A new study provides the best evidence to date that higher levels of income inequality in the United States actually lead to more deaths in the country over a period of years.
The findings suggest that income inequality at any one point doesn’t work instantaneously – it begins increasing mortality rates 5 years later, and its influence peaks after 7 years, before fading after 12 years.
[ ]…The Gini coefficient has been steadily rising in the United States in recent decades, from .403 in 1980 to .469 in 2010.
In this study, Zheng found that a 0.01 rise in the Gini coefficient increases the cumulative odds of death by 122 percent in the following 12 years. This is after taking into account a wide variety of factors that may also influence mortality, including a person’s age, gender, race, marital status, education, work status and family income.
“Income inequality has a substantial effect on mortality,” he said.
But if income inequality does indeed affect mortality rates, why have other studies found mixed results? Zheng reviewed 79 previous studies to look for the reasons. The 11 best studies looked at income inequality at a particular point in time to see how it affected mortality rates at a specified time later.
“But current mortality isn’t just affected by income inequality at one time, say 10 years ago. It is also affected by income inequality 9 years ago, and 11 years ago, and the current level of inequality, and so on,” he said.
In this study, Zheng was able to look at deaths in a particular year and control for income inequality for each of up to 21 years preceding the death.
Even though the represent a smaller percentage of the population studies have shown that politicians/our political institutions – including the courts are more responsive to the desires of the wealthy. Wealth in the USA is political power. Votes can and do change policy, sometimes it the direction of the non-wealthy, but wealth equals contact and influence. ALEC has an enormous affect on legislation in the US because it can afford to field a literal army of lobbyists who can meet with with legislators ad over helm with with data saying that for profit prisons are the best thing since the invention of the telephone. Or that not policing the release of toxic pollution is increases the bottom line. While those who think corporations are responsible for cleaning up their waste are marginalized as anti-business or Marxists. There are likely some copyright issues with this cartoon or I would post it here. On the left is an older gentleman being stopped and asked for voter ID. On the right panel is a guy bringing in a wheel barrel full of money to influence the election, no ID required. If you are an authoritarian who does not trust or believe in the common good, that little piece of satire represents your dream come true. It is difficult, it obviously costs a lot, to undermine the fundamental principles of a democratic republic, but it can and is being done. Not all at once, no Kristallnacht ( Night of Broken Glass) where everyone wakes up one day and realizes that democracy has been destroyed in one fatal action, but slowly, a step at a time. All the while, every step is accompanied by shrill cries of patriotism, family values and Bible quotes.
People who have already sifted through online information to make sense of a subject can help strangers facing similar tasks without ever directly communicating with them, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research have demonstrated.
This process of distributed sensemaking, they say, could save time and result in a better understanding of the information needed for whatever goal users might have, whether it is planning a vacation, gathering information about a serious disease or trying to decide what product to buy.
The researchers explored the use of digital knowledge maps — a means of representing the thought processes used to make sense of information gathered from the Web. When participants in the study used a knowledge map that had been created and improved upon by several previous users, they reported that the quality of their own work was better than when they started from scratch or used a newly created knowledge map.
“Collectively, people spend more than 70 billion hours a year trying to make sense of information they have gathered online,” said Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. “Yet in most cases, when someone finishes a project, that work is essentially lost, benefitting no one else and perhaps even being forgotten by that person. If we could somehow share those efforts, however, all of us might learn faster.”
There are places to seek expert advice or the advice of knowledgeable novices – like Ask Yahoo. Google Scholars is still up. Though generally its difficult to find an index of individual research. Sounds like a project that someone could make some money at, but the individuals who may have put hours, if not days or weeks into finding resources and making citations may feel they’re being used. Wikipedia’s citations can be helpful, but their links seem to go dead fairly often. My example may differ from others but I have found that work groups and study groups can be a good source of inspiration – despite having to filter out a lot of non-helpful information. Maybe an extension of Wikipedia would work – as in here are some research outlines with their sources. That would also include some community policing for veracity.
The helicopter plane from Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. I was watching The 39 Steps the other day and wondered if such a vehicle really existed. I cannot find any source that directly speaks to the airplane-helicopter used in that film (released in 1935), but according to Wikipedia there was a hybrid plane-helicopter called an autogyro flown as early as 1923. In the movie the police were using it to try and find a fleeing Robert Donat in the hills of Scotland.
