By Paul Krassner (Moronia) Politics: The electoral college will be replaced by a system where voters will choose the polling firm they trust the most. Rick Perry will copyright the word “Oops.”
Show Business: Angelina Jolie will legally adopt Brad Pitt. The Tea Party will become a popular sitcom. Capital-punishment executions will become a top-rated reality-TV series. The Taliban and al-Quaeda will be the final competitors on The Biggest Terrorists. Hulu and Netflix will merge as Netflu.
Fashion Trends: Arizona, Mississippi and Tennessee will refuse to recognize Leap Year. Prescription drugs will become children’s names, such as Ambien and Lipitor. Combination vibrators and insomnia cures will be invented, trademarked as Dildoze.
The Economy: The Supreme Court will download all corporations into embryos. Several million jobs will be created as Unemployment Insurance clerks.
International Relations: North Korea’s new Beloved Leader will allow almost 70 McDonald’s restaurants to open; he won’t allow them to sell any food. Saudi-Arabia will outlaw laughter. Iraq will become our 51st state. Products made in China will be increasingly pirated by American entrepreneurs. The most Christmas popular gift will be cans of pepper-spray in a variety of flavors.
Read the full story on Huffington Post.
By John Ingold (Denver Post) The passage of state medical-marijuana laws is associated with a subsequent drop in the rate of traffic fatalities, according to a newly released study by two university professors.
The study — by University of Colorado Denver professor Daniel Rees and Montana State University professor D. Mark Anderson — found that the traffic-death rate drops by nearly 9 percent in states after they legalize marijuana for medical use. The researchers arrived at that figure, Rees said, after controlling for other variables such as changes in traffic laws, seat-belt usage and miles driven. The study stops short of saying the medical-marijuana laws cause the drop in traffic deaths.
Rees and Anderson say their study does not mean it is safer to drive stoned than drunk. Instead, they write, increased medical-marijuana usage at home might change patterns of substance use and driving.
Mason Tvert, the head of the pro- marijuana-legalization group SAFER, said the study suggests legalizing marijuana would be beneficial in unexpected ways.
“People who are drinking drive faster, take more risks, underestimate how impaired they are,” he said.
via Report shows fewer traffic fatalities after states pass medical-pot laws – The Denver Post.
By Jenny Deam (Los Angeles Times) According to the Air Force Academy’s enrollment records, only three of United States Air Force 4,300 cadets identified themselves as pagans, followers of an ancient religion that generally does not worship a single god and considers all things in nature interconnected.
Still, the academy this year dedicated an $80,000 outdoor worship center — a small Stonehenge-like circle of boulders with propane fire pit — high on a hill for the handful of current or future cadets whose religions fall under the broad category of “Earth-based.” Those include pagans, Wiccans, druids, witches and followers of Native American faiths.
Chaplain Maj. Darren Duncan, branch chief of cadet faith communities at the academy says that it is no different from the worship spaces that serve this year’s 11 Muslim, 16 Buddhist and 10 Hindu cadets. There are also 43 self-identified atheist cadets whose beliefs, or lack of them, are also to be respected.
This is not about religious tolerance — a phrase Duncan, a Christian, rejects as implying that the majority religion is simply putting up with the minority. He calls it a 1st Amendment issue. If the military is to defend the Constitution, it should also be upholding its guarantee of religious freedom. “We think we are setting the standard,” Duncan says.
via Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans – latimes.com.
(Economist) A recent study found that bosses who don’t play golf are paid 17% less on average than those who do. Could this be because the qualities that make a good golfer—a mixture of hyper-competitiveness with strategic thinking and coolness under fire—also make for a good chief executive?
Probably not. The same study found that although golfing bosses are paid more, they do not produce better results for shareholders. One explanation would be that they are buttering up members of the compensation committee by inviting them to play wonderful courses like Wentworth. More likely, the correlation is pure chance.
via Golf and business: Why golfers get ahead | The Economist.
By Linda Searing (Washington Post) This study involved 623 children who were born in the mid-1980s weighing 4.4 pounds or less. Their health was assessed periodically, including screening for autism spectrum disorders at age 16 and evaluations to confirm the diagnosis, using standardized measures, at age 21. Overall, 5 percent of the youths had autism spectrum disorder diagnoses, a rate described as five times that found in the general U.S. population. The lower the birth weight, the higher the likelihood of an autism diagnosis, with a 10.6 percent prevalence among those who weighed 3.3 pounds at birth and a 3.7 percent prevalence at 4.4 pounds.
Source: November issue of Pediatrics
By Bevi Chagnon I’m a federal contractor who helps US government agencies produce, update, maintain, and publish those regulations you’re talking about. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of regulations from just about every federal agency here in Washington DC, and I have never found even one regulatory point that I thought was unrealistic for a company to deploy and abide by.
