Glad SOMEONE is Asking the Tough Questions

The Penn Science Cafe Presents: "Why Do People Keep Pets?"
April 24, 2006

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=948

WHAT: The Penn Science Cafe, is your chance to ask your questions directly to leading scientific experts.
WHO: James Serpell, professor in the University of Pennsylvania's School of VeterinaryMedicine .
WHERE: The MarBar
40th and Walnut streets, Philadelphia
WHEN: 6 p.m., Monday, April. 24 Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

Menu items available for purchase

They eat your food, they ruin your furniture and they do hideous things to the carpet. No, not children. Pets -- the incredible assortment of animals with which humans voluntarily share their lives.

This month at the Penn Science Cafe, Dr. Serpell will talk about the different roles that pets are believed to play in their owner's lives, and the results of recent studies that have attempted to investigate these roles.

Serpell, director of Penn's Center for the Interaction of Animals & Society, offers insight into some of the wider questions and issues raised by the practice of pet keeping.

A Bright Idea from a Bright University. Definitely worth the money!

UW wants men to dial in on violence. New study offers 'checkup' on phone
By BLYTHE LAWRENCEP-I REPORTER
Thursday, July 27, 2006

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/279040_abuse27.html


Wanted: Men who engage in domestic abuse (or think they might).
University of Washington researchers started a program Wednesday encouraging men concerned about their behaviors toward spouses and family to call 1-800-MEN-1089 for a domestic abuse checkup.

"This study is designed with one major goal -- to capture the attention of the man who is concerned about hurting their loved ones," said project director Lyungai Mbilinyi, a University of Washington researcher. "We want to reach men before the controlling and the physical assault get worse."

The process involves a confidential interview with a trained clinician from the UW or University of Minnesota schools of social work. They will help the man take stock of his behavior and his options.

Men can choose to participate anonymously or not, Mbilinyi said, although if a caller recounts a crime, he will be urged to report it to police while the clinician is still on the line.

Using the phone provides a free, unobtrusive way for men concerned about their behaviors to talk to a professional, said Joan Zegree, an adjunct faculty member of the University of Washington School of Social Work.

"That experience can encourage someone to get into a certified treatment program," she said.
Nearly one in three American women identify themselves as victims of violence or sexual assault at the hands of a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives.

Each year in Washington state, police respond to an average of 51,000 domestic violence-related calls.

Zegree said men who engage in domestic abuse can be of any color, creed or age.
"I'll tell you a secret about these men -- they're not who you may think," she said.
Mark Huston, a Seattle telecom professional, was one of those men. Huston struggled to control his violent behavior toward his family before he had to spend a weekend in jail for pushing his wife onto a couch.

"I hurt my wife, I hurt my kids, I hurt myself," he said. "I know other men like me are out there. Too many of us wait until we are hauled off to jail before we confront our behavior."
Huston believes a program such as the men's domestic abuse checkup would have helped him sooner.

"I would have happily reached out to some program if I knew it was there at the time," he said. "I'm not proud of what happened to me, but I'm very, very glad I was able to get help for it."
Advertisements encouraging men to participate in the study will appear in local newspapers and on Metro buses.

"She's afraid of you," one ad reads. "Does it have to be that way?"

GET INVOLVED
Men who would like to participate in the domestic abuse checkup can call 1-800-MEN-1089 from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Fridays.

Why didn't anyone think of this before? Ask criminals to turn themselves in! You University people astound me with your depth of perception.

Very Very Important Studies of Very Very Important People Berkeley Edition

The Ground Beneath Your Feet
Exposing the states of endangered soils
by Charlie Koven
http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=6&article=soils

The next time the soles of your shoes rest on something softer than asphalt or tile, something older and wilder than the green lawn in front of the library, stop and think about what you are standing on. Do you notice the soft aroma rising from subterranean fungi nourished by California’s winter rains, or the sound of water as it percolates through grains of sand? If you were to dig down deep enough, you would eventually encounter bedrock, but what would you dig through before you got there? And most important, would something irreplaceable and unique be lost if the place where you stood were unearthed by the plow or the backhoe?

