http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systemsOK, so in the few hours since I published this earlier post on the bizarre South Carolina Senate Democratic primary, things have been developing rapidly, and on a variety of fronts. I've received several emails from people I trust and respect, and the Vic Rawl campaign has now issued a statement about a study conducted by a political scientist and statistician I very much respect. For lack of a better way to unpack all of this, I'll just bullet point what I've learned or read, and then try to pull it all together in a summary at the end...
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
SC Democratic Primary Showing Strong Possibility of Fraud
Monday, June 14, 2010
Skulls show New World was settled twice: study
Skulls show New World was settled twice: study
June 14, 2010 -->
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Representation of the geographic dispersion models tested for the occupation of the Americas. (see scientific paper for details).
Two distinct groups from Asia settled in the New World and not one single migration as suggested by previous genetic studies, experts said Monday after comparing the skulls of early Americans.
Paleoanthropologists from Brazil, Chile and Germany compared the skulls of several dozen Paleoamericans, dating back to the early days of migration 11,000 years ago, with the more recent remains of more than 300 Amerindians.More information: PloS ONE paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011105
"We found that the differences between Early and Late Native American groups match the predictions of a two-migration scenario far better than they do those of any other hypothesis," they said.
"In other words, these differences are so large that it is highly improbable that the earliest inhabitants of the New World were the direct ancestors of recent Native American populations."
Their landmark research found differences in the cranial morphology that could only be explained by the fact that the last common ancestor of the Early and Late Native American groups came from outside the continent.
The experts agreed the differences were best explained by a scenario in which a first wave of settlers came across the Bering Strait from Northeast Asia followed by a second group from East Asia much later via the same route.
"We conclude that the morphological diversity documented through time in the New World is best accounted for by a model postulating two waves of human expansion into the continent originating in East Asia and entering through Beringia," they said.
"This disparity between our results and those of most genetic studies points to a large gap in our understanding of the peopling of the New World."
(c) 2010 AFP
via physorg.com
BBC News - White rice 'raises diabetes risk', say US experts
White rice has a far higher glycaemic index than brown rice as well as minimal fiber and oils. Replacing white rice with suitable brown rice and wholewheat bread could cut the risk of diabetes by a third, US experts say.
The study is based on questionnaires; some say the data is not robust enough to base firm conclusions on.White rice poses a serious diabetes threat because it causes steep rises in blood sugar, say Harvard researchers in Archives of Internal Medicine. Brown rice and other wholegrain foods are a healthier option as they release glucose more gradually, they say.
It may be that people who eat less white rice tend to live healthier lifestyles, for example.
'Brown is better'
In the study of nearly 200,000 US people, white rice consumption was linked to type 2 diabetes.
White Rice has no taste, it is like shoving spoonfuls of flour in your mouth. Remember Homer and his bag of flour when you start eating white rice or white bread you lardos.
After adjusting for age and other diabetes risk factors, those who ate five or more 150g servings of white rice per week had a 17% increased risk of diabetes compared with people who consumed less than one serving - about a cup of rice - per month.
Although few people - only 2% - in the study ate this much white rice, the finding was significant....
Teenager Passes Out Marrying Cow He Had Sex With
Jakarta Globe
It was on a terrace between two paddy fields like this that Balinese teenager Ngurah Alit was caught having sex with a cow, who he claimed had flirted with him. (AFP Photo/Jewel Samad)
Teenager Passes Out Marrying Cow He Had Sex With
A Balinese teenager caught in the act of intercourse with a cow passed out on Friday when he was forced to marry the animal in a ceremony witnessed by hundreds of curious onlookers.
As the Jakarta Globe reported earlier in the day, Ngurah Alit, 18, an unemployed youth from the seaside village of Yeh Embang in Jembrana, was caught stark naked positioned behind the cow in a rice paddy field.
In his defence, Alit admitted to the act of bestiality but claimed the cow, which he believed was a young and beautiful woman, had wooed him with flattering compliments.
As part of a Pecaruan ritual, a ceremony to cleanse the village of the unholy act of a man mating with a cow, Alit was forced to “marry” the animal.
Alit, however, according to Detik.com, passed out surrounded by locals and police, who were attempting to prevent a number of journalists from covering the spectacle.
It is unclear whether or not he got to say “I do.”
Alit’s collapse prompted his mother to begin screaming hysterically, while other family members shouted at photographers not to take pictures.
“Poor kid. He’s actually a quiet kid,” said one villager.
As part of the ceremony, Alit’s victim and new bride was drowned in ocean.
Alit, on the other hand, was symbolically drowned and bathed on the beach.
“Only his clothes were thrown into the sea,” the villager said.
Village chief Ida Bagus Legawa declared that the village had been “cleansed” from the “defilement from the incident.”
Steven Pinker - Mind Over Mass Media ( The Internet Is Not Making You Dumb)
Truro, Mass.
NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.
So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.
But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.
For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing, as anyone who has lost a morning of work to the Web site Arts & Letters Daily can attest.
Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.
Experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain. Speed-reading programs have long claimed to do just that, but the verdict was rendered by Woody Allen after he read “War and Peace” in one sitting: “It was about Russia.” Genuine multitasking, too, has been exposed as a myth, not just by laboratory studies but by the familiar sight of an S.U.V. undulating between lanes as the driver cuts deals on his cellphone.
Moreover, as the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show in their new book “The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else. Music doesn’t make you better at math, conjugating Latin doesn’t make you more logical, brain-training games don’t make you smarter. Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.
The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.
Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.
And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “The Stuff of Thought.”
via nytimes.com
Palestinian Girls Scoop Award At World's Top Science Competition
UNRWA Girls Scoop "Special Award" At World's Top Science Competition
15 May 2010
JerusalemThree girls from the UNRWA School at Askar Camp in Nablus have made history by becoming the first Palestinians to win an award at the world's premier youth science competition. Aseel Abu Aleil, Aseel Alshaar and Noor Alarada were competing with 1500 finalists from around the world.
They picked up a "special award in applied electronics" at the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, California.
The 14-year-olds scooped the prize for inventing an electronic "sensor cane" for the visually impaired, which for the first time sends an infrared signal downwards as well as forwards. Praising the originality of the invention, Mark Uslan, a Director at the American Federation of the Blind said: "Although various types of "laser canes" have existed since the early 1970s, the girls' design resolves a fundamental flaw in previous models by detecting holes in the ground."
UNRWA’s Deputy Commissioner-General, Margot Ellis said: “The girls are part of the UNRWA's school system which is educating 500,000 children throughout the Middle East. Unfortunately, severe financial constraints threaten the continued provision of quality education to young Palestinian refugees like these girls from Nablus.
"These students show the enormous potential of Palestinian girls and boys. UNRWA in its education programmes wants to bring this out. I pay tribute to them and their teachers. It makes me wonder what we could achieve if our education system were not in the midst of a cash crisis."
UNRWA Spokesperson, Chris Gunness, explained: "UNRWA's science education costs 25 million dollars a year and with a 90 million dollar deficit across the Agency our funds will run out in a matter of months. In Gaza, we have had to turn thousands of children away from our schools this year."
Ends
Ilona Kassisieh
Public Information Office
i.kassissieh@unrwa.org
Chris Gunness, Spokesperson
+972 (0)54 240 2659
c.gunness@unrwa.org
via unrwa.org
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