If you grew up reading southern writers like Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Alice Walker, Edgar Allan Poe and watching the plays or movie version of Tennessee Williams, you grew up as much with myths of the south as you did with documentations of the south. For even the average southern a good tale was even better with with a little myth thrown in. That is not to say those myths were always bad or the tendency to mythologize is always a slur on the truth. Crosses, Flowers, and Asphalt: Roadside Memorials in the U.S. South
Beginning in 2003, Tom Zarrilli has traveled around the American Southeast documenting handmade memorials to departed loved ones found alongside highways. He discovered differences in not only the memorials, but in the attitudes that officials and the general public expressed toward these shrines that affected their composition and longevity. In his photographic essay with accompanying text, Zarrilli offers a brief overview of the memorials, his approach to photographing them, and their significance to the contemporary southern imaginary.
[ ]…These memorials remind us of the enormous human cost of our national obsession with cars and car culture, an aspect of American life that has flourished in the U.S. South and in popular culture representations of southern culture. The images include romanticized moonshine runners evading the law, country singers meeting their fate in Cadillacs (the 1952 Cadillac Hank Williams died in attracts visitors in Mongomery, Alabama), dirt track racers defying death in stripped-down vehicles with high performance engines, the glitz and product promotion of modern day NASCAR, and the window-tinted, stretch-limo world of rap culture.
[ ]…The appearance and structure of roadside memorials varies greatly. They may be simple small crosses constructed on site from pieces of scrap lathe or metal and roughly hand painted with the name of the deceased. Others may be prefabricated in a home workshop, resulting in a more durable and finely crafted display. Adornments range from generic artificial flowers, ribbons, and stuffed animals to more personal items reminiscent of Georgia and South Carolina coastal African American grave site decorative traditions, such as personal photographs, items of clothing, and other relics and items that provide the traveler or mourner with a direct link to the deceased.
Highway 19 and 41, central Georgia, 2004. By Tom Zarilli,
I see them quite a bit. Most of the ones I see are memorials to those killed by a drunk driver.
Conservatives want to have small government and extra large government. The rhetoric, a dilapidated jig-saw puzzle with frayed edges, weathered and beaten, no one can tell for sure if they even belong to the same original puzzle. The average person looks at it and before having the chance to decide exactly what the mess represented is told, in nauseating and reactionary regularity, that it stands for small govmint. It hardly matters, if it matters at all to the conservative movement that their historical record hardly adds up to a movement that has made government smaller. They have mode the actual apparatus of government larger and extended government by having government become the Siamese twin of government – see the surveillance state, the national security state, the partnerships to share information of the private activities of ordinary citizens, to help set prices for commodities, to give corporations special status above that of individual persons. So it is no surprise that one of conservatives’ most visible pundits believes government cannot create jobs even as the candidate he supports is running on a job creation platform. Austerity Can’t Be Just For Regular People
Markets all over the world freaked out over the prospect of having ignorant European voters meddling in the recovery process the geniuses of the high finance world had already painstakingly laid out for them. The model for economic progress in the financial bubble era, after all, is supposed to go something like this:
Let banks inflate massive asset bubbles with the aid of cheap or even free government cash, and tons of leverage;
Before it all explodes, carve out gigantic sums for bonuses and compensation for the companies that inflated those bubbles;
After it explodes, get the various governments to bail those companies out;
Pay for it all by slashing services to what’s left of the middle class.
This is the model we used in America. We had a monster asset bubble based on phony mortgages, which Wall Street was allowed to inflate to spectacular dimensions with minimal reserve capital, huge amounts of leverage, and tons of fraud for good measure. When that bubble exploded, we first rescued the banks who inflated the thing in the first place, and then our plan for paying for it mostly revolved around folks like Paul Ryan and Chris Christie, who made great political hay by trying to take an ax to “entitlements” like health care and retirement benefits.
While I remember a couple of stories about some odd trader or banker having some rough times back in 2009, the same financial players are in place, enjoying the same massive bonuses as though the crash never happened. That still leaves an 8.1% unemployment rate with a couple more percent being people who have just given up and their unemployment benefits have run out. Along comes David brooks to tell us the way things are:
Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.
Politicians tried to compensate by reducing the tax bill, increasing deficit spending, ensuring easy credit for homebuyers and by helping workers shift out of the hypercompetitive, globalized part of the economy and into the less productive and more sheltered parts of the economy – mostly into health care, government and education.
But you can only mask structural problems for so long …. The current model, in which we try to compensate for structural economic weakness with tax cuts and an unsustainable welfare state, simply cannot last.
Has Romney heard that a voice from the vaulted tower of conservatism says not to bother creating jobs. My favorite part of the brooks fairy tale is how the millions in food stamps that keep people who had nothing to do with creating the Great Recession are getting literately less than a penny for every dollar of welfare people like Mitt Romney’s friends got so they can live in their milti-million dollar condos. We need to start resenting those people under the table who are grasping the crumbs that trickle down, not the crony corporatists who are self-made men until the next crash and the clock strikes twelve when they suddenly turn back into their true selves, corporate Marxists, otherwise known as conservatives.