UC Berkeley professor Ron Amundson of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management ponders that last question quite a bit. He and his colleagues recently published a paper in the journal Ecosystems that catalogues which of the thousands of individual soils recognized in the United States are the most endangered by human activity and at the greatest risk for extinction. At first, the words “endangered” or “extinction” may sound odd, because scientists have not traditionally viewed natural soils as living entities in need of the same types of diversity conservation as plants or animals. But Amundson and his colleagues make a clear argument for the need to start changing our thinking; like species, soils are unique and diverse assemblages whose natural life cycle is several orders of magnitude longer than humans’. At our frenzied pace, we are destroying much of this diversity. And while the extinction of plant and animal species is apparent, we are only now developing tools to perceive the extent of the destruction of our soils.

Soil vs. Dirt
Most soil scientists shudder a bit at the mention of the word “dirt.” To pedologists, those who study the structure and formation of soils, dirt is the components of soil--sand, clay, humus--taken out of context. Dirt is a pile of debris next to a construction site, while soil is the product of thousands of years of plant growth and decay, dissolution of minerals in rainwater, and burrowing by earthworms and gophers. Soil is what anything--granite bedrock, windblown dust, river muds--eventually turns into if left exposed at the earth’s surface. When pedologists classify soils, they seek to interpret this history; to do so they rely on characteristics such as the material from which a soil formed, the presence of layers rich in certain minerals, and the chemistry of a soil’s clay. In the process they reveal stories about the formation of the landscape we see today.

The roles that soils play in ecosystems, both natural and agricultural, are well known: storing water, providing mineral nutrients to plants, and hosting microbes’ recycling activities. Soil scientists have long promoted practices to sustain these soil functions on farmlands, but Amundson’s work broadens the discipline’s historically agricultural focus. “Traditional soil conservation has been to take land that has already been converted to some use and maintain its quality and productivity, which I think is a really important issue,” he says. “But then there’s the question that I wanted to bring up, about preserving the undisturbed land that we still have, helping to minimize the impact of urbanization and cultivation on those areas.”

In the United States, scientists classify soils under a soil taxonomy developed by the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA system’s hierarchical structure is modeled after the Linnaean system in biology; instead of kingdom, phylum, etc., soil scientists have order, suborder, on down to series, the pedological equivalent of a species. The coarsest level of classification has 12 orders. Examples include grassland soils (“mollisols”) and desert soils (“aridisols”). On the fine end of the system is the series, a unique soil type that has well-defined characteristics and is specific to a certain region. Currently, there are 13,129 soil series recognized in the United States, an example being the Valentine Series, which blankets most of Nebraska’s Sand Hills. California, with its varied topography and climate, is blessed with an abundance of soils. Its 1,755 series represent by far the highest soil diversity of any state, and 1,113 of those soils are unique to California.

The USDA system is designed to be insensitive to all but the most extreme changes in land use, grouping both soils in their natural condition and their agricultural counterparts under the same series. As a result, a soil map might show that a certain series covers an extensive area, even though very little is left in its natural state. Amundson and his colleagues confronted this ambiguity by using maps of land use compiled from satellite observations. These maps differentiate agricultural, urbanized, and relatively undisturbed land, and show the extent of the human footprint: two to three percent of our country is urbanized and nineteen percent is agricultural.

To measure the human impact on specific soils, Amundson and colleagues compared these land-use maps with a geographical database containing each soil series in the United States. They first identified “rare” soils, which cover less than 1,000 hectares (roughly the size of Tilden Park), and “unique” soils, which occur in only one state. They compared these rare and unique soils to land-use maps and termed a soil “endangered” if more than half of its area is covered by agriculture or urbanization. They found that the midwestern farming states have the highest numbers of endangered soils--in Indiana, for example, 82 percent of the naturally rare soils are endangered. In certain cases, their results showed a real cause for alarm; 31 of the nation’s soil series are so heavily used that they have effectively become extinct in their natural form.

