custom-variable – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

The Startling Rise of Disability in America

As the American economy has moved away from manufacturing to information services and the economy limps along, not keeping up with the number of people who need jobs, the U.S. Social Security Disability program has boomed. This boom covers up the real numbers of people who would otherwise be on welfare or counted among the unemployed. NPR looks at several factors that made this happen: for example, disability is for people who can no longer perform heavy labor, and don’t have the education or skills for other jobs. One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse’s aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she’d be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn’t it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she’s seen where you get to sit all day. At first, I found this hard to believe. But then I started looking around town. There’s the McDonald’s, the fish plant, the truck repair shop. I went down a list of job openings — Occupational Therapist, McDonald’s, McDonald’s, Truck Driver (heavy lifting), KFC, Registered Nurse, McDonald’s. And disability payments shift the expense of maintaining people without jobs away from states and onto the federal government. A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And the Public Consulting Group is glad to help. PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability. “What we’re offering is to work to identify those folks who have the highest likelihood of meeting disability criteria,” Pat Coakley, who runs PCG’s Social Security Advocacy Management team, told me. Other factors come into play, but the result is that 14 million Americans receive a disability check every month -and health care through Medicare. Learn more about the trend at NPR. Link

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The Startling Rise of Disability in America

Whole Milk Linked to Slimmer Kids

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children switch from whole milk to a lower fat milk at age two. The conventional wisdom is that getting children used to reduced fat milk will help keep them at a healthy weight. Skim, 1%, or 2% milk has fewer calories per cup. It just makes sense, doesn’t it? So here’s where things gets confusing. A new study of preschool-aged children published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a sister publication of the British Medical Journal, finds that low-fat milk was associated with higher weight. That’s right, kids drinking low-fat milk tended to be heavier. “We were quite surprised” by the findings, Dr. Mark DeBoer told me in an email. He and his co-author, Dr. Rebecca Scharf, both of the University of Virginia, had hypothesized just the opposite. But they found the relationship between skim-milk drinkers and higher body weights held up across all racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups. DeBoer says their data also show that low-fat milk did not restrain weight gain in preschoolers over time. This is not the first study to show such results, but the authors call for further research, as this study did not take into account what types of food the children were consuming or their total caloric intake. And scientists say sugary drinks make a bigger difference in overall child obesity. Link (Image credit: Flickr user David Goehring )

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Whole Milk Linked to Slimmer Kids

How China Becomes Smarter: Through Education and Genetic Engineering

First, China decided to become a manufacturing giant, then an economic and military superpower. So you shouldn’t be surprised that their next plan is to improve the actual Chinese people themselves. They’re doing this two ways: the first is not controversial. China is massively investing in education. Keith Bradsher of The New York Times wrote : China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they move from farms to cities. Source: UNESCO (degrees, enrollment); China finance ministry via CEIC Data (Spending) Chart: The New York Times And it seems to be working (though as some people pointed out, quantity isn’t the same as quality – and that, similar to United States and Europe, China is already facing a glut of educated college graduates who can’t find jobs). Again, from Bradsher’s article : Sheer numbers make the educational push by China, a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, potentially breathtaking. In the last decade, China doubled the number of colleges and universities, to 2,409. As recently as 1996, only one in six Chinese 17-year-olds graduated from high school. That was the same proportion as in the United States in 1919. Now, three in five young Chinese graduate from high school, matching the United States in the mid-1950s. China is on track to match within seven years the United States’ current high school graduation rate for 18-year-olds of 75 percent — although a higher proportion of Americans than Chinese later go back and finish high school. By quadrupling its output of college graduates in the past decade, China now produces eight million graduates a year from universities and community colleges. By the end of the decade, China expects to have nearly 195 million community college and university graduates — compared with no more than 120 million in the United States then. The second method is more controversial. According to this article by Aleks Eror published in VICE, China is working on making its people more intelligent by genetic-engineering: At BGI Shenzhen , scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation’s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Eror interviewed evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller who said that smart people were being recruited, through scientific conference and word of mouth, to contribute their genetic material to be sequenced so the genes for intelligence can be identified (and later on, used to determine the intelligence potential of embryos). What does that mean in human language? Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have. And over the course of several generations you’re able to exponentially multiply the population’s intelligence. Right. Even if it only boosts the average kid by five IQ points, that’s a huge difference in terms of economic productivity, the competitiveness of the country, how many patents they get, how their businesses are run, and how innovative their economy is. (Top image: Shutterstock )

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How China Becomes Smarter: Through Education and Genetic Engineering

Higgs Boson is Now Official!

There it is! Where’s Higgs Boson T-Shirt by Mike Jacobsen | More Higgs boson T-Shirts After the big announcement last year, physicists have made it official. They have indeed found the Higgs boson: Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the “God particle,” to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name. But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn’t collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics. Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is a Higgs. Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the full story: Link

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Higgs Boson is Now Official!

