Pope Benedict has expressed "outrage, betrayal and shame" over the sexual abuse of children by priests in Ireland. A major re-organisation of the Irish Catholic church is planned and there are reports that some Bishops will resign over the scandal, which was exposed in a government report two weeks ago. On Friday one victim condemned the Pope's statement as "just words".
Pope Benedict has expressed "outrage, betrayal and shame" over the sexual abuse of children by priests in Ireland.
A major re-organisation of the Irish Catholic church is planned and there are reports that some Bishops will resign over the scandal, which was exposed in a government report two weeks ago.
On Friday one victim condemned the Pope's statement as "just words".
Video report at link.
Pope Benedict has expressed "outrage, betrayal and shame"
[mental reservation] at the Catholic church getting caught[/mental reservation]
Stand by for distraction announcements such as .. oooh attacks on gay people. keep to the Fen Causeway
Boris Vian, the provocative writer, singer, poet, inventor and jazz trumpeter, was underestimated during his short, fast lifetime. Yet he had - and still has - a huge impact on French cultural and intellectual life. Fifty years after his death, Boris has come of age. In the preface to his perhaps finest and most famous novel L'Ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) Vian wrote: "There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music...of Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly". Wilfully provocative maybe, but there was more than a hint of truth in those words: Vian loved jazz and everything frivolous. He refused to take himself seriously.
In the preface to his perhaps finest and most famous novel L'Ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) Vian wrote: "There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music...of Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly".
Wilfully provocative maybe, but there was more than a hint of truth in those words: Vian loved jazz and everything frivolous.
He refused to take himself seriously.
It's been a while since I've sung the praises of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera, which takes incredibly hi-res images of the surface of Mars. Thanks to the HiRISE Twitter feed, I found this incredible picture:
The police were called on the patron saint of children and the imprisoned today, as he tried to deliver Christmas gifts to children at a detention centre. The inspiration for the modern day Father Christmas, St Nicholas of Myra, was turned away at the gate of the Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire when he tried to deliver presents to the children locked up inside for administrative purposes. Jolly Old St Nick brought with him £300 worth of gifts donated by several London churches for the estimated 35 children currently detained. Dressed in a red robe, long white beard, and a bishop's mitre and crook, and accompanied by the Rev Professor Nicholas Sagovsky, Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, they hoped to spread some St Nicholastide cheer among the children of migrants detained there.
The police were called on the patron saint of children and the imprisoned today, as he tried to deliver Christmas gifts to children at a detention centre.
The inspiration for the modern day Father Christmas, St Nicholas of Myra, was turned away at the gate of the Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire when he tried to deliver presents to the children locked up inside for administrative purposes.
Jolly Old St Nick brought with him £300 worth of gifts donated by several London churches for the estimated 35 children currently detained.
Dressed in a red robe, long white beard, and a bishop's mitre and crook, and accompanied by the Rev Professor Nicholas Sagovsky, Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, they hoped to spread some St Nicholastide cheer among the children of migrants detained there.
There's a lot of chatter on twitter and elsewhere about Matt Taibbi's scathing report on the Obama administration's economic team. The criticisms seem to be more matters of interpretation than matters of factual errors although you can decide for yourself by comparing this piece by Tim Fernholz at TPM to the article itself. Felix Salmon weighs in here. Taibbi responds here.
Taibbi is doing his job; how people interpret the results of that depends on the particular barricade they shelter behind. keep to the Fen Causeway
FOR MUCH OF the 20th century, the world's premier industrial research facility was Bell Labs, research wing of the giant AT&T telephone corporation, in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From it came many key technologies which define the contemporary world. All of modern electronics, for example, stems from the invention of the transistor by three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley.Bell scientists also were responsible for the laser, many of the technologies used in radio astronomy and mobile phones, wireless local area networking, information theory, the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work done at Murray Hill.The latest of these (for physics) was presented in Oslo last week to Willard Boyle and George Smith, who on 17 October 1969 were trying to come up with an idea that would stop their boss's boss switching resources from their work to another department working on sexy new kinds of computer memory. In a discussion that lasted "not more than an hour" (as Smith later recalled) they came up with a device that changed the way we see the world. They called it a charge-coupled device or CCD, and it developed into the sensor at the heart of most digital cameras in use today.
FOR MUCH OF the 20th century, the world's premier industrial research facility was Bell Labs, research wing of the giant AT&T telephone corporation, in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From it came many key technologies which define the contemporary world. All of modern electronics, for example, stems from the invention of the transistor by three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley.