The Human Impact on Soils
To appreciate what is lost when these unique soils disappear, imagine standing in a grassy field and digging up a shovelful of soil to search for the organisms living in it. Plant roots and leaf litter are the most obvious; they form the food base of the soil ecosystem. Next you find large animals: rodents, earthworms, ants and the like, known to soil microbiologists as macrofauna. Now zoom in to look at smaller creatures, the soil mesofauna, roughly half a millimeter in length: a large diversity of tiny insects, arthropods, and roundworms. In your shovelful you probably have at least a thousand of each. Zooming in further you find the microfauna: millions of protozoa, algae, and fungi, billions of bacteria, trillions of viruses. These microfauna do the most transformative work of recycling nutrients and forming soil organic matter, the dark-colored, carbon-rich substance that, by providing nutrients to plants and microbes, is truly the foundation of the ecosystem.

How do humans affect these ecosystems? According to UC Berkeley soil microbiologist Mary Firestone, “One of the most easily documented, well understood, and huge change is cultivation, plowing of soils. That reduces by orders of magnitude the presence of mesofauna and macrofauna: reduces diversity, reduces number, and to some extent eliminates their functional role. The function that’s being lost is in part the role of decompositon, but it’s also the role that they play in moving organic matter around and chopping up organic matter into smaller pieces.” In terms of long-term effects on the soil itself, continues Firestone, “the major impact of cultivation is the loss of soil organic matter.”

In addition to depleting what Firestone calls “the nutrient capital of the soil,” this loss has deleterious effects on the environment. Soils store a significant portion of the world’s carbon, and when it is lost from soils it is converted into carbon dioxide by respiration of soil microfauna. This carbon dioxide, along with that released by the burning of fossil fuels, is humanity’s main contribution to global climate change. Further, the loss of fertility that accompanies a soil’s loss of organic matter forces farmers to use more fertilizers to sustain productivity. But the nutrients in fertilizers are much more mobile than those locked up in soils; they drain off farmlands to pollute rivers, lakes, and coastal environments. Heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer also causes microbes to produce excess nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere has risen almost 10 percent in the past 300 years. These environmental effects raise the issue of the long-term role of natural, undisturbed soils in our nation’s landscape.

For Amundson, the greatest loss accompanying human transformation of a soil is that of the information and deep history the soil holds. He first looked into the problem of vanishing soil diversity when he realized, after 19 years of teaching the same field class on California soils, that many of the sites to which he used to take students no longer existed. “Science and the preservation of the natural history of the state were the reasons that I got into this,” he explains. “I look at soils as reservoirs of earth history. By disturbing soils, irrigating them, mixing them up, you basically destroy this historical record.”

Ecosystems Growing on Ancient Soils
Some of the most interesting and rare soils are extremely old--millions of years rather than merely thousands. As Amundson explains, “Segments of the earth’s landscape that are geologically old are rare because the random rejuvenation through erosion or deposition on the landscape keeps the very veneer of the earth’s surface relatively geologically young. So any landscape segment that somehow manages to evade those rejuvenation processes is by default a rare occurrence on the earth’s surface.” The unique properties of these old soils make their conservation both important and difficult.

To see how soils and the ecosystems which rest upon them have developed over such long periods, one can drive a few hours north of Berkeley to the coastal terraces of Jughandle State Park in Mendocino County. Here, millions of years of plate-tectonic motion have slowly and constantly raised the earth’s surface. As these forces push up the land, ocean waves plane it to a flat wall, causing the landscape to rise like escalator steps. Today one sees a staircase of successively older landscapes rising from the coast, from young soils near the coast to ancient soils--over one million years old--on the highest terraces. The lower steps tell a pleasant story of plant succession as redwoods predictably displace the coastal scrub. But continuing up the staircase, this simple story turns stark. The oldest steps contain a strange forest of stunted trees instead of towering redwoods. If you dug you’d find the cause: shallow soil bleached white with red spots. The colors indicate an almost complete loss of nutrients, leached by acids from roots and decaying pine needles until only pure white quartz sand and occasional red deposits of iron remain. In the 1960s the great UC Berkeley soil scientist Hans Jenny first realized that this soil, the Blacklock Series, revealed the importance of time in forming soils. He fought to preserve the landscape, which is now protected by the UC Natural Reserve System.

