Tuesday, 29 March 2011

Deaths from different types of energy production

Chart of death per energy unit (TWh) produced:


Taken from Edge 341 quote an unreferenced Swedish government report. Undated.  No idea on methodology etc but I'd presume it's within cooee.

Solar is missing, probably because it's very small.

I guess nuclear has upside potential on black swans events but it remains tiny compared to coal and oil.

Monday, 28 March 2011

Women's Underrepresentation in Science

According to this paper the problem isn't discrimination (mild positive discrimination was found at times) it's more to do with women's coice of having kids at the time when men are pumping their careers along.

"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."


Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science
Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/8/3157.full

Obesity

Population studies that try to link average life duration and average obesity are confouded by numerous factors, especially medical progress. However, virtually every study that I have seen that correlates body weight with disease prevalence finds a U shaped curve with minimum incidence rates at a BMI of about 22/23. Lower than this you are probably starving yourself or sick; higher and you are hurting yourself. Besides the usual cardiovasular and diabetes these results are common across many cancers, a range of other diseases and aging in general. These results are backed up by physiological evidence of cumulative negative impacts of bloated fat cells on the body.

There are some considerations that that weaken these results, especially the correlation between BMI and sedentry lifestyle. On the other hand, while BMI is easy to measure, it is an imperfect measure of obesity. Body shapes vary and research is indicating that it’s fat around the gut – aka “male fat” that is the problem more than distributed fat. (Or female fat on the breasts and hip which requires physiological effort to maintain so is a sign of youthful good health.) If a better fat measurements were used the impact of obesity on disease would probably increase.

None of this stuff is completely rock solid but the indications are pretty plain. The fact that you might now have an increased life expectancy despite being overweight doesn’t mean that much if the extra life is spent in a poor state of health, unable to do much, and kept alive by drugs. I aim to get as close you can reasonably manage to a BMI around 23 while maintaining activity and equanimity. People should take general body shape and fat distribution into account as well as the simple number.

(crossposted comment at johnquiggin.com)

Pedal Power

Portable Pedal Machines May Help Counter Harmful Effects of Sedentary Jobs!

Maybe I need one of these gizmos.  Desk workers do too many sedentry hours...

Polarising debates

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale looks at the cause of polarizing debates such as: global warming, gun ownership, school shootings, terrorism, nanotechnology, public health, nuclear power, foreign wars and just about every heated thread in Internet history. In short, the polarizing issue is "risk"- the perception of risk, and the proposed solutions to risk. It turns out people see risk in polarizing ways according to where they stand on a scale of cultural beliefs.

Attend to the Screen

(posted on link)

Fred Pilcher wrote:
> Like those infuriating scrolling messages that some TV stations use?

I guess we are generally heading towards news coming through web pages because it offers more scope for user selection.  What we need is an expectation that scrollers and continuously updating page gadgets can be "squelched" (to use the old radio term.)

As an interesting aside, it has been recommended that that infants under two are not left in front of TV.  Our attention is automatically directed to movement and change by circuits that we have weak ability to control.  This would be highly adaptive in a natural environment where change often signals risk and opportunity, but it is a biological mechanism that can be exploited in the constructed media environment where accumulated viewer attention drives profit.  Apart from the relentless shot jumps in TV, fully static shot are now very rare; even title frames and logo shots are now made with enough movement to suck attention.  In infants, the ability to control attention is virtually non-existent so they are forced to relentlessly follow screen changes.
Apart from the experience of being trapped in a Hell of undifferentiated valueless images, this is thought to have potentially serious developmental consequences as the infant doesn't have the time examine and model the visual field at an appropriate pace for developing visual discrimination.

Infants enjoy much simpler environments:

Older kids will typically have vastly improved ability to process images plus at least a modicum of capacity withhold attention.  As we age, cognitive processing throughput becomes a scarcer resource, and the desire to not attend to crap increases.  Well, mostly.  :)