Sachdev said. “You can basically look at the efficiency of the network and with ageing, we can see a reduction in the efficiency of these networks.”

“What we wanted to see is how this relates to cognitive function, and we found that the best relationship was with processing speed, which makes sense because we’re talking about strength of information connections.”

Other areas strongly affected by the efficiency of neural networks were executive functions that manage other brain processes and the ability to navigate in space, known as visuospatial function.

Sachdev said the findings could help to some extent with dementia research, by offering another way of looking at the condition, but had already helped explain what happens in the brain when physical reaction time slows down in older people.

“It’s not that they can’t do the task, it just takes longer, and we have shown that this is related to structural changes in the brain, in terms of its neural networks.”

“The next step is looking at what determines the efficiency of these networks. We want to see if they are flexible or plastic, and whether maybe we can intervene.”

...The results of the study, which was based on a sample of 342 healthy people aged between 72 and 92, have been published in the January edition of the Journal of Neuroscience. _AustralianAgeingAgenda

Here is more from science alert Australia:

In the study, the researchers performed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans on 342 healthy individuals aged 72 to 92, using a new imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

Using a mathematical technique called graph theory, they plotted and measured the properties of the neural connectivity they observed.

“We found that the efficiency of the whole brain network of cortical fibre connections had an influence on processing speed, visuospatial function – the ability to navigate in space – and executive function,” said study first author Dr Wei Wen.

“In particular greater processing speed was significantly correlated with better connectivity of nearly all the cortical regions of the brain.”

Professor Sachdev said the findings help explain how cognitive functions are organised in the brain, and the more highly distributed nature of some functions over others. _Science Alert

It is important to stress the difference between speed of nerve transmission and speed of information processing for the brain. The two are related, and both are measurable (or calculable) using the DTI computational techniques, but information processing is a much higher order process than mere nerve conduction velocities. Knowing processing speeds -- particularly being able to compare whole brain processing and subsystem processing speeds and efficiencies -- provides more information.

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) can be used to assess several aspects of brain functioning, including general intelligence and executive function. It can also be used to assess multiple types of brain pathology, including schizophrenia.

Better brain imaging techniques provide clinicians and researchers with better information with which to form theories and plan therapies. As brain ageing comes to be seen more as a reversible pathology, more advanced diagnostic tools and therapeutic methods will be made available more widely.

Cross-posted from an earlier Al Fin Longevity posting

Have You Considered Living in a Fortress?

Martello towers were built, at great cost, along the coasts of Kent, Sussex, Essex and Suffolk at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Originally, there were 103 of these 30ft-high towers, with walls 13ft thick and roof-mounted cannons capable of shooting lead balls a mile out to sea. _Guardian

Guardian
These coastal towers still stand guard along the English coast, watching against the risk of Napoleon re-born. If you imagine yourself as a modern-day watchman, protector against the invading destroyer, one of these towers may be reserved just for you.

The overall effect is magical: brick fort on the outside, palatial home within. The main space, approached from the entrance lobby, is breathtaking, with the climb up the spiral stairs enjoyably spooky, and the top floor a revelation: all light, space and comfort, with little hint of ostentation. But then you don't need decoration when you have the sea and all its moods just beyond the parapet, with ships hoving in and out of view, and sunlight playing over that lichen-encrusted brickwork throughout the day. _Guardian

Some refurbishment will be required, however. Back in the day of Napoleon, they lacked such modern amenities as satellite television, the internet, electricity, and . . . flush toilets. Interior designs and standards of interior thermal control may have changed a bit as well.

Think it over. If Europe and the UK experience half the tumult that seems to be headed that way, you may be happy to be living in a fortress by the time the storm passes over.

Previously published at Al Fin Potpourri

A Novel Approach to Nuclear Fusion

HyperV Technologies Corp. is taking a novel approach to small fusion, using mini-railguns to accelerate multiple supersonic plasma beams into a central target of deuterium or deuterium-tritium.

According to the FocusFusionSociety website:

... the approach is geared towards deuterium and/or deuterium-tritium fusion, as opposed to advanced fusion fuels, but success there would of course remain a huge accomplishment. Some of the links on HyperV’s site are under construction, but the technical materials show a well-credentialed academic/industry team, a talk at the 2009 International Conference on Plasma Science, and a publication calculating gain from their design published in Physics of Plasmas. The work has also received funding from the DOE Office of Fusion Energy Science. _FocusFusionSociety

A spherical array of minirailgun plasma accelerators is a potential driver for forming imploding spherical plasma liners that can reach HEDP-relevant ( about 0.1 Mbar) pressures upon stagnation. The liners would be formed via merging of 30 or more dense, high Mach number plasma jets (n about 10^16−17 cm−3, M about 10–35, v about 50–70 km/s, rjet about 5 cm) in a spherically convergent geometry. The small (typically 1-2 cm square bore x 15-50 cm length) parallel-plate railguns with ceramic insulators would use pulsed injection of high-Z gas at the breech via fast opening valves to produce high density plasma jets with velocity in the 50-100 km/s range. Recent tests at HyperV using a single pulsed capillary discharge injecting into the minirailgun breech have achieved plasma densities in the bore approaching 10^18 cm−3, with densities in the jet plume exceeding 1017 cm−3 at velocities above 50 km/s. Total plasma jet mass in these 1 cm square bore tests has not yet been determined, but similar tests of an earlier 6 mm square bore 13 cm long device, with a roughly 3 μs, 100 kA current pulse using an aluminized mylar fuse starting from rest, yielded 90 μg of plasma at 50 km/s, and about 40 μg at 63 km/s. A modest scaleup of the railgun to a 2 cm square bore operating at longer pulse widths of 200-300 kA should be capable of accelerating a few thousand micrograms of high-Z gas (e.g. xenon) to above 50 km/s. This performance should be sufficient for reaching HEDP-relevant pressures. _HyperV Presentation_quoted at NextBigFututre

HyperV Technologies is a US Virginia-based research group that aims to achieve "tunable" nuclear fusion power on the 100 MW and up scale. Its approach is to utilise a spherical array of magnetic railgun supersonic plasma jet injectors aimed at a central "magnetic fuel" target.

NextBigFuture HyperV

Brian Wang has more at NextBigFuture including graphics.

HyperV PDF Presentation on Mini-Railgun Plasma Injectors

More Technical Papers about HyperV's research

Several fusion approaches have studied the "colliding beam" approach, without success. The conventional laser inertial technique used at Livermore is another type of targeted energy approach, which has mainly succeeded in eating up many billions in research grants so far. General Fusion's approach to target-focused fusion involves a hybrid combination of magnetic confinement and pneumatic compression.

HyperV attempts to focus multiple plasma jets onto a magnetically confined central target, in a switched-pulse fashion. At this time -- like most of the other small fusion projects -- it appears to be purely in the research proof of concept stage.