But while old soils may be inhospitable to growth, they are hardly wastelands. As Amundson points out, “Old landscapes, even if they are in benign climates, can be considered to be extreme environments that have dictated or allowed evolution to produce rare plants and animals that have adapted to these locations.” The heavy hand of evolution can result in species that grow only on certain soils. The highest terraces of the Mendocino staircase, for example, are the sole habitat for several species of tree, including the Bolander Pine, Fort Bragg Manzanita, and Mendocino Cypress. The link between diversity of soils and of plants occurs across the nation; Amundson and his colleagues found strong geographic correlation between rare, endangered soils and rare, endangered plants.

All of these issues--rare, ancient soils with endemic plant species, encroachment of agriculture and urbanization, and conflicting ideas about how best to maintain natural diversity--recently came to a head with the planning of the new UC campus in Merced County. The county, on the broad, western flank of the Sierra Nevada south of the gold country, rests largely on terraces left behind by the meandering of rivers that once drained the mountains. Many of the soils are one to two million years old and harbor some of the last remnants of landscape features known as mima mounds and vernal pools that once pervaded California’s valleys. Together, these alternating mounds and pools constitute a hummocky landscape overlying a flat, concrete-like impermeable layer called a duripan. As the water level rises with winter rains the vernal pools fill with water, which recedes slowly throughout the spring. Botanists particularly admire the pools because they provide a habitat for a unique and beautiful assemblage of endemic wildflowers, which bloom along their margins.

“When the UC [campus] was proposed for that area I was concerned and frankly dismayed,” says Amundson, “because it was going to be on this wonderful, broad, million-year-old landscape that there isn’t really much left of.” The controversy which arose over the potential loss of the landscape, however, caused people to become more aware of this irreplaceable resource. The final location of the campus, moved over just a bit, “turned out to be a win-win situation,” Amundson says. “They’re going to take a small and insignificant amount of this [native soil] out of its natural state for the campus, but the result is that the state and the Nature Conservancy went around and started paying ranchers for the development rights to their broad ranch regions that ring the entire campus. I don’t think that, without having the UC campus there to focus all this attention, there would have been this coordinated effort to keep this broad remaining open area in its natural state.”

The relationships between soils, plants, animals, and humans can be critical to the success of such conservation plans. In this case, as Amundson describes it, the final plan “keeps the ranchers in business. It gives them a huge infusion of money and incentive to stay in ranching. Actually, ranching is needed to maintain the biology of the vernal pools now, because if you take cows away, the invasive grasses would grow so thick that they would choke out the native plants. So now cows are an integral part of the ecosystem, and you have to have ranchers there to keep the unique plants growing around the vernal pools.” For Amundson, these examples point to the fundamental role of soils in conservation plans: “We want not only to have contiguous areas, but areas that maintain the geological and pedological diversity of the area that allowed this mosaic of things to develop in the first place.”

Looking to the Future
To save the landscapes that are most endangered, scientists and planners need first to identify the most endangered soils. Amundson and his colleagues’ research, then, is critical; theirs is the first systematic comparison of individual soils’ distributions against patterns of land use across the country. Perhaps their most important result is to reveal the strain that agricultural and urban land use places on natural soil diversity. This realization comes at a time when, as Amundson notes, “Our population is expanding, agriculture is expanding, and basically at the end of this century there won’t be much land left to convert to agriculture. So I’m not suggesting that every segment of these incredibly old parts of the earth’s surface be preserved, but I think keeping a healthy and interesting diversity of segments of these areas in their natural conditions would be warranted for future generations.”

Ultimately, for preservation to succeed, more people need to appreciate the value of soils. “This generation has the choice about what we’re going to leave in terms of the earth’s surface for the next generation and beyond. It’s a serious responsibility that I think we at least need to consider. I’m just here to provide data and raise the conceptual issues that I think are worth talking about,” says Amundson. “I guess my view is to approach these parts of the earth’s surface with some sort of awareness that they represent time beyond anything we can imagine in biology. You know, the oldest trees on earth are insignificant compared to some of these landscapes that we destroy without even a second thought.”


Charlie Koven is a graduate student in environmental science, policy and management.

Oh God, Charlie. I've nearly had a heart attack. I didn't know the very ground I walk on was endangered! I've been treating it...well...like dirt! I know better now...