Bell scientists also were responsible for the laser, many of the technologies used in radio astronomy and mobile phones, wireless local area networking, information theory, the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work done at Murray Hill.
The latest of these (for physics) was presented in Oslo last week to Willard Boyle and George Smith, who on 17 October 1969 were trying to come up with an idea that would stop their boss's boss switching resources from their work to another department working on sexy new kinds of computer memory. In a discussion that lasted "not more than an hour" (as Smith later recalled) they came up with a device that changed the way we see the world. They called it a charge-coupled device or CCD, and it developed into the sensor at the heart of most digital cameras in use today.
So who deserves the accolades for inventing the charge-coupled device? "It depends on what you're celebrating," says Carlo Sequin, who joined the team at Bell Labs developing the CCD a few months after the project began. "My initial assumption was the Nobel in physics goes to fundamental concepts," says Sequin, now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. "If the fundamental concept was the charge transfer principle, then that goes to [Willard] Boyle and [George] Smith, and maybe Gene Gordon." But while Boyle and Smith, who were initially trying to design something analogous to magnetic bubble memory for computers in silicon, sketched out the charge transfer concept, they were not the ones who actually built the CCD, Sequin says. "If we try to find out who made the first practical image sensor, credit would go to Mike Tompsett, possibly [Gilbert] Amelio," he says.
"My initial assumption was the Nobel in physics goes to fundamental concepts," says Sequin, now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. "If the fundamental concept was the charge transfer principle, then that goes to [Willard] Boyle and [George] Smith, and maybe Gene Gordon."
But while Boyle and Smith, who were initially trying to design something analogous to magnetic bubble memory for computers in silicon, sketched out the charge transfer concept, they were not the ones who actually built the CCD, Sequin says.
"If we try to find out who made the first practical image sensor, credit would go to Mike Tompsett, possibly [Gilbert] Amelio," he says.
ON Christmas Day, Hollywood will blanket America with a most unlikely holiday entertainment. That's when "Up in the Air," the acclaimed new movie starring George Clooney, will spread from its big-city engagements to more than 2,000 screens. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a corporate road warrior for a small, Omaha-based contractor hired to lay off employees for companies that prefer to outsource that unpleasant task. Ryan has fired so many people in so many cities that he is approaching a frequent-flier status unknown to all but a few Americans.
Astronomers have discovered that Alcor, a star in the middle of the Big Dipper's handle, has a red dwarf companion. They found the new star, Alcor B, by using a mask called a coronagraph to block out nearly all of the light from the previously known star, now called Alcor A. In the above close-up, the actual diameter of each star is less than a pixel; the large halo of speckles surrounding Alcor A results from star's residual glare visible around the mask. When our ancestors looked at the Big Dipper, they sometimes used it as a vision test: Could you see make out two distinct stars at the point where the handle bends? The sharp-eyed could distinguish the "rider" from the "horse" -- the small star we call Alcor sitting above the larger star we call Mizar. Now it turns out that there are actually two riders on that horse. Alcor has a red dwarf companion that has just been discovered by Project 1640, a team that includes astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The newly discovered star, named Alcor B, is about a quarter the mass of our Sun, and about an eighth the mass of its companion, now called Alcor A. By using a mask to cover the Alcor A, the astrophysicists spotted a faint light nearby, and then they were able to show that this was from a red dwarf orbiting the larger star. "We used a brand new technique for determining that an object orbits a nearby star, a technique that's a nice nod to Galileo," says Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astrophysicst at the Museum of Natural History. "Galileo showed tremendous foresight. Four hundred years ago, he realized that if Copernicus was right--that the Earth orbits the Sun--they could show it by observing the parallactic motion of the nearest stars. Incredibly, Galileo tried to use Alcor to see it but didn't have the necessary precision."
Astronomers have discovered that Alcor, a star in the middle of the Big Dipper's handle, has a red dwarf companion. They found the new star, Alcor B, by using a mask called a coronagraph to block out nearly all of the light from the previously known star, now called Alcor A. In the above close-up, the actual diameter of each star is less than a pixel; the large halo of speckles surrounding Alcor A results from star's residual glare visible around the mask.
When our ancestors looked at the Big Dipper, they sometimes used it as a vision test: Could you see make out two distinct stars at the point where the handle bends? The sharp-eyed could distinguish the "rider" from the "horse" -- the small star we call Alcor sitting above the larger star we call Mizar.