Taken from an earlier article at Al Fin Energy

Social Sciences in US a Hotbed of Politically Correct Bias?

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” _NYT

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spoke at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference last month. Professor Haidt mad a lot of waves when he came right out and called the US social sciences bigoted and quasi-religious in its biases and dogmatisms. Will Haidt become the next target of hate for having spoken his mind honestly? More about Haidt's talk:

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.” _NYT

Unfortunately this is a widespread phenomenon in the humanities and social sciences faculties, and in administrative staffing at universities. To the victor go the spoils. In this case what is being spoiled are the futures of students and entire societies.

Higher education in the US is overpriced and of decreasing quality. As faulty assumptions get incorporated into mainstream academic thought -- and into the thinking of research funding institutions -- the outcome of multi-billions of dollars worth of scholarship and research comes into question.

Affirmative action for libertarians, conservatives, and white males is not the answer. The answer is a complete housecleaning in higher education staffing and research funding to get rid of the ideologues and riff-raff who have managed to clog the system. Such a housecleaning of personnel is necessary at all levels, from K-12 to the highest levels of education. The stink of bigotry, indoctrination, and dogma throughout the educational system is too great to ignore any longer.

Jonathan Haidt's TED Talks page

More: The same phenomenon has been observed among economics professors as well
H/T Powerline

Do Junk Food Be Makin Kids Stupid?

ImageSource
A study recently published in the BMJ's Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found a small but significant IQ difference between 8 year olds who had been raised largely on "junk food" diets, and those who had been fed a "health conscious" diet most of their lives.

The conclusion, published on Monday, comes from a long-term investigation into 14,000 people born in western England in 1991 and 1992 whose health and well-being were monitored at the ages of three, four, seven and eight and a half.

Parents of the children were asked to fill out questionnaires that, among other things, detailed the kind of food and drink their children consumed.

Three dietary patterns emerged: one was high in processed fats and sugar; then there was a "traditional" diet high in meat and vegetables; and finally a "health-conscious" diet with lots of salad, fruit and vegetables, pasta and rice.

When the children were eight and a half, their IQ was measured using a standard tool called the Wechsler Intelligence Scale.

Of the 4,000 children for which there were complete data, there was a significant difference in IQ among those who had had the "processed" as opposed to the "health-conscious" diets in early childhood.

The 20 percent of children who ate the most processed food had an average IQ of 101 points, compared with 106 for the 20 percent of children who ate the most "health-conscious" food.

"It's a very small difference, it's not a vast difference," said one of the authors, Pauline Emmett of the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol.

"But it does make them less able to cope with education, less able to cope with some of the things in life." _France24_via_DiversityIsChaos

In this type of population study, it is important that as many potential "confounders" be identified and corrected for, as possible. Ethnicity and socioeconomic status are particular confounders for IQ. Without adequate adjustments and corrections for confounding at all stages of the study, the results will not be particularly reliable -- even with such a large number of subjects included.

The current study, based on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, uses data on children's diet reported by parents in food-frequency questionnaires at 3, 4, 7 and 8.5 years of age. Dietary patterns were identified using principal-components analysis and scores computed at each age. IQ was assessed using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children at 8.5 years. Data on a number of confounders were collected, and complete data were available for 3966 children. _PaperAbstract

Are the results of this study meaningful? Correlation is not causation, particularly when so many factors come together to form a child's IQ score on any given testing day. Multiple IQ scores would be more helpful than a single score, and naturally every little detail of the study's methodology would need to be dissected. Still, 4,000 subjects can provide a study with a lot of "power." If the scores were adjusted and corrected for SES and ethnicity, the findings may be important.

As always, it should be noted that childhood IQ is likely to change as a person grows to adulthood. And in terms of life success, sound executive function (EF) of the frontal lobes is more important overall, than high IQ -- although both sound EF and high IQ together work better than either one singly. A pity that there is no single easy way to test for the many parameters of a sound EF.

Women Choose Their Destinies in Science

Since 1970, women have made dramatic gains in science. Today, half of all MD degrees and 52% of PhDs in life sciences are awarded to women, as are 57% of PhDs in social sciences, 71% of PhDs to psychologists, and 77% of DVMs to veter-inarians.* Forty years ago, women’s presence in most of these fields was several orders of magnitude less; e.g., in 1970 only 13% of PhDs in life sciences went to women (1). In the most math intensive fields, however, women’s growth has been less pronounced (2–4). Among the top 100 US universities, only 8.8–15.8% of tenure-track positions in many math-intensive fields(combined across ranks) are held by women, and female fullprofessors number ≤10%. _PNAS Ceci, Williams

Famous Women in ScienceIs the relatively low number of women professors in math-intensive fields due to discrimination, or do women choose their destinies in their field of choice? A recent study published in PNAS suggests that the choice depends on the woman, and how she interprets her ensemble of personal and professional needs.

It's not discrimination in instances of different hiring, but rather differences in resources attributable to career and family-related choices that set women back in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, say Stephen J. Ceci, professor of developmental psychology, and Wendy M. Williams, professor of human development and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, both in Cornell's College of Human Ecology.

The "substantial resources" universities expend to sponsor gender-sensitivity training and interviewing workshops would be better spent on addressing the real causes of women's underrepresentation, Ceci and Williams say, through creative problem-solving and policy changes that respond to differing "biological and social realities" of the sexes.

The researchers analyzed the scientific literature in which women and men competed for publications, grants or jobs in these fields. They found no systematic evidence of sex discrimination in interviewing, hiring, reviewing or funding when men and women with similar resources – such as teaching loads and research support – were compared.

"We hear often that men have a better chance of getting their work accepted or funded, or of getting jobs, because they're men," Williams said. "Universities expend money and time trying to combat this rampant alleged discrimination against women in the hope that by doing so universities will see the numbers of women STEM scientists increase dramatically over coming years."

The data show that women scientists are confronted with choices, beginning at or before adolescence, that influence their career trajectories and success. Women who prioritize families and have children sometimes make "lifestyle choices" that lead to them to take positions, such as adjunct or part-time appointments or jobs at two-year colleges, offering fewer resources and chances to move up in the ranks. _WomenInScience

From the abstract to the study:

Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings. _PNAS

People tend to do what they are good at. A great deal of research demonstrates that at the most elite levels of math performance men outnumber women by as much as 7 to 1 or higher. Not only do math-proficient women tend to find themselves badly outnumbered by men in fields which are math intensive, but the higher testosterone levels of men in those fields tends to drive them to work harder over longer hours in order to achieve success -- even at the sacrifice of the men's personal and family lives. For men, it is a biological imperative to compete and excel.