Well, at Least it doesn't Cost much to Watch TV (Very Very Important Studies by Very Very Important People)

U-M analysis indicates more television dramas redefine women's roles

http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2006/Jul06/r072406b

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—From "Xena: Warrior Princess" to "Judging Amy," television shows are redefining women in dramatic roles by telling diverse stories about their lives, a University of Michigan analysis shows.

In the mid-1990s, more dramas were created to feature female characters as the primary protagonists—and many of these shows succeeded, said Amanda Lotz, assistant professor of communication studies.

"It took the success of several single female characters, as well as changes in business of television, to redefine how women are portrayed on television," Lotz said.

She said she hopes subsequent female dramas will explore many stories about women's lives that are still lacking, such as characters who are lesbian, not white, in stable relationships, or lacking rewarding careers.

Lotz's analysis explores 16 female-centered dramas airing in the late 1990s through the early 2000s. The shows are based around one or more women and notably expand from the character-types and stories common in television's past.

The number of female-centered dramas jumped to 14 in 1985-1994, up from eight shows during 1975-1984. The number then more than doubled to about 37 shows in 1995-2005, peaking in 2000 as television executives and advertisers saw the value of developing strategies to target a niche—the female audience.

"The proliferation of female-centered dramas in the late 1990s made good business sense because the fragmentation of audiences among new broadcast and cable channels made ‘narrowcasting'—or explicitly targeting just a female audience—a more viable strategy," Lotz said.

Also, female-targeted cable networks expanded from one (Lifetime) to three (Lifetime, Oxygen and Women's Entertainment) during the early 2000s, and in some of these years, Lifetime was the most-watched cable network—not just among female-targeted ones.

Since its beginnings in the 1940s, television often has portrayed women as wives and mothers who do not work outside the home. If women had lead roles, networks confined them to comedies, such as "I Love Lucy," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Roseanne" and "Murphy Brown," and to individual characters in male-dominated dramatic settings.

Women achieved central roles in dramatic narratives that included an emphasis on adventure, such as "The Avengers" and "Police Woman," but they were often partnered with a man. By the late 1970s, some dramas starred women without male partners, including "Charlie's Angels," "Wonder Woman" and "The Bionic Woman." Like their predecessors, these women relied on their sex appeal yet were featured in "empowered" roles, she said.

A shift in shows emphasizing sex appeal and empowerment occurred in 1982 when the able female cops of "Cagney and Lacey" led to fairly conventional roles for women in "Murder, She Wrote" (1984), "Sisters" (1991) and "Touched by an Angel" (1994).

The situation then changed significantly as empowered heroines in action dramas such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Xena: Warrior Princess" offered complicated depictions of characters balancing loyalties and competing demands; post-Baby Boom characters in "Ally McBeal" and "Sex and the City" negotiated personal and professional lives amidst the gains of second-wave feminism; and many characters in series as varied as "Providence," "Judging Amy," "Gilmore Girls" and "Strong Medicine" provided new stories about the complexities of families and work.
Also, even though Lifetime, Oxygen and Women's Entertainment seek female audiences, they do so through substantially different programming strategies.

"This, too, adds to the diversity in stories about women's lives available on contemporary television," she said.

Lotz's analysis appears in her new book, "Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era."
Amanda Lotz

I'm impressed by this woman's courage. She's really redefining her role as a woman in academia by writing about women's portrayal in the media. This is cutting edge stuff folks.

Department of Communication Studies

Further Very Very Important Studies by Very Very Important People

If all drivers were polite, they would get where they're going faster

http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2006/May06/r052306a

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A new study from the University of Michigan found that traffic metering systems that incorporate new algorithms for merging could reduce the seriousness of traffic slowdowns that originate near freeway on-ramps.

Craig Davis, a retired Ford Motor Co. research scientist and current adjunct professor at U-M, studied highway merging to see how current on-ramp traffic meter systems could be made more effective. Currently, meter systems try to improve traffic flow by letting a certain number of cars enter the highway each minute based on how many cars are already there. Traffic metering has been around for a long time and many large U.S. cities have metering systems, Davis says.

