Archive for 2014
March 2, 2014
REPEAL THE HOLLYWOOD TAX CUTS: Oscar Protest: Visual Effects Protestors Take to Streets.
MORE SMART DIPLOMACYTM ON IRAN: Treasury Secretary Jack Lew Tells Unmoved AIPAC Crowd that Sanctions Relief Just Gives Iran ‘a Small Taste.’
THE DANGERS OF exercise addiction.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Calling Arne Duncan: National Democrats are silent as Bill de Blasio kills charter schools. I’m beginning to think that the Democrats don’t really care whether poor minority kids get decent educations.
BILL STRAUB: ‘We Need to Quit Acting So Freaking Defeated’: Dems Plot Blue Creep in Deep South. Easy. The way you turn states from red to purple is to make blue states so intolerable that a lot of people flee them for red states. Then those voters stupidly vote for the same disastrous policies in their new homes. So Andrew Cuomo, Martin O’Malley and Jerry Brown are already executing the plan. . . .
I THINK WE NEED AN EXCESS ENDOWMENTS TAX: Universities engage in “endowment hoarding.”
A downturn in the endowment equivalent to a 10% reduction of a university’s budget leads to a 4.9% reduction in the number of tenure-system faculty during the following year relative to similar universities that did not experience shocks to their endowment funds.
A shrinking endowment also results in cuts made to support employees such as secretaries, but found no similar effect on the numbers of adjunct faculty or administrators. All this suggests that that endowments are being used to keep administrators’ jobs safe during economic downturns rather than as means to preserve academic quality of the institution. More broadly, one has to ask what the point of university endowments is if there is such an emphasis on growth—rather than protecting the institutions they were created to benefit. The inability of universities to cut administrative staff when endowments are shrinking is also troubling.
At some point, you’ve hoarded enough money.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: How Gun Rights Have Expanded Over The Last 20 Years: A Story of Hope.
DISAPPOINTMENT WITH THE 21ST CENTURY: Today’s Apps Are Turning Us Into Sociopaths.
First, some quick background on how BroApp works: It not only sends scheduled texts, but comes preloaded with 12 messages to help users get started. The developers also took steps to conceal the automation going on behind the scenes; in places designated “no bro zones,” the app is automatically disabled. (After all, the jig is up if your girlfriend received an automatic text from you while you’re at her place.) The app even has a rating system that lowers the risk of the same message being sent too frequently.
Despite the fact that the app currently advertises the core benefit of spending “more time with the bros”, it included other scenarios in the initially testing according to the developers: “A girl who used it to message her boyfriend.” Someone who “used it to message her Mum a few times a week.” But let’s put aside the many gender implications for a moment. There’s certainly much to discuss there, and by no means do I want to dismiss the fact that this type of thing exacerbates power differentials and perpetuates the problem of sexism in the tech industry.
Uh huh.
HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: No Means No, and So Does Yes.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Want To Plan A Threesome? There’s An App For That!
UPDATE: I’ve disabled this link because a reader said there was a trojan on the site. It was YourTango, which should be safe, but better safe than sorry.
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CITY OF HOUSTON TO UBER: Stop petitioning us for a redress of grievances.
A 1029-HORSEPOWER minivan.
APPLE’S TIM COOK: “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.” Duly noted.
BOOK PLUG: Charlie Martin recommends Rolf Nelson’s The Stars Came Back.
FASTER, PLEASE: Compound That May Mimic Calorie Restriction Extends Life Span in Mice.
A synthetic chemical that may mimic the effects of eating a low-calorie diet extends life span in mice, a new study has found. Previous research showed that mice on a high-fat diet lived longer when given this compound, known as SRT1720; the new work shows that mice on a standard diet also benefit from it. This study is just the latest in an extensive effort to find compounds that may help slow aging and aging-related diseases. . . .
Recently, scientists have been testing synthetic chemicals that activate sirtuins much more efficiently than resveratrol, including SRT1720. The newest study, published in the February 27 Cell Reports, found that SR1720 extended the life span of mice on a standard diet by about 9 percent. They also confirmed their earlier work indicating that the compound extends the life span of mice fed a high-fat diet.
“I think the data in the paper is compelling,” says sirtuin researcher Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is not a co-author of the study, although he is a consultant for a company involved in the research. He acknowledges it is impossible to say for sure that SRT1720 is activating sirtuins and nothing else. But “that qualification would hold for really any pharmacological intervention,” he observes.
It may be a long time before SRT1720 makes it into human medication, however, if it does at all. Even then, it would likely be targeted at specific ailments such as heart disease or diabetes, not longevity, says Rafael de Cabo, a researcher at the National Institute on Aging and the senior author of the paper. “There is no such a disease called ‘aging,’ defined by the F.D.A.,” he says. “You cannot process an application for a drug for curing aging.”
Well, the FDA needs to get its act together.
IT’S THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE FUTURE, AND ALWAYS WILL BE: The Hydrogen Car Is Back—Again: Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota are rolling out new hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles for 2014. So are we finally at the dawn of the hydrogen age? Not so fast.
I test-drove a hydrogen car a few years ago. My review is here.
IN THE MAIL: From Charles E. Gannon, Fire with Fire.
TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 297.
A FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE: Putin Smashes Washington’s Cocoon:
A Politico report calls it “a crisis that no one anticipated.” The Daily Beast, reporting on Friday’s US intelligence assessment that “Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine,” quotes a Senate aide claiming that “no one really saw this kind of thing coming.”
Op-eds from all over the legacy press this week helped explained why. Through the rose tinted lenses of a media community deeply convinced that President Obama and his dovish team are the masters of foreign relations, nothing poor Putin did could possibly derail the stately progress of our genius president. There were, we were told, lots of reasons not to worry about Ukraine. War is too costly for Russia’s weak economy. Trade would suffer, the ruble would take a hit. The 2008 war with Georgia is a bad historical comparison, as Ukraine’s territory, population and military are much larger. Invasion would harm Russia’s international standing. Putin doesn’t want to spoil his upcoming G8 summit, or his good press from Sochi. Putin would rather let the new government in Kiev humiliate itself with incompetence than give it an enemy to rally against. Crimea’s Tartars and other anti-Russian ethnic minorities wouldn’t stand for it. Headlines like “Why Russia Won’t Invade Ukraine,” “No, Russia Will Not Intervene in Ukraine,” and “5 Reasons for Everyone to Calm Down About Crimea” weren’t hard to find in our most eminent publications.
Nobody, including us, is infallible about the future. Giving the public your best thoughts about where things are headed is all a poor pundit (or government analyst) can do. But this massive intellectual breakdown has a lot to do with a common American mindset that is especially built into our intellectual and chattering classes. Well educated, successful and reasonably liberal minded Americans find it very hard to believe that other people actually see the world in different ways. They can see that Vladimir Putin is not a stupid man and that many of his Russian officials are sophisticated and seasoned observers of the world scene. American experts and academics assume that smart people everywhere must want the same things and reach the same conclusions about the way the world works.
How many times did foolishly confident American experts and officials come out with some variant of the phrase “We all share a common interest in a stable and prosperous Ukraine.” We may think that’s true, but Putin doesn’t.
We blame this in part on the absence of true intellectual and ideological diversity in so much of the academy, the policy world and the mainstream media. Most college kids at good schools today know many more people from different races and cultural groups than their grandparents did, but they are much less exposed to people who think outside the left-liberal box.
Note that both Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney got this right, and were called idiots by box-dwellers.
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