ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY, - Salon
Stephan: This is the latest on an important downward trend: the collapse of American media. A healthy Fourth Estate is essential to the running of a healthy democracy. I have written about this a number of times in the past, but this trend is gaining momentum, and should be of concern to every citizen.
This report is excerpted from 'Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
The decline of journalism over the past generation, which has accelerated in the last decade, would be a less pressing concern if the existing news media were making a successful digital transition, or if the Internet was spawning a credible replacement. The evidence suggests on balance that emerging digital news media are havÂing a negligible effect upon the crisis in journalism. It certainly is not due to a lack of effort, as commercial news media have been obsessed with the Internet since the 1990s; they understood that it was going to be the future.
For traditional news media, it has been a very rocky digital road. A 2012 report based on proprietary data and in-depth interviews with executives at a dozen major news media companies found ‘the shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers conÂtinue to contract at alarming speed.
No Comments
CYRUS FARIVAR, - ars technica
Stephan: Here is a follow up to my edition the other day which focused on 3-D printing, touching on its effect on the gun control issue. This report confirms everything I said.
Click through to see the video.
Cody Wilson, like many Texan gunsmiths, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’-but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to help him with his craft.
Wilson’s nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds-illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process.
Last year, his group famously demonstrated that it could use a 3D-printed ‘lower
No Comments
REBECCA LEBER and ADAM PECK, - Think Progress - Health
Stephan: Once again we see the social outcome arising from a particular pattern of social values. Red value states deal hypocritically with human sexuality, and this is what those policies produce. Red value states also have the highest incidence of STDs.
Click through to see the very interesting maps.
Teen pregnancies have fallen to record lows. But according to a new report from Guttmacher Institute that breaks out data by each state, the decline is uneven across the country. New Mexico had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation in 2008 (the latest available data), followed by Mississippi, Texas, Nevada, Arkansas, and Arizona:
These states have something in common: They have poor sexual education in schools, and consequently tend to have lower rate of contraception use among teens.
New Mexico, the state that tops the list, has sex and HIV education in public schools. However, the sexual health information is not required to be medically accurate, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff points out that contraceptive use is lower for New Mexico high school students too, at 60.5 percent compared to 75 percent nationally. Other states with higher teen pregnancy - Arizona, Texas, and Arkansas - do not require sex ed at all, and if it is taught, schools are required to stress abstinence:
The decline in teen pregnancy is ‘almost exclusively
No Comments
LAURA MILLER, Senior Writer - Salon/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: The sense of persecution that is part of the DNA of Christianity begins here. I have to admit this story stunned me. Perhaps like you I had seen the early Christian period as a time of persecution and martyrdom. But I spent some time looking into this, and I think Professor Candida Moss' work is solid, and is destined to be the accepted view. We need to reconsider this period through a very different prism.
In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, a modern myth was born. A story went around that one of the two killers asked one of the victims, Cassie Bernall, if she believed in God. Bernall reportedly said ‘Yes
No Comments
Stephan: The cycles and processes of nature are always interconnected and interdependent, and this is an excellent example of what I mean. Poisons are killing honey bees, affecting wild bees, and climate change is breaking down the stasis of our food ecology. Unless this is reversed the results will be devastating.
Some of the most healthful foods you can think of - blueberries, cranberries, apples, almonds and squash - would never get to your plate without the help of insects. No insects, no pollination. No pollination, no fruit.
Farmers who grow these crops often rely on honeybees to do the job. But scientists are now reporting that honeybees, while convenient, are not necessarily the best pollinators.
A huge collaboration of bee researchers, from more than a dozen countries, looked at how pollination happens in dozens of different crops, including strawberries, coffee, buckwheat, cherries and watermelons. As they report in the journal Science, even when beekeepers installed plenty of hives in a field, yields usually got a boost when wild, native insects, such as bumblebees or carpenter bees, also showed up.
‘The surprising message in all of this is that honeybees cannot carry the load. Honeybees need help from their cousins and relatives, the other wild bees,’ says Marla Spivak, a professor of entomology at the University of Minnesota. ‘So let’s do something to promote it, so that we can keep honeybees healthy and our wild bee populations healthy.’
Unfortunately, a second study, also released in Science this week, makes it clear that wild bees aren’t […]
No Comments