Davis says there are two basic types of traffic congestion: gridlock-type jams where cars stop; and the synchronous flow-type congestion, where two or more lanes of traffic all slow down to the same speed. Synchronous flow happens often near on-ramps, when cars don't give one another enough room to merge, or when too many cars are on the road.ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A new study from the University of Michigan found that traffic metering systems that incorporate new algorithms for merging could reduce the seriousness of traffic slowdowns that originate near freeway on-ramps.

Craig Davis, a retired Ford Motor Co. research scientist and current adjunct professor at U-M, studied highway merging to see how current on-ramp traffic meter systems could be made more effective. Currently, meter systems try to improve traffic flow by letting a certain number of cars enter the highway each minute based on how many cars are already there. Traffic metering has been around for a long time and many large U.S. cities have metering systems, Davis says.

Davis says there are two basic types of traffic congestion: gridlock-type jams where cars stop; and the synchronous flow-type congestion, where two or more lanes of traffic all slow down to the same speed. Synchronous flow happens often near on-ramps, when cars don't give one another enough room to merge, or when too many cars are on the road.

Metering systems use computer algorithms to try to predict when a jam may occur, typically based on occupancy. Davis, however, based his algorithm on the throughput and the rate at which vehicles are merging, not on highway occupancy. He found that traffic jams happen when throughput exceeds about 1,900 cars per hour per lane, and after that capacity drops by 10 percent or more.

Davis says in the absence of metering systems, simple politeness would go a long way toward thinning the sludgy traffic near on-ramps. But, letting people merge is helpful only if you don't slow down too much to do so.

"If you can do it without slowing down very much, that allows the driver who's entering to enter at a higher speed," Davis said. "If they have to crawl along waiting for an opening, they slow down the other vehicles on the freeway."

If you can safely move over a lane and allow a vehicle merge, that is even better, he adds.
Davis has received much attention for his research on automatic cruise control, a separate but related area of traffic congestion research. With ACC, onboard computers keep the correct distance between cars. Such systems have been shown in computer simulations to reduce traffic jams in throughput lanes, but don't do much to lessen the problem that is caused by merging near on-ramps, he says.

I'm so glad we have these Brahmin types informing us on the intricacies of getting stuck in traffic, and the unfortunate effect of road-rage upon it. Such valuable research. Now I know not to get p*ssed off and park my car in the middle of the free-way.

The Very Very Important Research of Very Very Important People--subtitled The Stupid Crap that Our Money Goes Toward.

Hurricanes and the happiness index:U-M study tracks the time path
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—


http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2006/Jun06/r060106b

With another hurricane season underway, a University of Michigan study shows how Hurricane Katrina affected the happiness of a nationally representative sample of 1,105 U.S. adults.
Not surprisingly, average happiness levels in the U.S. dipped significantly right after Katrina hit. But within two weeks—three for residents of the battered South Central region—average levels of happiness had rebounded to pre-storm levels.

The study is a pilot project designed to provide high-frequency data on happiness by U-M economists Miles Kimball and Helen Levy, together with Osaka University economists Fumio Ohtake and Yoshiro Tsutsui.

"Just because happiness rebounded quickly after Katrina doesn't mean we should underestimate the importance of the event," said Kimball, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "That's just the nature of happiness; people adjust psychologically and cognitively to all kinds of events, from winning the lottery to the news that they have cancer. It's called hedonic adaptation."

Published as a working paper earlier this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the study tracked the week-by-week responses from July 29 to October 24, 2005 to the following question, widely used to measure positive and negative feelings:

Now think about the past week and the feelings you have experienced. Please tell me if each of the following was true for you much of the time this past week:

a. You felt happy.

b. You felt sad.

c. You enjoyed life.

d. You felt depressed.

Kimball and colleagues constructed a happiness index that is the simple sum of these four questions, with "yes" answers to a and c and "no" answers to b and d valued as one. Overall, they found, the mean value of the happiness index was relatively high—3.4 out of a possible 4.0.
In a related study, Kimball and ISR economist Robert Willis argue that much of the variation in happiness is not about how well off you are, but about news in your life—whether you are doing better than expected or worse than expected. "The average level of happiness is just one of many things people care about. But the temporary spikes in happiness after good news and dips in happiness after bad news give a comprehensive picture of what matters to people."