For many women who happen to be good at math, other motivations and needs take precedence over the academic rat race. For women in fields dominated by other women -- such as psychology -- the competition is against other women who have lower testosterone levels like themselves. Stress levels are consequently not as high in terms of competitive performance anxiety -- although staff meetings may occasionally take on the ambience of a screeching cat fight. ;-)

Women who prioritize families and have children sometimes make “lifestyle choices” that lead to them to take positions, such as adjunct or part-time appointments or jobs at two-year colleges, offering fewer resources and chances to move up in the ranks. These women, however, are not held back by sex discrimination in hiring or in how their scholarly work is evaluated. Men with comparably low levels of research resources fare equivalently to their female peers. Although women disproportionately hold such low-resource positions, this is not because they had their grants and manuscripts rejected or were denied positions at research-intensive universities due to their gender.

Also, females beginning before adolescence often prefer careers focusing on people, rather than things, aspiring to be physicians, biologists and veterinarians rather than physicists, engineers and computer scientists. Efforts to interest young girls in these math-heavy fields are intended to ensure girls do not opt out of inorganic fields because of misinformation or stereotypes.

Also, fertility decisions are key because the tenure system has strong disincentives for women to have children — a factor in why more women in academia are childless than men. Implementation of “flexible options” to enhance work-family balance may help to increase the numbers of women in STEM fields, the researchers say. _SB

Women should be free to choose the nature of their careers, and not be pushed into career tracks which they feel do not suit them, by political feminists.

There is far too much denial of human biodiversity (HBD) inside politics, the media, and the academy. By denying the natural statistical diversity of human biology in the genders and other population groupings, these HBD deniers do untold amounts of damage to generation after generation of young people -- and to society at large.

Reasons for Economic Growth: Don't Forget Human Capital

NextBigFuture
MIT economists and computer modelers are attempting to answer the age old question: "Why are some countries rich and some countries poor?" (via Next Big Future) They have framed the question in terms of economic growth, and have surrounded it with sophisticated computer modeling and visual representations, but they seem to have left out a crucial, central variable: human capital.

In the MIT model, the key variables considered are the diversity of economic "inputs" and diversity of economic "outputs" for a country.

Economists think of production in terms of inputs and outputs. The outputs are the goods that a country produces. The inputs are everything that’s required to produce those goods. In 19th-century America, lumber was an example of a product with relatively few inputs. Exporting it required little more than the manpower and tools to chop down trees and haul them to shipping ports. Twentieth-century digital-signal-processing chips, on the other hand, are products that require a lot of inputs: the ability to extract and purify exotic materials like gallium arsenide, computer-aided design software to produce circuit layouts, and the chemicals and vacuum chambers required for the deposition of different layers of material, among other things.

Hidalgo and Hausmann argue that the diversity of a country’s production capacity, and thus the true strength of its economy, depends on the diversity of both its outputs and its inputs. Two countries could export the same number of products — they could have the same diversity of outputs — but if one exports only garments, it’s likely to have many fewer inputs than a country that exports a mix of garments and other light manufacturing, agricultural products, electronics and cultural goods. And the country with more inputs, the researchers claim, will adapt better to a changing world economy. _MIT

Hidalgo and Hausmann have found that GDP correlates pretty well with diversity of outputs, but it correlates much better with diversity of inputs. And the cases where the correlation breaks down could actually be more interesting than the cases where it holds, because they could indicate economies poised for growth. In 1970, for instance, the Korean economy had much greater diversity of inputs, according to Hidalgo’s measure, than the Peruvian economy; but Peru had twice Korea’s GDP per capita. Over the next 30 years, the relative diversity of inputs in the two countries’ economies stayed more or less the same, but by 2003, Korea had four times Peru’s GDP per capita. _NextBigFuture

Human capital can be represented by several different markers. Levels of educational achievement, for example, can be seen as one measure of human capital. Quality of pre-natal care, child-raising, and early education are other very crucial metrics. But one assessment of human capital which absolutely cannot be neglected in the analysis of a nation's long-term economic trajectory, is the average population IQ.

Per capita GDP vs. national average IQ. The regression line is shown in red. The correlation coefficient is 0.73.
There are many ingredients which go into the economic growth and success of a society, region, or nation. But any analysis which dances around the central issue of human capital, can easily be seen as a sophisticated smokescreen or obfuscation, rather than an attempt to get at the heart of the issue.

A nation's exports and imports are certainly important indicators of its economic health. But what is cause and what is effect? Clearly the MIT researchers are wrapped in a complex dynamic computer network of circular causation -- and potential infinite regress -- unless they can clearly identify variables which are more central and causative.

Political correctness has long been associated with the death of honest research and scholarship in many departments of academia. The ascendancy of post-modern multiculturalist ideology in the humanities departments and in administrative policies of universities has trickled down and spilled over into the social sciences -- even into some of the harder sciences. There are simply some topics and phenomena which one cannot even hint at, much less mention outright -- and far less make a topic of serious study.

Imagine all the time, effort, and resources being wasted at all levels of society, devoted to "dancing around the obvious." Entire huge and expensive departments of academia, media, industry, and government are devoted to obfuscating and denying truths which are obvious to any intelligent 6 year old.

But MIT has very big computers, very good tools of visual illustration, and very intelligent professors and researchers. Best to let them show them off, and pull the wool over society's eyes, using very sophisticated tools. Lie back and enjoy it. You'll feel much better about it all that way.

A Slipping Away of Competence and Human Capital Over Time?

...in a hard place, independence and self-reliance were the most sovereign of virtues and looked upon as the elements of character that made a man or a woman “worthwhile.” _Rex Murphy

NationalPost
In the National Post article quoted here, Rex Murphy is looking back at a recent bygone era of practical competence and self-reliance. Modern people in the year 2011 perceive their advanced technologies and lives of relative ease as signs of superiority. And yet, what is lost when generations of children are raised so as to be unable to lift a finger to provide practical sustenance for themselves or those they care about?

We know what is gained in terms of productivity, when specialisation of labour is practised. But when children spend most of their formative years -- outside of their school indoctrinations into political correctness and groupthink -- playing video games, watching cartoons and movies, texting friends . . . what will they do in a large-scale catastrophe to provide for personal and group survival?

...when I look to the Newfoundland of 50 years ago, look to it as my native province really was, not as I now retrospectively would like it to have been, I see in that hardscrabble time and place certain features of character and life that present a worth and depth all too rarely encountered today. Furthermore, I think most present day Newfoundlanders would agree with me — they were a better crowd then, those Newfoundlanders on the edge of our memories from a couple of generations back. They were a modest, hardworking, uncomplaining and above all a self-reliant people...

...The people of old did not advertise their diligence, industry, their life-long persistence at the hard, hard business of getting food and shelter for their families, and of making do with what they had. This was a time before the Oprah gene of emotional incontinence and reckless, exhibitionary self-worship so tormented our species. Newfoundlanders had the grand old gift of shutting-up about what they endured, why they endured it, and how much it cost them to endure it...

...They were tough, and in addition they were incredibly, ferociously self-reliant. Self-reliance was a foundation rock of their entire character. Be careful that you never accidently cast a doubt or a slur on a man or woman’s ability — and total determination — to be utterly free of any dependence on anyone else whatsoever.

