Spring comes 10 days earlier in changed U.S. climate

Certainly seems to have come here early too... we've already planted the lettuce!

The Next Empire

China in Africa

For your listening pleasure

Daptone Gold

An Open Mind

On the history and state of OER from MIT open courseware to the P2P university

Chicken-care

For those who can relate...

Is Marriage Good for Your Health?

Initial research was an overwhelming yes... but our understanding is getting a bit more nuanced:

But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.
...
Kiecolt-Glaser told me that the overall health lesson to take away from the new wave of marriage-and-health literature is that couples should first work to repair a troubled relationship and learn to fight without hostility and derision. But if staying married means living amid constant acrimony, from the point of view of your health, “you’re better off out of it,” she says.

There is even a biological reason why, if your partner is under some stress, that a simple holding of the hand, or a hug can do wonders:

Researchers have also started to examine the salutary health effects of social relationships, including those of a good marriage. In one recent study, James A. Coan, an assistant professor of psychology and a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, recruited 16 women who scored relatively high on a questionnaire assessing marital happiness. He placed each woman in three different situations while monitoring her brain with an f.M.R.I. machine, which offers a way to observe the brain’s response to almost any kind of emotional stimulation. In one situation, to simulate stress, he subjected the woman to a mild electric shock. In a second, the shock was administered, but the woman held the hand of a stranger; in a third, the hand of her husband.

Both instances of hand-holding reduced the neural activity in areas of the woman’s brain associated with stress. But when the woman was holding her husband’s hand, the effect was even greater, and it was particularly pronounced in women who had the highest marital-happiness scores. Holding a husband’s hand during the electric shock resulted in a calming of the brain regions associated with pain similar to the effect brought about by use of a pain-relieving drug.

Coan says the study simulates how a supportive marriage and partnership gives the brain the opportunity to outsource some of its most difficult neural work. “When someone holds your hand in a study or just shows that they are there for you by giving you a back rub, when you’re in their presence, that becomes a cue that you don’t have to regulate your negative emotion,” he told me. “The other person is essentially regulating your negative emotion but without your prefrontal cortex. It’s much less wear and tear on us if we have someone there to help regulate us.”

There are a lot more interesting experiments in that article.

Krugman: Building a Green Economy

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)

Gadgets come and gadgets go
Gadgets come and gadgets go. The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you). The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you.

Google PowerMeter

... is a free energy monitoring tool that helps you save energy and money. Using energy information provided by utility smart meters and energy monitoring devices, Google PowerMeter enables you to view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online. Find out what people are saying about Google PowerMeter.

Unfortunately, it isn't in my area yet... here is a piece on the back-story.

Neologisms and such

Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning
submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers
are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. The
winners are:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have
gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat
stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you
absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after
you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question in an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by
proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with
Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief
that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets
stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts
worn by Jewish men.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to
take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding,
subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new
definition. Here are this year's winners:
1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that
stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer,
unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near
future.
2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the
purpose of getting laid.
3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders
the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit
and the person who doesn't get it.
6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are
running late.
7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra
credit.)
9. Karmageddon (n): it's like, when everybody is sending off
all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth
explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
10. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the
day consuming only things that are good for you.
11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.
12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem
smarter when they come at you rapidly.
13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just
after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets
into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast
out.
15. Caterpallor (n.): The colour you turn after finding half a
grub in the fruit you're eating.
And the pick of the literature:
16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid & an ass hole.

Episode 20: Corruption

Daniel Kaufmann and Mushtaq Khan debate the role and importance of tackling corruption as part of a development strategy.

Acceptance not tolerance