Healthcare revisited

This was a hot topic last time. Now with the Senate passing its bill, what are some thoughts on the current legislation? Both the House and Senate have bills. Can we call this an accomplishment for citizens?

This is your brain (egg), this is your brain on...(broken egg sizzling)…television?

A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (1) reported that children and young adults (8-18 yrs) spend an average of 44.5 hours in front of a television screen, computer screen, media device (e.g., IPOD), or cell phone. Basically, this is their job plus some overtime. Is this the new addiction of the 21st century, or just a changing of the times where technologies for work and play merge?

Source:
1: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/Executive-Summary-Generation-M-Media-in-the-Lives-of-8-18-Year-olds.pdf

Power to the people?

Jean Jacques Rousseau writes in “The Social Contract” that leaders have 3 different wills. First, their individual wills which strive for self-promotion. Second, the corporate will, what Rousseau calls “vis’a’vis the will of the government” and includes the wills of other leaders. And lastly, the will of the people or sovereign will.

I will posit that in a perfect society leaders silence their individual wills, place the corporate will as a subordinate, and allow the general will of the people to dominate.

Any thoughts on whether the above is something we should strive for and ask of our leaders. Any qualms with the 3 general wills (additions, subtractions)?

Graymailing: A Blackwater Update (changed its name again?)

"

Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince's handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a "201 file," which would have put him on the agency's books as a vetted asset. It's not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations...

Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating "hard target" countries--where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency's designs. "I made no money whatsoever off this work," Prince contends. He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays. "I'm painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I'm paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/scahill2

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121502690

Kondratiev Waves

An explanation:

In this paper, it is claimed that the effective causality of long-term macroeconomic rhythms, most commonly referred to as long waves or Kondratieff waves, is founded in our biological realm. The observed patterns of regularity in human affairs, manifest as socioeconomic rhythms and recurrent phenomena, are constrained and codetermined by our natural human biological clocks, themselves the result of instructions impressed in the human genome and human cognitive capacity by the physical regularity of fixed cosmic cycles. Considering that a long wave can be conceived as an evolving learning dissipative structure consisting of two successive logistic structural cycles, an innovation cycle and a consolidation cycle, and applying considerations from population dynamics, chaos theory and logistic growth dynamics, a Generational-Learning Model is proposed that permits comprehension of the unfolding and time duration of the phenomenon. The proposed model is based on two kinds of biological constraints that impose the rhythm of collective human behavior - generational and cognitive. The generational consist of biologically based rhythms, namely, the Aggregate Virtual Working Life Tenure and the Aggregate Female Fecundity Interval, both subsets of the normative human life span or human life cycle. The cognitive consist of a limiting learning growth rate, manifest in the alternating sequence of two succeeding learning phases, a new knowledge phase and a consolidation phase. It is proposed that the syncopated beats of succeeding effective generational waves and the dynamics of the learning processes determine the long-wave behavior of socioeconomic growth and development. From the relationship between the differential and the discrete logistic equations, it is demonstrated that the unfolding of each structural cycle of a long wave is controlled by two parameters: the diffusion-learning rate and the aggregate effective generation t_G, whose product maintained in the interval 3<t_G<4 (deterministic chaos) grants the evolution and performance of social systems. Moreover, it is speculated that the triggering mechanism of this long-term swinging behavior may result from the cohesion loss of a given technoeconomic system in consequence of reaching a threshold value of informational entropy production.

This is a bit complicated, but I have noticed that this article in wikipedia has been changed several times in the last month or so (more attention focused on it for obvious reasons). I believe these kondratiev waves are real and that they correspond with the human lifespan not the 2 generations cited in wikipedia. They correlate with the human lifespan in this way: humans live a certain amount of time and society is a collection of humans which are demographically divided to young, middle, old. The lessons taught by the old (elders) to the new generations are lost when they die and therefore history is to repeat itself. This may be a key part of the equation for the recent and ongoing economic crisis. The question is can technology dampen or perhaps even eliminate these economic fluctuations. If people use it like we do, then probably, but most people don't (as addressed in a previous article by Taggart). So we may continue to see these economic cycles for years to come. Also, the artificiality of markets may play a role which I can't yet comment on (as in, power centers may influence markets to create boom-bust cycles or potentiate them at least as this would mean quite a bit of profit for those power centers).

1) Devezas, Tessaleno. A wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessaleno_Devezas

2) Devezas T.C.¹; Corredine¹ J.T. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 68, Number 1, September 2001 , pp. 1-57(57)http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/00401625/2001/00000068/00000001/art00136"

Endocrine Disruptors and Public Health, NY Times Article

A lot of stuff we've been saying all along.

"Likewise, asthma rates have tripled over the last 25 years, Dr. Landrigan said. Childhood leukemia is increasing by 1 percent per year. Obesity has surged. One factor may be lifestyle changes — like less physical exercise and more stress and fast food — but some chemicals may also play a role.

Take breast cancer. One puzzle has been that most women living in Asia have low rates of breast cancer, but ethnic Asian women born and raised in the United States don’t enjoy that benefit. At the symposium, Dr. Alisan Goldfarb, a surgeon specializing in breast cancer, pointed to a chart showing breast cancer rates by ethnicity.

“If an Asian woman moves to New York, her daughters will be in this column,” she said, pointing to “whites.” “It is something to do with the environment.”"

Kristof, Nicholas. Cancer From the Kitchen? A New York Times Article accessed on their website December 6, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=2

The World According to Monsanto

I watched a documentary on topdocumentaryfilms.com last night about Monsanto (a food company which was scrutinized in Food Inc.). (1) This company, using only that documentary to judge mind you, appears to be the most evil corporation perhaps ever. The most amazing thing is that this company is not simply working within our borders, but it seems to have supplanted itself as a powerhouse for food (their soybeans in particular) all over the globe. The documentary makes the claim that they are trying to control all of the food across the world.