I remember one old man who after a life of being on the water decided to build a long-liner all by himself. Cut the timbers, hauled the wood, planed, hammered and sawed away for the whole of two full winters: no neighbours to help, just him and a few tools. At the end to look across the road and see the magnitude of what, solitarily, he had built, the grace and finish of it, too — was to marvel that one man had so much within his own capacity and determination. I know he was proud that he, “just a fisherman” had so much skill. He was proud of his craft. But he was more proud that he could engineer this whole project all by his own 70-year-old self. He needed no one. Had to ask help of no one. Took money nor grant from no one. This was his boat....

...That self-sufficiency and the intensity of the commitment to it was the real hallmark of the Newfoundland character. It showed itself not just in large projects — such as building a boat — but in the lesser gestures of everyday as well...For many people, especially in the outports, this meant keeping a few farm animals and growing in a back garden of potatoes, cabbage and turnip. Together with fish and game, they had their own food supply. _RexMurphy-NationalPost

Murphy talks about self-reliance in Newfoundland, but the same ethic was practised across the rural areas of North America -- from seacoasts to mountains to the great plains. People were self-reliant because they had to be, and had been required to be so for as long as they could remember.

Modern people have largely forgotten any world except one where one supplies any need -- service or substance -- through a monetary (typically credit card) purchase. It is not so hard to imagine situations where the modern infrastructure of universal supply and demand might break down. A broader competence would come in handy in such situations. Another situation requiring self-reliant and resourceful competencies will be the opening of new frontiers in space and on/beneath the oceans.

A smarter society -- smarter than the currently deepening Idiocracy -- would raise its children with such possibilities in mind.

American Superbowl A Prime Showcase for Child Prostitutes

Each year, 100,000 to 300,000 American kids, some as young as 12 years old, are exploited in the sex trade, he says. The traffickers use the Super Bowl and other large events such as the World Cup to ply their trade, Allen says. "The traffickers try to seize that opportunity to do business," he says.

...Super Bowl XLV on Sunday in Cowboys Stadium is of particular concern because of Texas' 1,200-mile border with Mexico, which makes the state a bigger target for international rings, says Abbott, the attorney general. Agents are monitoring websites for signs of underage sex offerings and launching undercover investigations in the region, he says.
"We are watching them, we will find them, and we will prosecute them," Abbott says _USAT

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Child prostitution and human trafficking is an international scourge. Large criminal rings and international human trafficking groups often zero in on huge sporting events -- such as American Football's SuperBowl. The FBI and other US law enforcement agencies are taking a special interest in the Dallas, Texas, area for the next several days:

Incidents of underage prostitution have spiked during previous Super Bowls, leading to some arrests, says Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.

His office, working closely with the FBI, is bringing in at least a dozen extra agents from Austin and other cities to monitor and combat cases of trafficking in underage prostitutes during Super Bowl XLV in Arlington, Texas, he says.

"The Super Bowl is the greatest show on Earth, but it also has an ugly underbelly," Abbott says. "It's commonly known as the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States."
FBI agents often team up with federal, state and local law enforcement officials during Super Bowls to prevent terrorist attacks, ticket scams and other crimes, including high-priced prostitution. Law enforcement agents increasingly are linking up with child advocate groups to crack down on the trafficking and exploitation of minors during the event, says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. _USAToday

Mexico is only one of several international centers of global human trafficking. Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Arab middle east are other particular trouble spots for international law enforcement. Such global gangs of human slavery tend to prey on children as young as they can find, in an effort to satisfy the perverse sexual tastes of persons in possession of more wealth than decency.

The US SuperBowl is one of many large sporting and cultural events which bring out these vultures, and compel their prey. The solution to this sad problem must be multi-faceted, and far more clever than virtually all law enforcement is capable of imagining.

Previously published at Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!

Why Do Blacks Commit So Much Crime?

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Is it actually true that blacks commit more crime than other races? Perhaps this is merely a racist stereotype meant to cast blacks in a bad light? To the world traveler, it seems as if crime is worse in areas of higher black populations, generally. South Africa, Haiti, Jamaica, Detroit, and cities across the Americas and Europe. Perhaps the crime experienced up until now is just a preview of what is coming to areas where black populations are building rapidly?

* “Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against other blacks.” Forty-five percent of the victims of violent crime by blacks are white folks, 43 percent are black, 10 percent are Hispanic.

* Blacks are seven times as likely as people of other races to commit murder, eight times more likely to commit robbery and three times more likely to use a gun in a crime.

* “Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit violent crime against a white person than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.” (If decent black folks have trouble hailing a cab, and they do, these numbers may help explain it.)

* Black-on-white rape is 115 times more common than the reverse.

Even the two most famous sexual assaults by white men on black women in the last two decades � the Tawana Brawley and Duke rape cases � turned out to be hoaxes. _Buchanan_quoted from_The Color of Crime

The short list above was derived from official US government crime statistics, but published in The Color of Crime as a detailed report by a private group. Political correctness prohibits most people and organisations from publishing such simple -- but distinctly not politically correct -- statistics on race and crime.

The mainstream media will not report these documented facts to the public at large. Academics in Black Studies departments or otherwise, will not pass this information along to their students, although it would be helpful for them to know -- for their safety as well as their edification. Why can't western societies handle the truth?

Unless black leaders—real or media-created—muster the will to address the crime epidemic among black youth....the ongoing carnage will almost inevitably include an infinitesimal number of accidental police shootings of unarmed men. Criminal activity among young African-Americans is the poison of cities and of race relations; _CityJournal

Can we sort through all the carnage, intimidation, and hostility to discover the source of all this black crime?

My black crime problem, and ours, is that for most Americans, especially for average white Americans, the distance is not merely great but almost unfathomable, the fear is enormous and largely justifiable, and the black kids who inspire the fear seem not merely unrecognizable but alien. Not that we can’t understand where they come from, when we stop to consider. After all, the child is father to the man: and think how many inner-city black children are without parents, relatives, neighbors, teachers, coaches, or clergymen to teach them right from wrong, give them loving and consistent discipline, show them the moral and material value of hard work and study, and bring them to cherish the self-respect that comes only from respecting the life, liberty, and property of others. Think how many black children grow up where parents neglect and abuse them, where other adults and teenagers harass and harm them, where drug dealers exploit them. Not surprisingly, in return for the favor, some of these children kill, rape, maim, and steal without remorse. And around goes the negative feedback loop: reasonable fear feeds unreasonable white race hostility, whose reality in turn feeds unreasonable black paranoia about the justice system. _CityJournal

That is one valid point: with an illegitimacy rate of 70%, most black children lack for mature and wise guidance in their upbringing. How can they learn self control, and develop frontal lobe executive function, when the opportunity for training into responsibility and productivity is squandered? 40 years after affirmative action and the elimination of legal discrimination, is the problem caused mainly by passive neglect?

