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POPSReactionary anti-women "men's rights" groups go mainstream
More: Toward the end of her piece, Joyce makes a particularly fascinating point about MRAs' domestic violence arguments: Critics like Australian sociologist Michael Flood say that men’s rights movements reflect the tactics of domestic abusers themselves, minimizing existing violence, calling it mutual, and discrediting victims. MRA groups downplay national abuse rates, just as abusers downplay their personal battery; they wage campaigns dismissing most allegations as false, as abusers claim partners are lying about being hit; and they depict the violence as mutual—part of an epidemic of wife-on-husband abuse—as individual batterers rationalize their behavior by saying that the violence was reciprocal. Additionally, MRA groups’ predictions of future violence by fed-up men wronged by the family-law system seem an obvious additional correlation, with the threat of violence seemingly intended to intimidate a community, like a fearful spouse, into compliance.
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POPSIn defense of jaywalking More: today the word jaywalking is often used as a sort of blanket justification for the dominating presence of cars on city streets. It also reflects a social bias against those people not in cars. (Note this comment in a Federal Highway Administration report: "Still, almost no one can avoid occasional pedestrian status," as if they were discussing exposure to a venereal disease.) …the Netherlands, which has essentially legalized jaywalking, has an enviable pedestrian safety record. …Finally, read newspapers very carefully. A number of studies have documented that media coverage of traffic crashes is selective, framed in certain predictable ways, and often misrepresents the true frequency or nature of actual risk. Jaywalking makes better copy for columnists than actually probing the complex nature of traffic safety.
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POPSArtificial Brain on it’s way to reality. And yet, Dr. Henry Markram is willing to get accept the challenge to get this job done within 10 years. So, would this be another of those "fake" promises with the only purpose to get the scientist up on the midia or maybe a "real" one, giving us something that we have been dreaming of since the early days? And then again, we should wait to see the polemics this is going to bring.
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POPSWhat happens when schools care The picture about school food is not so dire. Watch how healthy teens look like, how they talk. Sure a diet influence behavior, and judgment, and common sense. Do we need more "research" to prove this? Kids cannot pay with their health for our ignorance and apathy.
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POPSNobody Knows What Nanoparticles Do -- Yet They Are in Food, Cosmetics, and Toys Some studies find little or no risk. Others are alarming. One reason nanomaterials can cause trouble is that they are small enough to evade the body's defenses. "The take-home message for me is, the behavior of these particles is very complex," Gruden says. "When you take a nanoparticle and put it into the environment, you have to know how it's going to behave. And we don't."
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POPSThe value of keeping things simple To me, there is no better example of this than the Gore vs Bush election. Bush consistently presented his ideas in simple terms that people could understand. Gore, on the other hand seemed to have a better overall grasp of the issues, but articulated them in long, often confusing, answers.
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POPS"Just stop being lazy": on being diagnosed with ADD/ADHD as an adult I know there are teachers out there, and parents, who would tell a kid with cerebral palsy not to flail like that, who would tell a kid with Down Syndrome to “stop being so stupid.” I spent the first eighteen years of my life hearing people telling me, in effect, to just stop having ADD. I have spent the last three decades telling myself the same thing. I want to call the last 46 years, struggling with this problem, this sieve of distraction clamped around my mind that has only just now begun to dissolve — I want to call it a waste. That would be silly. I’ve accomplished a hell of a lot…accomplishments look all the rosier now that I know I scaled those hills with a hidden bag of cement in my pack. But I’m sorrowful that it took so long. And I’m angry — searingly angry — to think of that eight-year-old’s enthusiasm as it succumbed to frustration and repeated insult, and to think of the twelve-year-old he became, certain that he was the worst waste of skin in the world. [/quote
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POPSORGANS TO GROW Creativity and science leading the way to new solutions for an old dilemma with far reaching consequences
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POPSBrains! Brains!! As we increasingly move onward in our quest to better understand how we work, the human brain remains on the frontier of targets to look at. No longer are we satisfied with the homunculus seated in our cranium in grand Oz fashion. Nor does the pre-science religious concept of soul address the practical workings of the human mind.
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POPSBloggers Beware Update on the proposed law to imprison bloggers for intimidating threatening acts online
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POPS2009 Food Trends: Organic-Natural-Sustainability To date market data has led IRI to conclude these trends in consumer packaged goods (CPG). * Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) is the world’s leading provider of enterprise market information solutions and services, empowering its clients to grow their business profitably in a complex marketplace.
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POPSRage Against the Art Gene On the other hand: Stephen Jay Gould. Until his death in 2002, he stood as one of the great champions and evangelists of science, as well as one of the most exacting critics of its tendency to overreach. According to Gould, life's history needs to be understood not just as the result of natural forces explicable by science, but also of contingency: strange, unplanned events that change the course of everything that follows. The arts, likewise, may be one of the many adaptively useless byproducts of a complex brain that evolved to perform other tasks. something rings false in the overriding impression created by evolutionary esthetics: that a mental trait is ennobled when we supply it with Darwinian roots. Gould, the self-described "naturalist by profession, and a humanist at heart," knew the opposite to be true. An interesting debate, one that surely is only beginning as we enter this era of progress...
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