Now it turns out that there are actually two riders on that horse.
Alcor has a red dwarf companion that has just been discovered by Project 1640, a team that includes astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The newly discovered star, named Alcor B, is about a quarter the mass of our Sun, and about an eighth the mass of its companion, now called Alcor A. By using a mask to cover the Alcor A, the astrophysicists spotted a faint light nearby, and then they were able to show that this was from a red dwarf orbiting the larger star.
"We used a brand new technique for determining that an object orbits a nearby star, a technique that's a nice nod to Galileo," says Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astrophysicst at the Museum of Natural History. "Galileo showed tremendous foresight. Four hundred years ago, he realized that if Copernicus was right--that the Earth orbits the Sun--they could show it by observing the parallactic motion of the nearest stars. Incredibly, Galileo tried to use Alcor to see it but didn't have the necessary precision."
Self-organizing comes to disaster management.
"The top-down and centralised nature of aid agencies fails to take advantage of the potential offered by the technologies. It's really quite a different approach from what they've done traditionally, which is that when there's an emergency, they go and sort things out," she told BBC News. Instead, she said, aid agencies and government disaster relief agencies could work best by simply providing a framework for the use of the technologies, coordinating their use by people in affected areas and allowing the free flow of information among those people.
Instead, she said, aid agencies and government disaster relief agencies could work best by simply providing a framework for the use of the technologies, coordinating their use by people in affected areas and allowing the free flow of information among those people.
New research by Simon Fraser University evolutionary biologist Bernard Crespi reinforces his theory that autism and schizophrenia are diametric or opposite conditions based on genes.
... "Our findings provide new insights into the 'genomic architecture' of these major human mental illnesses," says Crespi, who a year ago stunned the global scientific community with his theory suggesting that genes passed on from either parent can steer brain development in certain directions. ... Among their findings, data from studies of head and brain size "phenotypes" -the physical or biochemical characteristics of organisms as determined by genetics and the environment - show that autism is commonly associated with developmentally enhanced brain growth, while schizophrenia is characterized by reduced brain growth.
"Our findings provide new insights into the 'genomic architecture' of these major human mental illnesses," says Crespi, who a year ago stunned the global scientific community with his theory suggesting that genes passed on from either parent can steer brain development in certain directions.
...
Among their findings, data from studies of head and brain size "phenotypes" -the physical or biochemical characteristics of organisms as determined by genetics and the environment - show that autism is commonly associated with developmentally enhanced brain growth, while schizophrenia is characterized by reduced brain growth.
(I downloaded it sometime during '08 I suppose, attracted to the concept of a "social brain" which I considered an literary novelty apropos a body of research into cognitive development that has been published by psychologists since, oh, Freud. This construct or qualification of mental functions I find interesting because it reveals a persisting dichotomy or research biases among so-called cognitive scientists in hypothesizing primacy among mental pathologies, environmental (stimulants) or genetic (chemical). The findings, as enter public discourse, also contain moral and political values which bureaucrats lever into policy prescriptions. See for example Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics , NYT)
"Abstract: Autistic-spectrum conditions and psychotic-spectrum conditions (mainly schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression) represent two major suites of disorders of human cognition, affect and behavior that involve altered development and function of the social brain. We describe that a large set of phenotypic traits exhibit diametrically-opposite phenotypes in autistic-spectrum vs. psychotic-spectrum conditions, with a focus on schizophrenia. This suite of traits is inter-correlated, in that autism involves a general pattern of constrained overgrowth, whereas schizophrenia involves undergrowth. These disorders also exhibit diametric patterns for traits related to social brain development, including aspects of gaze, agency, social cognition, local vs. global processing, language and behavior. Social cognition is thus under-developed in autistic-spectrum conditions, and hyperdeveloped on the psychotic spectrum."
etc etc Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
"'People divide roughly, it seems to me, into two kinds, of rather a continuum is stretched between two extremes. There are people people and things people.' W.D. Hamilton (1996, Kyoto Prize lecture)
"1. Introduction
"We describe a new hypothesis that seeks to conceptually unify the analyses of psychosis and autism, two disorders of the human social brain (Burns 2004, 2006; McAlonan et al. 2005). The core of this hypothesis is that psychosis and autism represent two extremes on a cognitive spectrum with nomality at its center [descriptive stats SOP]. Social cognition is thus underdeveloped in autism, but hyperdeveloped to dysfunction in psychosis. We also suggest that these forms of deviation from normal social development [read, normative] in either direction are mediated in part by alterations in developmental and metabolic systems affected by genomic imprinting, notably via effects of genes that are imprinted in the brain and in the placenta [ht mercury birthers] (Tycko & Morison 2002; Davies et al. 2005)."
emphasis added, etc etc Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
I'm not indicting the whole field, but all too often these studies get picked-up, used, and broadcast by bigots - of one variety or another - to feed their paranoia, neuroses, or Domination Fixation.
