Thursday, August 20th, 2015
Emily Singer, - Quanta Magazine
Stephan: Before you read this report, let me remind you of the report I published in SR in few weeks ago showing that meditators through their focused intentioned awareness could literally change their DNA. Now research is saying new genes can be created, demonstrating once again the power of psychophysical self-regulation.
Credit: Skip Sterling/ Quanta Magazine
Genes, like people, have families — lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member. That ancestor multiplied and spread, morphing a bit with each new iteration.
For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that this was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions.
Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. They’re the molecular equivalent of a mysterious beast discovered in the depths of a remote rainforest, a biological enigma seemingly unrelated to anything else on earth.
The mystery of where these orphan genes came from has puzzled scientists for decades. But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of so-called junk DNA, or non-coding DNA, the mysterious […]
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Thursday, August 20th, 2015
Malcolm Gladwell, - The New Yorker
Stephan: Something very fundamental and undemocratic changed in New Orleans after Katrina. This is a good summation of the story.
Social scientists find that leaving a dysfunctional urban neighborhood can transform a family’s prospects.
Credit Illustration by Matt Dorfman / Photograph Courtesy Carol M. Highsmith Archive / Library of Congress
The first time that David Kirk visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was at the end of 2005. His in-laws were from the city. Kirk and his wife visited them at Christmas, just four months after the storm hit, and then went back again on several more occasions throughout 2006. New Orleans was devastated. Thousands had fled. “I’ll admit I’d drive around the Lower Ninth, taking it all in, feeling a little guilty about being the gawking tourist,” Kirk said not long ago. “It made an impression on me. These neighborhoods were gone.”
Kirk is a sociologist at the University of Oxford. He trained at the University of Chicago under Robert Sampson, and, […]
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Thursday, August 20th, 2015
Sarah Laskow, - Atlas Obscura
Stephan: I have always thought of chastity belts as iconic objects of fundamentalism illustrating the deep sexual dysfunctionality of fundamentalists, and their obsessive need to dominate and control the portion of the population with vaginas. This essay addresses this, but it also provides some much needed clarity concerning the reality of chastity belts, a reality rather at variance with the myths.
A 16th century German woodcut
Credit: Image: Wikimedia
What was the chastity belt? You can picture it; you’ve seen it in many movies and heard references to it across countless cultural forms. There’s even a Seattle band called Chastity Belt. In his 1969 book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), David R. Reuben described it as an “armored bikini” with a “screen in front to allow urination and an inch of iron between the vagina and temptation.” “The whole business was fastened with a large padlock,” he wrote. With this device, medieval men going off to medieval wars could be assured that their wives would not have sex with anyone else where they were far, far away, for years at a time.
Yes, it sounds simultaneously ridiculous, barbarous and extremely unhygienic, but…medieval men, you know? It was a different time.
This, at least, has been the story that’s been told for hundreds of years. It’s simple, shocking, and, on […]
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Wednesday, August 19th, 2015
Stephan: The Emerging White Minority Trend is beginning to bear some very bitter fruit as attempts by White Rightists to skew the powers of government to maintain control of African-Americans and Hispanics comes into conflict with their growing political power. In the Red value states this is going to become a major point of contention that will shape politics in those states for years to come, but will eventually resolve because these Rightists are aging, and their number are becoming proportionately a smaller percentage of the total electorate.
Disgraced Shreveport Republican District Attorney Dale Cox
We already know that African Americans are disproportionately arrested/convicted for similar crimes committed by their white counterparts.We already know that black women are arrested up to 13 times the rate as other women.
Blacks and whites use marijuana at the same rate, but African Americans are arrested at nearly four times the rate.
Even unarmed African Americans are twice as likely to be killed by police than their unarmed white counterparts.
Now a groundbreaking new study absolutely confirms much of what we’ve believed to be true for decades about African Americans being denied a jury of their peers in districts all over the country.
In Shreveport, Louisiana, where more black men are being sent to death row than any single district in the country, district attorneys and prosecutors would routinely preemptively strike African Americans from juries at three times the rate of their white counterparts. For preemptive strikes, no rationale or reason is required.
Here are some reasons prosecutors have offered for excluding blacks from juries: They were young or old, single or divorced, religious or […]
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Wednesday, August 19th, 2015
Katie Allen, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: One doesn't often see a rational conversation about the relationship between technology and job creation. This report does a pretty good job of presenting actual data, and its conclusions may surprise you.
Credit: Blutgruppe/Corbis
In the 1800s it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days retail staff worry about automatic checkouts. Sooner or later taxi drivers will be fretting over self-driving cars.
The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. Are they taking our jobs? Or are they merely easing our workload?
A study by economists at the consultancy Deloitte seeks to shed new light on the relationship between jobs and the rise of technology by trawling through census data for England and Wales going back to 1871.
Their conclusion is unremittingly cheerful: rather than destroying jobs, technology has been a “great job-creating machine”. Findings by Deloitte such as a fourfold rise in bar staff since the 1950s or a surge in the number of hairdressers this century suggest to the authors that technology has increased spending power, therefore creating new demand and new jobs.
Their study, shortlisted for the Society of Business Economists’ Rybczynski prize, argues that the debate has been skewed towards the […]
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