There is another reason being overlooked which makes the problem even worse. It is the active cultivation of hostility and hatred which is purposely cultivated within black communities by black-oriented newspapers, radio, community organisers, religious clerics from their pulpits, black "leaders", academics, politicians, and mainstream media. The hatred and hostility are carefully cultivated into a wild resentment which often has no other outlet besides violence.

If this picture of the mental life in too many western black communities reminds you of life in Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Jakarta, Manila, and tribally divided Africa, it is because purposely fueled human resentment, hostility, and violence, is associated with tribal juxtaposition and multicultural societies. It is the way that ambitious but underperforming men and women within a poorly-functioning community can achieve power and revenge against the better functioning community.

Children in these communities, from their earliest consciousness, are fed stories of outsider violence and abuse against the people of the community. Young minds are filled with tales of injustice and monstrous crimes against people like themselves -- until the young minds swell with resentment and hostility against the perpetrators. The process continues in the schools, churches, and even into colleges, universities, and public media.

The narrative which feeds into the resentment and hatred is finally the only narrative which is able to penetrate the mind and take root. At that point, bitterness is inevitable, although violence is not. But if the right combination of circumstances converge, violence eventually becomes more likely than not. If the boy falls in with the wrong crowd, if he's both quite suggestible and dull-minded, if the humanity of the victims has been systematically removed from his mind over the years -- violence becomes more likely.

Once a habit of using violence as a means to an end develops, barriers to greater violence in the future tend to shrink and fall. Any society which has allowed things to get this far in large numbers of child-men, is in for a nasty experience. Any society that allows things to continue like this, generation after generation, is a sick society that is apparently unconcerned over its own ultimate destiny.

Multiculturalism itself could be seen as a big part of the problem. Within the advanced western world, multiculturalism is almost inevitably accompanied by greater crime. Watch the crime rates soar, as Europe becomes more multicultural. Predictable, certainly, but apparently no one is willing to address the issue. Certainly Europe's low birth rates among Europeans creates a vacuum -- and a societal need -- which less affluent immigrants will wish to fill.

The "culture of resentment" which accompanies multiculturalism is going to be very difficult to arrest and subdue, since it appears to be so universal among humans. And resentment leads to violence and other crime, among the impressionable, and those who think they can get away with it.

What about this very Al Fin article? Could it not be said that this article feeds into the same type of resentment? Certainly it can be said. But ongoing and future crime is a real issue of current concern, unlike the slavery of the 1700s and early to mid 1800s, or the lynchings and KKK inspired violence of 50 to 150 years ago.

And what am I suggesting be done? More violence and hatred? Certainly not. The idea is to eradicate the hatred and violence, not to propagate more of it. But a society where acceptance of this violence-inducing resentment is endemic, and often encouraged, is a sick society which must be changed. Be aware that in changing such a sick society -- where the sickness saturates the government, the media, the academy, the unions, political activists, other special interests, the mainstream punditry -- the reaction against such change is apt to find expression in acts of violence.

But the change is coming, because the status quo cannot continue without leading to more uncontrolled violence, like the LA riots and the ongoing "simmering violence" in virtually every city with an appreciable black population.

In the US, a temporary prosperity due to the 1980s Reagan reforms of government temporarily reversed the Carter-Nixon malaise. But Mr. Obama has arrived on the scene just in time to accelerate the ongoing regress to the Carter rules of government and long lasting malaise and growing polarisation and resentments.

If the defenders of the status quo use violence against those who want a more peaceful future, an unfortunate propagation of constraints is likely to be triggered. Even peaceful reformers and ordinary people can only take so much violence against them. Chaos is unpredictable, but it often appears that a limited chaos is likely whatever path is chosen.

The first step would seem to be to stop the indoctrination into resentment, which so often leads to violence. Can that be done? Ask the purveyors of large-scale resentment if they are willing to give up their livelihoods. It is worth asking, if for no other reason than to receive an answer to your question.

Nuclear Energy Needed to Prevent Blackouts in Age of Global Cooling

If Texas had made the same dollar investment in new coal and/or nuclear power plants they would probably be snug and warm tonight. Do we we really want to sacrifice our families’ safety and security along with business productivity during extreme cold for the sake of political correctness? _WUWT

The rolling blackouts experienced in Texas recently were caused by problems with wind, gas, and coal systems to adjust to freezing conditions and increased power demands. Nuclear power is different from the other power sources mentioned above, and is clearly the power source of choice for an ice age or an age of global cooling (possibly along with enhanced geothermal).

US President Obama's Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been excessively slow to license and approve safer, more reliable new reactor designs, which makes it almost impossible for the US to provide more secure and reliable power to the people. Amazingly, the Obama NRC has still not given approval for construction of new plants using the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor.

If the NRC approves the AP1000 design, the agency could decide by the end of 2011 on whether to issue construction licenses to Southern and SCANA to build their nuclear reactors, according to Jaczko.

"We will continue to work on a schedule that puts us in a position to make some final decisions possibly by the end of this year," he [NRC's Jazco] said. _Reuters

Take your time, Jazco. It's only the future of the American society and global security that is at stake. Bureaucrats rule in the modern US, so pay no attention to the little people and their needs.

It should be obvious that the US can no longer allow its bureaucracy and Luddite political class to drag its feet on the future.

It is clear that, were our reactors allowed to retire as originally planned, the nuclear industry’s contribution to clean energy production would all but disappear by 2035. Fortunately, some license renewals, which extend a reactor’s lifetime by 20 years, have been approved and others are in line.... even in the best case, in which all licenses are renewed, about 25% of our fleet will be retiring in 2035, making it very unlikely that the US’s clean energy portfolio can grow in that time frame.

This alarming scenario should hurry the construction of new reactors. Though building 784 new plants is an impossible target, the AEF Committee judged that 5 to 9 additional nuclear plants could be brought online by 2020. As espoused in my first article, there is no need to wait around for research breakthroughs; proven reactor technologies are ready to be built now, as China continues to demonstrate. _leadenergy

The Obama administration and its Luddite counterparts at state and local levels, continue to drag their feet on providing reliable power sources -- while they continue to spout nonsensical gibberish about the "promise of wind and solar power."

But what good are wind and solar power when solar panels are covered with snow and ice, and ice-covered propellers on wind turbines prevent power generation -- even in perfect winds?

Wind generators also appeared to be having problems, said Fraser; he had received reports of some turbines shutting down because of issues with ice on the blades. "The wind was blowing yesterday, but I'm not sure wind generation was available because they had problems with ice," he said. _MetMusings

In the recent Texas power blackouts, wind was not the only power source to fall down on the job. Water pipes at coal plants froze and broke, gas pipelines failed to provide adequate pressures to gas plants, and huge piles of coal froze to unusable condition in the ice and snow storms.

The problem had several causes, but we have learned one thing -- in conditions of extreme cold, wind power and solar power are not sources that can be reliably depended upon.