These short-run movements in happiness show people's reactions to all kinds of events. For example, Kimball, Levy, Ohtake and Tsutsui found that happiness dipped considerably—nearly as much as it did after Katrina—after the Pakistan earthquake. This is evidence that people were moved by the suffering of those hurt by the Pakistan earthquake—even though they may have felt too tapped out by their donations to Katrina victims to donate much to help those hurt by the earthquake in Pakistan.

Short-run movements in happiness may be useful both in helping people to notice what they care about most in their daily lives and in giving people a sense of perspective about what isn't so important, according to Kimball. For example, "The details of day-to-day political wrangling probably won't show up in national happiness," he says.

Although the effect of news on happiness is powerful and revealing, it does not offer an easy way to be happier. "It doesn't do any good to tell people to go out and get good news," Kimball says. "They are already doing what they can to get good news." It also doesn't help people's happiness overall to know that high social rank adds to happiness, since the only way to gain social rank is at the expense of someone else, he adds. The things people can do to be happier in the long run are often simple—getting a good night's sleep or spending more time with friends, he notes. "People think they want to be happy, but for some people that only means they want good news, which no one can control. Given other concerns and worries, not everyone is willing to devote time to being happy."

One of the great mysteries about happiness is that economic growth has not raised U.S. or Japanese happiness much if any in the last 50 years, according to Kimball. "That doesn't mean that money can't buy happiness—only that people don't know how to convert time and money into happiness or that they have chosen other things instead," says Kimball. "Our complex, modern lives offer greater potential than ever for us to be happy, as long as we sacrifice money for the sake of time and put enough time into the things that will make us happy."

Yes, that was definitely worth the millions of dollars of research. I never thought that natural disasters might make people sad. (Nods approvingly)

Another Blow for Tolerance!

Letter from the National Campus Director

Temple University Trustees Adopt Policy on Students' Academic Rights

July 24, 2006

From: http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/

Temple University has become the first university in America to adopt an academic freedom policy which specifically addresses student rights and not just faculty privileges; protects students from ideological abuses in the classroom; and provides a grievance machinery to handle violations of students’ academic freedom.

This breakthrough can become a powerful weapon in building the student movement for academic freedom which has seized the imaginations of college students across the country. In a referendum this spring, the student body of Princeton University voted for a student academic bill of rights. Both these events present a tremendous opportunity for us to win hearts and minds among students all across the country and to challenge the political abuse of university classrooms by academic radicals.

......Temple University therefore reaffirms its commitment to academic freedom, and adopts the following statement of academic freedom principles applicable to faculty and students:

Statement of Principles

1 Faculty are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subjects, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial (or other) matter which has no relation to their subject. The faculty member is responsible, however, for maintaining academic standards in the presentation of course materials. [It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials, which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty member is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without super-cession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.]

2. As members of the academic community, students should be encouraged to develop the capacity for critical judgment and to engage in a sustained and independent search for the truth.
3. Faculty members in the classroom and in conference should encourage free discussion, inquiry and expression. Student performance should be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards.

4. Students should be free to take reasoned exception to the information or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion, but students are responsible for learning the content of the course of study in which they are enrolled. The validity of academic ideas, theories, arguments and views should be measured against the relevant academic standards.

5. Students should have protection through orderly grievance procedures against prejudiced or capricious evaluations that are not intellectually relevant to the subject matter under consideration. At the same time, students are responsible for complying with the standards of academic performance established for each course in which they are enrolled.

How can anyone in their right mind disagree with this!? Someone has heard our prayers. Lets hope it spreads like wildfire. Its so common-sense...it might not stand a chance.

Crisis in the Middle East

34 Youths Among 56 Dead in Israeli Attack
From http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060730/D8J6AN680.html

Israeli (sic) said it targeted Qana because it was a base for hundreds of rockets launched at Israeli, (sic) including 40 that injured five Israelis on Sunday. Israel said it had warned civilians several days before to leave the village.

"One must understand the Hezbollah is using their own civilian population as human shields," said Israeli Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir. "The Israeli defense forces dropped leaflets and warned the civilian population to leave the place because the Hezbollah turned it into a war zone."

...Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr questioned Israel's claim that Hezbollah fired rockets from the village. "What do you expect Israel to say? Will it say that it killed 40 children and women?" he told Al-Jazeera television.

...French President Jacques Chirac's office said "France condemns this unjustifiable action, which shows more than ever the need to move toward an immediate cease-fire, without which other such dramas can only be repeated."

Why doesn't it occur to anyone that the advantage of being a terrorist is that you don't wear a uniform? Apparently these Hezbollah characters think its a good idea to hide amongst the civilians, endangering their own countrymen and even consigning innocents to death in the process. Its a PR masterpiece.

Furthermore, the idea that Israel would attack civilians unprovoked is ridiculous.

The French make me sick when they talk like this. This isn't an "other such drama" this is war! Leave it to the French to make war into a dance. By the way, France, since when was it unjustifiable for a nation to fire upon those who are attacking it? Oh yes, since you lost your appendages of manly courage.

NEXT!!

From IDF: Qana building fell hours after strike
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3283816,00.html

IDF: Qana building fell hours after strike

(VIDEO) IDF continuing to check difficult incident at Qana village, and attempting to account for strange gap between time of the strike on the building – midnight – and eight in the morning, when the building collapsed Hanan Greenberg

VIDEO - An IDF investigation has found that the building in Qana struck by the Air Force fell around eight hours after being hit by the IDF.
"The attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear," Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters told journalists at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, following the incidents at Qana.

Rockets being fired from Qana village (Video: IDF Spokesperson Unit) Eshel and the head of the IDF's Operational Branch, Major General Gadi Eisnkot said the structure was not being attacked when it collapsed, at around 8:00 in the morning.
The IDF believes that Hizbullah explosives in the building were behind the explosion that caused the collapse.
Another possibility is that the rickety building remained standing for a few hours, but eventually collapsed. "It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there, Brigadier General Eshel said.
Rescue operations in Qana (Photo: Reuters)
"I'm saying this very carefully, because at this time I don't have a clue as to what the explanation could be for this gap," he added.
Meanwhile in Lebanon it is being reported that the number of those killed in the collapse of the structure climbed to 60.

All targets struck accurately
Eshel said that an additional attack took place at 7:30 in the morning, but added that other buildings were targeted. "This was an attack on three buildings 460 meters away from the structure we are talking about. Four bombs were dropped and all of them are documented by the planes' cameras. They all struck their targets. In addition, we carried out a filming sortie that photographed the village during the afternoon showing that the three targeted buildings we struck. We have verification of strikes on the building and that the bombs reached their targets," Eshel said.
"An attack that took place at two in the morning struck two targets, both of them 400 meters away from the building (that collapsed). They were also destroyed. The attack between 12 and 1 a.m. struck the area of the affected house, and there were accurate strikes on the target. We are asking the question – what happened between 1 in the morning and 8 in the morning… we understand this building was attacked between 12 and 1 in the morning, seven hours before it was seriously damaged," he said.

Brigadier General Eshel explained that "since the start of fighting in Lebanon 150 rockets from a very high number of rocket launchers have been fired from the village and its surrounding areas, at a number of sites in the State of Israel. Within the village itself we have located a diverse range of activities connected to firing of rockets, beginning from forces commanding this operation – because such an operation needs ongoing command to direct it – and logistical sites that serve this end."
"From this village rockets are fired almost every day across Israel. The operation carried out overnight is an extension of operations that didn't start last night but before, and during this night we struck a number of targets in the village. All of the targets are being meticulously sifted," Eshel added.

(07.30.06, 20:44)

This is the enemy! I wouldn't be surprised. It will be interesting to see how this develops or if it is conveniently swept under the rug.

In Introduction

Good evening and a rich welcome to you all. This is a project that needed to be embarked upon. I will avoid the usual heavy-handed "We're going to change the world" garbage. This blog isn't meant to change the world. Its an outlet. If you, like me, feel cornered, oppressed and threatened by the liberal culture that is infesting our state-funded Universities--join me. If not, then listen and learn.

In addition, I'll be hitting on current events, providing some sanity for myself in this liberal hothouse they call University