I say this as a die-hard capitalist, 4th-generation business owner with an MBA (concentration in finance).
If you have it, please show me documented proof that a government regulation caused a company to either cease its operations or lay off its employees. I’d love to have it for my records.
I believe that the American public is being spin-doctored about jobs and regulations. Reducing regulations won’t create more jobs. Sure, a corporation will save money by dumping toxic waste into a river rather than following EPA and NIOSH HazMat regulations, but I’ll bet that the saved money ends up in the paychecks and perqs for the CEOs and the dividends to stockholders. Because of our arcane tax laws and human greed, profits are not used to hire more employees or reduce the prices of a company’s products. On a corporate balance sheet, profits get siphoned out to the CEOs and stockholders in one way or another because otherwise the profits get taxed now before a company gets the chance to use them later to hire more employees.
Increasing a company’s profits by removing the costs of regulations will do nothing to increase the customer base. It will just increase the profits which will then will have to be distributed to the CEOs and shareholders to minimize taxes. No wonder these guys give heavily to election campaigns and spin doctors.
Jobs are created when a company has a product/service to sell plus a willing prospective customer base (or market) with enough money to purchase stuff plus enough corporate cash to jump-start the product/service.
But every industry has had a drastic reduction in its prospective customer base over the past 4 years (big corporations to small mom-and-pops, every business I consult with has seen this). It’s fairly well known that people are not purchasing at the same level as they did 4 years ago. Even sales of Apple’s iPhone 4S are below analysts expectations, and this is a “charmed” product from a “golden” corporation.
A better long-term solution would be to develop ways to:
- Put more money in the hands of consumers (both individuals and business consumers) so that they purchase more stuff;
- Help companies develop new products and services that consumers will want to purchase; and,
- Revise our tax laws and provide a method for companies to retain profits tax-free (or low-tax) for a period of time IF they increase the number of US employees within a specified time period and keep the jobs here in the US for x-years. If they don’t hire US employees with that money, then they’ll be retro-taxed on it. And if they take the jobs overseas too soon, they’ll be retro-taxed on it.
An example: for the past 2 years I’ve tried to stockpile a cash reserve so that I could hire a full- or part-time employee and know that I had the reserve to cover expenses. Both years I wasn’t able to stockpile enough and it was taxed as profit. Heavily taxed as profit, so much so that it took a big chunk of the reserve I had developed. Consequently, I still don’t have the reserve I need to hire someone and I’m now in year 3 without the extra employee I need.
In the end I think we can all agree that things suck right now. But I don’t think that deregulation—whether it’s deregulation of the finance industry or reducing environmental/manufacturing regulations—are a solution. Any money that’s saved will not trickle down to you, me, or anyone outside of the board room.
Interview by Douglas Clement (Federal Reserve Bank, Minn.) David Card seems like a pretty mild-mannered guy. True, he speaks with conviction, but it is confidence backed by meticulous research and tempered with open acknowledgment of the limits of that research. Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is the antithesis of a zealot.
Nonetheless, by virtue of the topics he investigates, he has frequently found himself in the center of the nation’s most incendiary controversies. And in many cases, Card’s findings have been at odds with the conventional wisdom. Raising the minimum wage modestly is likely to have a negligible impact on employment levels, he has found. Immigration has only a minor impact on wages of native-born workers.
But it would be wholly inaccurate to say he’s been drawn into these debates. In fact, he has scrupulously avoided taking advocacy positions. A public stance, he believes, might raise doubt as to the rigor of his methods and the impartiality of his findings—two qualities he does defend zealously.
In 1995, Card was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to an outstanding American economist under 40 years of age. In granting the award, the American Economic Association highlighted Card’s ingenious use of “natural experiments”—naturally occurring instances of the phenomena under study.
To study the impact of minimum wage legislation, for instance, Card looked at fast-food jobs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. To understand immigration, he examined the 1980 Mariel boat lift, when Miami’s labor force increased by 7 percent. In a just-released paper on unemployment benefits and job search behavior, he scrutinized data from Austria, where workers on the job for 36 months or longer get generous severance.
“If one unifying principle runs through David Card’s work,” observes Harvard economist Richard Freeman, “it is a belief in the power of empirical economic science—in the ability to use statistics creatively to make inferences about how the economy operates.”
By Mary Catt (PhysOrg) The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.
“How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.
The studies’ findings include:
- Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
- People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.
- Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
- Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.
(EurekaNet) Despite growing concern about the effects of media violence on children, violent television shows and movies continue to be produced and marketed to them. An Indiana University research study concludes that violence doesn’t add anything to their enjoyment of such programs and their characters.