The system needed all of the power it could get. Had more thermal plants been built, at least some of them would have been in service and helpful. Outages would have been moderated a little. Wind generated power was used and useful, but couldn’t be dialed up to produce more during a time of need. Wind power was neither the cause of the problem, nor of any special value in reaching a solution. _MasterResource

It is time for voters and ordinary people to jettison the lefty-Luddite politicians and bureaucrats who are exposing them to potentially fatal risks, all in the name of a failed ideology of faux environmentalism and pseudo-scientific carbon hysteria.

Nuclear power is the best power source for extreme cold -- for most advanced nations -- since all components of the generation system are contained indoors, well protected from the elements -- and do not rely upon the supply of fuel from the outside, which can be disrupted in many ways during extreme weather.

Sure, we need to replace above-ground transmission and distribution lines with secure, buried, and preferably super-conducting lines. But that will take time, and will require severe budget cuts in entitlement spending and public sector union benefits to provide the necessary resources. Before that can happen, heads will need to roll -- in a figurative sense, naturally. (human heads are not perfectly round, so they do not roll as smoothly as one might wish) ;-)

Al Fin was once an enthusiastic supporter of all types of wind energy -- and still supports small wind turbines for niche and off-grid uses. But human minds which are functional will continually monitor the world around them, and take in new information and data. In the course of time, working minds will change and grow with experience. Those minds which are incapable of learning, growing, and changing, may as well not even exist, for all the harm they are likely to do. Particularly when they are in positions of power and responsibility.

Other perspectives on this issue from nuclear bloggers Charles Barton, and Rod Adams.

Power blackouts play hell with electric vehicles. Best to keep your own reliable backup power source at home or place of business -- along with necessary fuels. Relying on the dumbed-down commons for life and death needs can be a fool's play, but in a society of perpetual incompetents -- the Idiocracy -- it is what it is.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Always keep an ample supply of food, water, fuels, necessary medicines, cash, power source, communications gear, etc., and the means to prevent riff-raff from taking it from you. The police are never more than 10 minutes away, whenever a situation calls for an instantaneous response. Perhaps a bit longer if they belong to public sector unions.

Some Product Claims Go Beyond Whimsical

GreenTechMedia
Some of algal biofuels company BARD's claims are too whimsical to put in a headline or title. But in an atmosphere of mainstream doubt regarding the short to intermediate-term viability of algal fuels, these claims are too cute to ignore. Keep in mind these claims are for yields, not for profitability:

"Biofuel Advance Research and Development, LLC (BARD) has entered into an agreement with The Green Institute Inc. to construct and operate a commercial scale algae system pilot facility located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The planned facility will produce algae biomass to be used to produce biodiesel, and other commercial products. The pilot facility is estimated to produce 20,000,000 gallons of algae oil / biodiesel per acre per annum (!) [emphasis added]. Initially, the pilot facility will produce 43,070 gallons of algae oil / biodiesel per annum using 6 modules of photo-bioreactors covering 84 square feet." _Greentechmedia

Got that? The claim is for roughly 43,000 gallons of oil from 84 square feet over one year. Since there are roughly 43,000 square feet in an acre, they claim that they would have produced over 20,000,000 gallons of oil per year had they expanded their lab facility to 1 acre size.

Here is what an algae guru from NASA and other algae experts say about the claims:

According to John Benemann [an algae expert], with 'normal' systems we can expect at the very most 5,000 gal/acre/yr from open ponds. This either means that BARD is doing something very revolutionary or they are not telling us that their yield of 9+ million gal/acre will take them 1,886 years to produce! We have a real problem with light unless of course we use artificial light and then we have an energy problem or a photonic materials cost problem... These guys may have discovered a miracle organism, but I suspect they are selling snake oil rather than making algae oil.

...According to Bob Walsh, the CEO of Aurora Biofuels: "While it is hard to comment on another company's technology when you are not under the hood, I can say we believe the absolute theoretical maximum is 10,000 gal/acre/year. The white paper GreenFuel Technologies: A Case Study for Industrial Photosynthetic Energy Capture by Dr. Krassen Dimitrov, PhD, March 2007 goes through the calculations.

"We also believe engineering systems [photo bioreactors and their ilk] will not deliver huge increases in productivity. Engineering has to drive out the typical costs of algae production but cannot double production. Our most recent scientific progress, which decreased photo inhibition increased our capability from the 2,000 gal/acre/year level to consistently producing above 4,000 gal/acre/year. Our scientific team believes 6,000 gal/acre/year is an achievable target." _GTM

Clearly BARD is doing a great deal of extrapolation, and is likely supplementing its module's sunlight with artificial light, in addition to feeding its algae some very expensive algal food. Yield is irrelevant if the process is not economically viable.

But there are ways to fudge the yield. Imagine a tall rotating cylindrical building, with a 120 ft radius and a height of 4,000 feet. The algae are grown on panels (or bags, etc) on the cylinder's outer surface. Given an oil yield of 5,000 gal / acre / year on the cylinder's surface -- but with the building's footprint occupying roughly 1 acre of land -- an algal facility could theoretically produce about 20,000,000 gallons of oil per "acre" per year, using only sunlight for photons.

Perhaps this is what BARD has in mind? They will have to find a cheap way of rotating the building to provide uniform sunlight for all the pannels. Of course their are other ways of sharing the sunlight -- rotate only the outer surface, or slide the panels around in any number of elaborate patterns . . . Or if BARD locates the building on a hill surrounded with mirrors that bathed the panels with sunlight, they might get away with a smaller building. You can probably think of a novel approach yourself if you give it some thought. But keep it between yourself and your investors, for now.

It all depends upon what BARD's investors or government sponsors are willing to go for. The numbers provided are certainly impressive -- large enough to throw your blog host into a whimsical mood at the very least. So whimsical that I hesitate to pour that scotch and water, savouring the natural whimsy instead.

From an earlier Al Fin Energy article

Guest Article: Features to Look for When Buying a Home

Guest article courtesy of Doorfly.com

10 Most Important Features People Look for in Homes
Posted on January 30, 2011 by admin

From small families just starting out, to established families looking for something larger, each home buyer has his own list of must have’s. I trust my list will give you an idea of what to look for if you are embarking on that journey or about to anyway. Maybe you are in the planning stages ­- you are in a different town – you know what you want – however it may not be what you can afford. So research is a good beginning.