By the by, I largely owe my sensitivity to normal-normative sleight o' hand to one reading, if you can believe it, of Shelby Hunt, Foundations of Marketing Theory. Let me see... marginalia ... ah:
Is the positive/normative dichotomy unnecessary? Do normative statements play a role in scientific explanation? To evaluate these questions, we must refer to the meaning of positive statements versus normative statements. Recall that the positive/normative dichotomy provides categories based on whether the focus of the analysis is primarily descriptive or prescriptive. Positive marketing [read, distribution or logistical system] adopts the perspective of attempting to describe, explain, predict, and understand the marketing activities, process, and phenomena [read, metaphysical] that actually exist. This perspective examines what is. In contrast, normative marketing adopts the perspective of attempting to prescribe [read, remediate] what marketing organizations and individuals ought to do or what kinds of marketing systems a society ought to have. That is, this perspective examines what ought to be and what organizations and individuals ought to do Thus, one signal (but not the only one) of a normative statement is the extence of an ought or should or some similar term.
The telelogical certainty of these remarks left a profound impression on my comprehension of the possibilities and limitations (calculus) of organizational strategy. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Fancy that. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
;-)
The interactions of environment - writ large - and brain chemistry - writ large - are very much a topic of research. The Behavior Genetics people face a major problem separating the two for analytical purposes. My opinion is the two are so intimately connected it is impossible to achieve a valid Categorical distinction. For example, that Danish study on schizophrenia showed the highest level of children developing the dysfunction was when they had a genetic disposition for it (9%) AND there was an environmental (parental) exhibition of the dysfunction (16%.)
Enculturation (Environment) studies of African American and European Americans show the WORST possible outcomes of Public Policy stem from policy and decision makers being uninformed by the Body/Mind Unity and an over-reliance on - let me put it - "tenuous" conclusions from Behavioral Genetic (BG) reseach. The same happens with BG Gender Differences studies as applied to educational policies and practices for girls, notably in regards to mathematical education.
It's possible to go one step further and question a definition of "normal" - aka, that which no one is - based on Information derived from the extremes. Schizophrenia is a disabling disease. Those who are schizoid have some of the Attributes and Properties of schizophrenia but are typically high functioning with regard to cognition, social intelligence, and RW skills. It can be stated the "male" brain has a tendenz for schizoid because it is a "male" brain plus Environmental influences that support "male" brain behavior, including but not limited to, "male-as-gender" socialization. It is here that it is possible to really study, gain knowledge, for informing Public Policy. With schizophrenics about the only intervention is: drugs or, at worst, institutionalization. With schizoids there are Public Options (that may be) available for those at or approaching dysfunction.
But we don't know because most of the research is directed at the extremes.
Yeah, except that
An extension, the extreme male brain theory, hypothesizes that autism is an extreme case of the male brain, defined psychometrically as individuals in whom systemizing is better than empathizing; this extension is controversial, as many studies contradict the idea that baby boys and girls respond differently to people and objects.
The same is applicable across all levels of Environment and Environmental influences.
Toss in Biology plus Environment, the division into narrow fields, disciplines, and sub-disciplies and the whole thing gets squishy.
Extreme "male brain" theories are, let me put it, wrong headed. We don't know enough to make those kind of conclusions. People study them because they limit the scope of the investigation. I concede there is a utility there, gotta draw the line somewhere, but to then recursively wander back to a gross generalization of the entire subject population is more than a bit intellectually pretentious.
We've been here before with the Social Darwinism, eugenics and ethnographic movements of the 1880-1945s. It was a disaster, from both scientific and humanitarian considerations. Yet there was useful work: clinical therapies for Hypothermia and deep insights into the epidemiology of Sexual Diseases, to name two, that resulted. But at what a cost!
And, too, there are some personal experiences, that I don't need to get into, driving my intellectual position. (If ya remember what I'm referencing. ;-)
So when we start talking about tendencies that's ALL we're talking about. And we're talking low-order tendencies, to boot, spread across the entire test or subject population.