In a research study published in the journal Media Psychology, Andrew J. Weaver, an assistant professor of telecommunications in IU’s College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues tested a common view presented by media producers that children like to watch violent programming.
“Violence isn’t the attractive component in these cartoons, which producers seem to think it is. It’s more other things that are often associated with the violence. It’s possible to have those other components, such as action specifically, in non-violent ways,” Weaver said in an interview. “I think we should be concerned about violent content in cartoons in terms of the potential effect. This is one way that we can get around that from a producer’s point of view.
“You don’t have to cram violence into these cartoons to get kids to like them. They’ll like them without the violence, just as much if not more,” he said.
Violent cartoons have been a staple of Saturday morning programming for decades and now are readily available on cable television channels specializing in children’s shows and cartoons. Many classic cartoons, such as those in the “Looney Tunes” series, have featured slapstick violence. But in recent years, action programs such as “Pokemon” and “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” have drawn much attention both because of their violent content and their popularity with young people.
Some content analyses have found that as many as 70 percent of children’s television shows have violent content.
“For many producers and media critics, the question is not if children love violence, but rather why children love violence,” Weaver and his co-authors wrote in the paper. “Our goal in this study was to examine children’s liking of violent content while independently manipulating the amount of action, which is often confounded with violence in the existing research.”
Co-authors include Jakob Jensen of Purdue University, Nicole Martins of IU, Ryan Hurley of North Carolina State University and Barbara Wilson of the University of Illinois.
The researchers used a sample group of 128 school children, ranging in age from five to 11 and from kindergarten to the fourth grade. There were a nearly equal number of boys and girls.
Research assistants showed each child one of four versions of a five-minute animated short created for the study and then led them through a questionnaire. The short was designed to resemble familiar slapstick cartoons. Four different versions of the cartoon were used. Six violent scenes were added to one version, which was carried out by both characters and in response to earlier aggression. Nine action scenes were added to another version. Two other versions had lower amounts of action or violence.
What they found was violent content had an indirect negative effect on whether boys enjoyed a program, due to how they identified with the characters.
“That was a little surprising,” said Weaver, the father of two young sons. “There is a lot of talk about boys being more violent and more aggressive, for whatever reason, social or biological, and yet we found that they identified with the characters more when they were non-violent . . . They liked the characters more and they enjoyed the overall cartoon more.
“This is good news. If producers are willing to work on making cartoons that aren’t violent so much as action packed, they can still capture their target audience better . . . and without the harmful consequences.”
On the other hand, among girls violence did not decrease wishful identification of the characters. Weaver believes this may be because such slapstick cartoons are geared more toward boys than girls. Also, girls perceived the characters as boys, even though they were created without sexual attributes.
“They’re not going to identify with what they perceive to be male characters, whether they are violent or not,” he said. “They didn’t prefer the more violent programming. They were just using other cues besides the character’s violent or non-violent behavior to determine how much they enjoyed the show.”
Weaver would like to apply his research to characters in more female-oriented programs, like “The Powerpuff Girls.” He also recognizes that violence is seen by producers as an easy means to introduce action and conflict into a story.
“Alternatives could be things related to speed — characters going fast, moving quickly. It was one way that we manipulated action in this study,” he said. “If you can increase action without increasing violence, which clearly is possible as we did it in this study, then you can increase the enjoyment without potential harmful effects that violence can bring.
The cartoon the researchers used, “Picture Perfect Thief,” featured a villain called Eggle, who attempted to steal a painting created by a hero called Orangehead. Eggle ultimately fails and the hero’s painting wins first place in an art show. It was created by a friend using Macromedia Flash.
###
Editors: An electronic copy of the paper is available from George Vlahakis at 812-855-0846 or gvlahaki@indiana.edu. Video of the cartoon created for the study is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU1-yL84bl4.
(AFP) Romantic novels threaten women’s sexual and emotional health, according to British author and relationship counselor Susan Quilliam, who blasts the books for defining the success of a relationship as the ability to crank out babies, while failing to promote safe sex and encourage patience in achieving female orgasm.
Ms Quilliam, writing in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, says that, according to a survey, only 11.5 per cent of romantic novels mention condom use.
“And within these scenarios, the heroine typically rejected the idea because she wanted ‘no barrier’ between her and the hero,” she notes.
The typical bodice-ripper ends “with the heroine being rescued from danger by the hero, and then abandoning herself joyfully to a life of intercourse-driven orgasms and endless trouble-free pregnancies in order to cement their marital devotion.”
via Romance novels pose threat to women’s sexual and emotional health – medical journal | Herald Sun.