1. Closet space. Oh yes, us girls need our closet space. Yet not only do we have closet needs, the men in our life do as well. The boys for toys, the men for whatever else it is they need to store.
2. Is there outside storage? All our yard tools need a place of their own. “Everything must have a place, and everything must be in its own place,” my elders use to say. It is still true, so outside storage for garden tools, yard tools, or outside toys such as bicycles and baseballs must have a place to be stored.
3. Kitchen cabinets – enough to spare. I love my kitchen. However after lived here for 15 years, I just realized I need another drawer or two or three. I have a pantry, and plenty of cabinet space above the counter tops, yet there are 5 drawers and I have need of 5 more. Ah well!
4. Once a three bedroom 2 baths home was sufficient for growing families. And while it is still ample for some families, it might be something to take into consideration. Do you have company often? Do you have a guest bedroom? If so having a third bath for the guest bedroom is very important. On the other hand, would you need a guest bedroom? If so than more than three bedrooms should be in your plans.
5. Do you like a fireplace? To me, a fireplace conveys the picture of flickering flames, a cozy setting, the dog lying on the hearth, Mom in her bathrobe reading a book, and Dad reading the wall street journal with the children playing a game close by. OK! I woke up – maybe that isn’t what you see in a fireplace. Maybe what you see is a mess to have to clean up from the ashes and soot! Let’s go back to my first question of #5, do you like a fireplace? Then by all means put that in your list of a homes must have’s otherwise there are homes that have none.
6. With many people working from home, having a home office may be one of your priorities. An office doesn’t have to be as large as a bedroom, however it is according to what your needs are for a library in the study area is concerned.
7. I love my garage. At one time that question was asked by Automobile insurance people was if you had a garage. Not sure if they still do but it sure is nice to have one to pull into when it is raining, or even after dark where I feel safe to get out of the car when I’ve let the door down. Whether two car or three car garage if this is on your list of features, don’t settle for less.
8. Do you like the openness of a floor plan? How about windows? While windows may speak dollar signs due to having to cover them, the trend now is not so much shutting out the light as bringing it into the home. Count your costs and weigh them against the likes and dislikes of windows. Personally I love the natural light windows give, and also the view it gives me to look out over my own domain.
9. It goes without saying an Energy efficient home is important. Be sure to inspect or ask questions concerning insulated windows and upgrades to the insulation if the home you are looking at is an older more established home.
10. Then there is the one level versus multi-level home. Some prefer sleeping quarters to be upstairs and away from the living quarters. While Mom may see only the multi trips she will be making up and down the stairs on a daily basis. Another point is to consider the age of the purchasers. Stairs are not a good idea the older one gets, simply because of the dangers as well as agility.

This is my list, and hopefully you have added more to your needs. Someone said, when we fail to plan, we simply plan to fail. I’ll agree in that if we have no idea what we want in a home, other than a place to put our furniture and a have a roof over our head, then that is what we’ll get. It is too late to make a list six months after you have hung your hat and made yourself at home. _Doorfly.com

Al Fin's comment: This list appears to cater mainly to a woman's wants. A man would want shop space, plenty of available amperage in the power service, outdoor utility building(s), water supply and sanitation, good lot drainage and elevation above flood plain, solid construction, new roofing, outer sheathing finish with no need to paint frequently, no termites, etc etc. Other special requests such as hot tub, pool, outdoor game area, indoor game room, wet bar, catering-quality kitchen, etc. would depend on the nature of the residents.

Survival-oriented folks would consider road and overland access and egress routes as well as general defensibility. Ample clean, dry, cool underground storage is a big plus for preppers.

Originally published at Doorfly.com

Alternative Chinese Tiger Mother Parenting: Send Your Gifted Children to a Reform School for Delinquents to Scrub Toilets

Jen-Hsun Huang, president of multi-billion dollar company Nvidia owes his success to cleaning toilets at a reform school for difficult teens in Kentucky. Huang's parents moved all the way from Taiwan (via Thailand) for the opportunity to send their children to American schools. Consider the reform school approach to be a "tougher love" approach to Chinese Tiger Mother Parenting.

Mr Huang was born in Taiwan. His father was a chemical and instrumentation engineer and his mother was a home-maker intent on teaching her children English even though she couldn't speak it herself.

The family moved to Thailand but political upheaval there resulted in Mr Huang and his brother being shipped to relatives in Tacoma. The two boys were later sent to Oneida Baptist Institute in eastern Kentucky. They thought it was a prep school but soon discovered it was for "difficult" children [a reform school]:
... Mr Huang ... remembers that his main job as a nine-year-old at the school was to clean all the toilets in the dorm.

He reckons that taught him the value of hard work, and says that he has worked his entire life:

"Work ethic is important. There are a lot of smart people around the world and today's industry is 24-7 global where nobody stops.

"Your competition doesn't go to sleep. Your customers don't go to sleep. Your competitors are everywhere. Your customers are everywhere. It doesn't matter how smart you are, because there is always someone smarter than you." _BBC

Finally rescued from reform school, he eventually graduated from Oregon State and Stanford – a school to which he has since pledged $30-million (U.S.) in donations. _Globe&Mail

For those who considered Amy Chua's approach to Chinese Tiger Mother Parenting to be tough, look at how much tougher the approach of Huang's parents was. Although Huang's parents and relatives now claim that sending the children to the school was accidental, don't be too sure. Tiger Mother Parenting is not for the soft-hearted, and you cannot argue with success. Most reform school students fail to derive as many useful and profitable lessons from the experience as Mr. Huang, perhaps because they were not as naturally gifted.

China's Problems Driven Underground?

In a Beijing suburb, beneath one of the thousands of faceless residential tower blocks that have carpeted the city's peripheries in a decade-long building frenzy, one of Beijing's "bomb shelter hoteliers", as they are known, agrees to show us his wares.

...There, in the city's vast network of unused air defence bunkers, as many as a million people live in small, windowless rooms that rent for £30 to £50 a month, which is as much as many of the city's army of migrant labourers can afford. _Telegraph

In a real estate bubble of epic proportions, China's upward-spiraling property prices are driving a million low income residents underground, and millions of others into squalor. In the quest to puff up China's economic numbers, the corrupt CCP is making life a misery for many tens of millions of ambitious, intelligent, hard-working people who deserve a more honest and trustworthy government.

Beijing is estimated to have 30 square miles of tunnels and basements, some constructed after the Sino-Soviet split of 1969, when Mao's China feared a Soviet missile strike, and many more constructed since to act as more modern emergency refuges. _Telegraph

Images are courtesy of Impactlab

The fact Mr Zhao can easily rent out 150 such rooms, with the connivance of the city's Civil Defence Bureau with whom he has signed a five-year contract and invested nearly £150,000, is testament to China's massive unfulfilled demand for affordable housing.

"Some 80pc of our tenants are girls working in the wholesale market and the rest are peddlers selling vegetables or running sidewalk snack booths," he adds. "There are dozens of similar air defence basement projects in residential communities. In this area, they say 100,000 live underground."

Checking out the price of property above ground it is not difficult to see why. To buy a small flat (860 sq ft) in the tower block above – a typically grim, grey concrete affair – currently costs more than £200,000. In a city where the average monthly salary is 4,000 yuan, the average person would take 50 years to buy such an apartment, assuming they saved every penny they earned.
_Telegraph_via_ImpactLab

There are plenty of empty residential buildings -- enough empty space for as many as 50 to 100 million people, according to some accounts. Of course, many of those buildings were built using substandard materials and practises -- courtesy of corrupt government inspectors and officials. The high prices do not reflect the likelihood of very short lifetimes for much of China's construction.