What Really Smart People Worry About At Night

What do you lay awake at night worrying about? Are your worries different than those far smarter than you? Perhaps. John Brockman of Edge magazine asked what the world’s most intelligent brainiacs – including Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, technologist Tim O’Reilly, musician Brian Eno, The Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb – about their professional worries and got a lot of responses. One hundred and fifty distinct worries, in fact. Thankfully, VICE’s Motherboard blog has summarized it for us : 1. The proliferation of Chinese eugenics. – Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist. 2. Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely on models that have been proven fraudulent. – Nassem Nicholas Taleb 3. That we will be unable to defeat viruses by learning to push them beyond the error catastrophe threshold. – William McEwan, molecular biology researcher 4. That pseudoscience will gain ground. – Helena Cronin, author, philospher 5. That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist 6. Genuine apocalyptic events. The growing number of low-probability events that could lead to the total devastation of human society. – Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society 7. The decline in science coverage in newspapers. – Barbara Strauch, New York Times science editor 8. Exploding stars, the eventual collapse of the Sun, and the problems with the human id that prevent us from dealing with them. — John Tooby, founder of the field of evolutionary psychology 9. That the internet is ruining writing. – David Gelernter, Yale computer scientist 10. That smart people–like those who contribute to Edge–won’t do politics. –Brian Eno, musician 11. That there will be another supernova-like financial disaster. –Seth Lloyd, professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering at MIT 12. That search engines will become arbiters of truth. –W. Daniel Hillis, physicist 13. The dearth of desirable mates is something we should worry about, for “it lies behind much human treachery and brutality.” –David M. Buss, professor of psychology at U of T 14. “I’m worried that our technology is helping to bring the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end.” –David Bodanis, writer, futurist 15. That we will continue to uphold taboos on bad words. –Benhamin Bergen, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, UCS Humanity, start worrying! Or, you can just accept it all, like Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, who said: I’ve given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me… and marvel stupidly. Read the original post over at Edge: Link | Summary at Motherboard blog

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What Really Smart People Worry About At Night

Gorgeous Photography of The Elements

Bismuth (Image: fluor_doublet/R. Tanaka/Flickr ) We all know the periodic table of the elements from high school chemistry, but have you ever wondered what the actual chemical elements look like? Japanese chemist and photographer R. Tanaka is on a mission to photograph the world’s most photogenic elements and we dare say he succeeded with flying colors. Check out his website and Flickr page to see more wonderful images of the elements. Osmium Palladium Monoclinic sulfur Oxidized arsenic Gold crystal Lead Platinum Ruthenium Tellurium Oxidized vanadium View more over at R. Tanaka’s Flickr set: The Elements – via Visual News

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Gorgeous Photography of The Elements

Circular Beam of Electrons

Beam of electrons moving in a circle, due to the presence of a magnetic field. Purple light is emitted along the electron path, due to the electrons colliding with gas molecules in the bulb. (Photo: Marcin Bialek ) Oh, how I love you guys. In our recent post A Fiery Dance on the Sun , Neatoramanaut PlasmaGryphon kindly took the time to explain to us the physics behind solar flares. In the explanation , there was a link to Wikipedia article on Lorentz force , where I found this fascinating image of a circular beam of electrons in a Teltron tube . Neat, huh? ( Thanks PlasmaGryphon! )

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Circular Beam of Electrons

Office Depot and OfficeMax to Merge

Well, at least they don’t have to change the first part of their names! The Wall Street Journal reported that OfficeMax and Office Depot are merging: OfficeMax Inc. and Office Depot Inc. are in advanced talks to merge, people familiar with the matter said, as the retailers of pens, paper and desks try to fight off tougher competition from rivals like Staples Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. A deal would combine two companies that have been hammered in recent years by weak economic conditions, falling sales and rising online competition. Office Depot’s market value is just $1.3 billion, and OfficeMax’s is about $933 million. Still, the two chains have a substantial retail presence. Office Depot, based in Boca Raton, Fla., has 1,675 stores world-wide, annual sales of some $11.5 billion and about 39,000 employees. OfficeMax, based in Naperville, Ill., has about 900 stores in the U.S. and Mexico, roughly $7 billion in annual sales and approximately 29,000 employees. OfficeMax is scheduled to post its quarterly and annual results Thursday. Link What do you think we should call the new entity?

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Office Depot and OfficeMax to Merge

Medieval Cat Paw Prints

Does your cat walk all over your desk? It’s’ nothing new, cats have been walking all over humans since, like, forever as this photo from Emir O. Filipovic of the University of Sarajevo’s History Department shows. Emir was working on a 15th century manuscript when he ran across this medieval cat paw prints: Link – via The Weasel King

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Medieval Cat Paw Prints

Clever Students Use Game Theory to Get Perfect Scores on an Exam

Dr. Peter Fröhlich of Johns Hopkins University grades exams so that the highest scoring exam receives a 100% grade and all others fall below on a curve. It wasn’t a Kobayashi Maru scenario , but his exams are hard. Fröhlich’s students devised a cunning plan to all get A grades. It involved boycotting the exam: Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Fröhlich. This approach, Fröhlich said, is the “most predictable and consistent way” of comparing students’ work to their peers’, and it worked well. At least it did until the end of the fall term at Hopkins, that is. As the semester ended in December, students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” classes decided to test the limits of the policy, and collectively planned to boycott the final. Because they all did, a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Fröhlich’s curve, meant every student received an A. Dr. Fröhlich abided by his grading policy and gave all students A grades, as well as congratulating them on their cooperative spirit: Fröhlich took a surprisingly philosophical view of his students’ machinations, crediting their collaborative spirit. “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done,” he said via e-mail. “At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible. Link -via The Volokh Conspiracy | Image: Paramount Pictures