I'd strongly suggest watching that documentary, in the meantime I'll post some of the wikipedia article:

It's 10 pages long and mostly about various corruption cases and scandals. The most interesting part is this:

"Corporate governance

Current members of the board of directors of Monsanto are: Frank V. AtLee III, John W. Bachmann, Hugh Grant, Arthur H. Harper, Gwendolyn S. King, Sharon R. Long, C. Steven McMillan, William U. Parfet, George H. Poste, Robert J. Stevens.

Former Monsanto employees currently hold positions in US government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), United States Environmental Protection Agency‎ (EPA) and the Supreme Court. These include Clarence Thomas, Michael Taylor, Ann Veneman, Linda Fisher, Michael Friedman, William D. Ruckelshaus, and Mickey Kantor.^[19] Linda Fisher has even been back and forth between positions at Monsanto and the EPA." (2)

1) The World According to Monsanto. A documentary on topdocumentaryfilms.com http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto/

2) Monsanto. A wikipedia article. Accessed December 8, 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

Research and Business Report for University of Minnesota

This is a fairly important piece tying several important ideas together. Recall that Minneapolis was not identified by Richard Florida as part of its own economic center (it's instead part of the Chi-Pitts megaregion). I will highlight several important points:

Thomas Lee Star Tribune:

1) Judging from the university’s recent track record of converting its vast reservoir of research into cash, the U faces an uphill climb. The school that’s known for inventing the pacemaker, the heart valve and one of the Web’s first Internet browsers is desperate for a hit.

At a time when the state’s economy is slowing and its medical device sector is maturing, the U’s long commercialization slump has attracted the urgent attention of lawmakers, venture capitalists and others concerned about where Minnesota’s next Medtronic or St. Jude will come from.

2) According to the U’s own business development people (see link to Powerpoint presentation at bottom http://www.cvm.umn.edu/img/assets/8965/Doug%20Johnson-Industry%20Academic%20Partnership.pdf), the 20-year success record of the U’s technology company spin-offs is only half the university average nationally — and less than one-fourth the success record of the nation’s premier schools. What’s more, in one recent year (2004), for example, the U of MN spun off only one company compared to 14 at the University of Michigan and 16 at the University of Illinois [Do you believe there is a correlation to this data and the fact that Michigan's business and law schools are ranked so highly?]. Why I am focusing here on spinoffs? Well, because, according the U’s own business development people, creating university spinoffs is “much more profitable than licensing (revenues)” to the school.



The University is a top 10 University (graduate) because of its link with the automobile industry in post-ww2 America. With America's main manufacturing base in 2009 being biotechnology and IT, if Minneapolis misses the opportunity it has with all of the surrounding companies, then it really deserves to be a middle-tier University forever.

Points to argue, America itself lacks the drive to be a manufacturing economy in any sector (this may very well be true) and so any effort on Minnesota's part is somewhat moot. Thoughts?


1) Thickens, Graeme. The Latest on U of M Technological Innovation and Commercialization.
An Article from minnov8 online magazine. Written Saturday October 18, 2009 and Accessed December 2, 2009. http://minnov8.com/2008/04/19/the-latest-on-u-of-m-technology-innovation-and-commercialization/

2) Stevens, Randall. See the Richard Florida Article.

10.78 G-Force Units

We have some wide receiver named Decker who was impacted (on a well-timed attack) by a Cal Safety.

See video here (00:03:39 in time length):
http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2009/UR_CONTENT_148395.html

"At one point it was as if Decker weighed 2300 lbs" (1)

We really shouldn't need MRI-imaging of these players' brains and spinal cords to know that serious damage incurs should we? Weigh this cost to the individual against the societal need for violence and destruction; the discussion becomes much more complicated.

1) Morrison, Deanne. "Gee' whiz, Dan Dahlberg University of Minnesota Physics Professor calculates the G-Forces in a Football Collision. UMNews.

Chomsky for a good laugh?

"I had a startling experience a few weeks ago. I travelled to Mexico City for talks at the National University, an enormous and very impressive institution with high standards of achievement and scholarship. Entrance is selective, but the university is virtually free. I then visited an even more remarkable institution, the college in Mexico City established by former mayor Lopez Obrador. Again, the facilities and standards are quite impressive. It is not only free, but has open admissions, though sometimes that requires some delay and sometimes assistance for students lacking adequate preparation. Shortly after I went to San Francisco for talks, and learned more about the California institutions of higher education. They have been at the very peak of the international higher education system. By now tuitions are quite high, even for in-state students, and cutbacks are affecting teaching, research, and staff. It would be no great surprise if the two major state universities, UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, will soon be privatized while the remainder of the state system is reduced considerably in scale and level. Needless to say, Mexico is a poor country with a struggling economy, and California should be one of the richest places in the world, with incomparable advantages. I mention these recent experiences only to emphasize that the recent cut-backs in higher education seen in much of the world cannot simply be traced to economic problems. Rather, they reflect fundamental choices about the nature of the society in which we will live. If it is to be designed for the wealthy and privileged, mostly engaged in management and finance while production is transferred abroad and most of the population is left to fend somehow for themselves at the fringes of decent and creative life, then these are good choices. If we have different aspirations for the world of our children and grandchildren, the choices are shameful and ruinous." (1)


Very succinct, very precise, very accurate. He just did what doctors do to patients but on the society level (doctors rarely make a diagnosis simply off one symptom even though it's possible). If that Mexican girl is in BIG this week, then I'm going to ask her more about the educational systems.

1) An email from Noam Chomsky. Chomsky.info Accessed Dec. 1, 2009
http://chomsky.info/letters/20091130.htm