That Feeling in Your Gut? Intestinal Flora

"As animals ourselves, we have more than 1000 different kinds of microorganisms living in our guts ...._abcnet

Intestinal microbes can determine the quality of your life, and your perception of it. Your guts are the repository of the majority of your microbial complement. Life without "normal flora" would be a different animal.

Professor Petterson and his colleagues bred a number of mice under normal and germ-free conditions. In stantardised tests of activity, the germ-free mice explored more of an "open-field activity box", rearing up on their hind legs more often, and showed less of the signs associated with anxiety.

In studies of the animals' brains, they showed higher levels of a number of hormones, and even differences in the expression of over 170 genes.

The result does not paint a clear picture of whether the development of the germ-free mice is specifically "better" or "worse" for the animals, Professor Pettersson explained, but is a "very, very interesting" first demonstration that the bugs can have such profound effects even within the brain.

It follows a long line of studies that suggest the bugs are far more involved in mammalian function than just in their digestion. _BBC

Very interesting. The germ-free animals lived longer and seemed more curious, but they were very fragile to stress and various types of injury, compared to animals with normal bacterial and skin flora.

If we are to swim in a sea of bacteria -- as it seems we are destined to do -- it is best that our bacterial partners be sympatico with us. If we wish to avoid chronic intestinal inflammation, fatty liver, obesity, and a wide range of other pathologies and malaise, we need to pay attention to our bacterial friends.

Gut inflammation allows the intrusion of large numbers of various protein intruders which are better kept out of the blood and lymph systems. Yes, we can eat more yoghurt, or take probiotic capsules or powders. Not a bad idea, actually. We may even want to begin to gene-engineer our probiotics for maximal benefit against these ailments. In situations of grave extremis, we may be forced into fecal transplants -- as a last resort.

Al Fin clinical and synth-bio microbiologists recommend genetically engineered probiotics out of all the choices mentioned above: from germ-free environments to fecal transplants. But different situations call for different remedies. Consider each case individually.

Researchers looked in detail at the molecular effects of the engineered bacteria and found that the production of regulatory immune cells, rather than of inflammatory immune cells, was enhanced. "When we treat mice with the new strain, we see more accumulation and generation of cells that produce regulatory proteins, which lure and generate regulatory T cells," says Mohamadzadeh. The regulatory T cells, a type of immune cell, counteract the effects of harmful immune cells that attack the cells lining the gut, he says.

...Mohamadzadeh's team is also exploring engineered probiotics as a treatment for colon cancer. In preliminary studies in mice designed to mimic colon cancer, treatment with the modified bacteria reduced the number of polyps the animals developed by 90 percent. "We observed an average of just three small polyps in treated mice, compared to about 35 to 50," he says.

He adds that the bacteria's ability to reduce inflammation isn't limited to the gut; the regulatory cells migrate throughout the body. That means the microbes may also be able to help treat other diseases linked to inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. _TechnologyReview

Of course, once you start introducing targeted gene-engineered microbes into the gut, the possibilities for treatments and specific optimisations multiply rapidly.

You may be aware that peptic ulcers and gastric cancer are tied to a gastric microbe, helicobacter pylori. The development of counter-bacteria to H. Pylori would allow simple, food-assisted treatment for a number of illnesses specific to that microbe.

The same arguments could be applied to skin bacteria and other parts of the body where normal bacterial flora reside. There are plenty of diseases of multiple systems which are caused or made worse by absent or insufficient symbiotic bacteria.

But once we start applying, ingesting, and inserting engineered microbes for treatment and prophylaxis, we are likely to begin thinking about optimisation. Why take nutritional supplements, for example, when microbes can produce the needed substance just as well? The same applies to particular medications, enzymes, or hormones. And so on...

Now go eat your yoghurt.

Hydrogen: Accept No Substitutes

A helium atom consists of a nucleus containing two positively charged protons and two neutrons, encircled by two orbiting electrons which carry a negative charge. A hydrogen atom has just one proton and one electron. Donald Fleming of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues managed to disguise a helium atom as a hydrogen atom by replacing one of its orbiting electrons with a muon, which is far heavier than an electron. _NS

NewScientist
The cloak and dagger world of atomic promiscuity is generally ignored at the macro-level, where "a hydrogen atom is a hydrogen atom." But in the atomic world things are not so simple. Atoms may have too many or two few of particular subatomic particles and still chemically react with each other. Sometimes particles that don't belong -- such as muons or anti-muons -- can substitute for electrons or protons to create exotic dancers imposter atoms capable of bonding with conventional atoms.

In a feat of modern-day alchemy, atom tinkerers have fooled hydrogen atoms into accepting a helium atom as one of their own. The camouflaged atom behaves chemically like hydrogen, but has four times the mass of normal hydrogen, allowing predictions for how atomic mass affects reaction rates to be put to the test.

...Because it is so heavy, the muon sits 200 times closer to the helium nucleus than the electron it replaces and cancels out one of the nucleus's positive charges. The remaining electron then behaves as if it were orbiting a nucleus with just one positive charge, just like the electron in a hydrogen atom. The difference is that the nucleus is 4.1 times heavier than normal.

Fleming and his colleagues used this "super-heavy hydrogen", to test the effects of mass on chemical reaction rates.

...Two hydrogen isotopes, containing one or two neutrons and with two or three times the mass of normal hydrogen, can be used to test this. An even heavier isotope, with three neutrons, exists but decays too quickly. Muonic helium, which has the same mass as this isotope, lasts long enough to react with a hydrogen molecule.

Fleming's team shot muons produced at the TRIUMF accelerator in Vancouver into a cloud of helium, molecular hydrogen and ammonia. The helium atoms captured the muons, then pulled hydrogen atoms away from the molecular hydrogen and bonded with them.

The team compared how long this took with the rate of the same reaction using normal hydrogen, and with a reaction rate recorded in 1987 when a type of ultra-light hydrogen, called muonium, was used. Chemists formed this by replacing the proton in a hydrogen atom with an antimuon, the muon's positively charged antimatter partner.

As expected, the reaction with the disguised helium was the slowest, followed by normal hydrogen, then the light hydrogen [muonium]. The rates perfectly matched predictions from quantum mechanical calculations led by Fleming's teammate Donald Truhlar of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis _NS

Source Muonium
These exotic atoms and molecules do not last long, but for these experiments they only have to last long enough to perform the experiment and collect the data. Eventually, we may learn to incorporate exotic matter into long-lived commercial products, exhibiting unique properties which make them valuable.

The truth is, we have barely begun to comprehend the universe in which we live. As for all the other universes? Fuggiduhbowdit!