Atheists and agnostics are more driven by compassion to help others than are highly religious people, a new study finds.
That doesn’t mean highly religious people don’t give, according to the research to be published in the July 2012 issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. But compassion seems to drive religious people’s charitable feelings less than it other groups.
The very religious are highly motivated in their giving by social pressure. I’m kind of suspicious of studies like this. It might be true as big pictures of mass behavior goes, but there is a tremendous amount of personal differences, thus personal considerations that go into altruistic behavior.
In 1912, after she called him “the Old Maid of novelists” in a scathing review of his new book, Marriage, journalist and author Rebecca West met and fell in love with H. G. Wells. The often-explosive affair that resulted lasted for some months, until, in March of 1913, Wells — 26 years her senior and already a married man — broke of their relationship. West was distraught, and responded with the following intense letter.
Dear H. G.,
During the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death. At any rate I shall be quite a different person. I refuse to be cheated out of my deathbed scene.
I don’t understand why you wanted me three months ago and don’t want me now. I wish I knew why that were so. It’s something I can’t understand, something I despise. And the worst of it is that if I despise you I rage because you stand between me and peace. Of course you’re quite right. I haven’t anything to give you. You have only a passion for excitement and for comfort. You don’t want any more excitement and I do not give people comfort. I never nurse them except when they’re very ill. I carry this to excess. On reflection I can imagine that the occasion on which my mother found me most helpful to live with was when I helped her out of a burning house.
I always knew that you would hurt me to death some day, but I hoped to choose the time and place. You’ve always been unconsciously hostile to me and I have tried to conciliate you by hacking away at my love for you, cutting it down to the little thing that was the most you wanted. I am always at a loss when I meet hostility, because I can love and I can do practically nothing else.
Some Teens May have Innate Neurological ‘Risk’ for Drug Abuse. Thus most at risk seem to have neural networks wired a little differently from people/teens who are more likely to become addicts or even try an addictive drug in the first place. The researchers hope that the findings might lead to a medical screening for this risk tendency.
Researchers of the team of Professor Anton Zeilinger at the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology and the University of Vienna’s Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information have experimentally demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to know whether two particles were in a separable or in an entangled quantum state even after their measurement or if they no longer exist.
Quantum states of particles become tangled and than untangled. In that event they leave behind fingerprints and body fluids that can be used to recreate the scene of the original entanglement. or something like that. Not even two lonely particles can get away with anything like they used to. At least until the day they can become hedge fund managers or conservative congress critters.
Physician income declined in general, although the top-earning specialties remained the same as in Medscape’s 2011 survey. In 2012, radiologists and orthopedic surgeons topped the list at $315,000, followed by cardiologists ($314,000), anesthesiologists ($309,000), and urologists ($309,000). Previously, radiologists and orthopedic surgeons led the pack, at a mean income of $350,000 each, followed by anesthesiologists and cardiologists (both at $325,000). The bottom-earning specialties in 2012’s survey were pediatrics, family medicine, and internal medicine.
The late Lewis Thomas, physician, poet, etymologist and essayist could be both deeply compassionate and a cranky SOB. In one collection of essays back in the 1980s he said one of the worse things that was happening to the medical profession was doctors who were more concerned with owning big houses and their stock portfolios than with the practice of medicine as a humanitarian calling. Making money and good medicine are not mutually exclusive, but these income trends might have just a little bit to do with why the same procedures in the US costs so much more than they do in most western European countries.
A Conversation With John Slattery. The Mad Men actor talks about Roger Sterling’s long, strange trip. Interesting behind the scenes look at how the most recent episode was filmed especially Roger’s experiment with LSD. That episode has set in motion the speculation/hope that now Roger and Joan may get together. I don’t see Roger as wanting to play daddy at this point in his life. Though maybe that ‘trip’ has made him a different man.
Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.
[ ]….Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
Hasn’t being with other people always been a trade-off. In the best circumstances you get human warmth, sympathy, sometimes emotional intimacy, fun, shared experiences that become the nostalgic memories of old age. We also give up part of ourselves. We sacrifice part of who we are in order to establish some peace, some agree-ability. There are always a few that thrive on conflict, but most of us do not like contentious relationships. Even among our closest friends sometimes our moods or priorities don’t match. There was or never should have been an expectation that the internet would smooth out the complications that follow any sustained interactions with others.
We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety.
I’m not so sure about the basic thesis that we’re lonelier than ever or that loneliness per se is something we need to work on. It can be debilitating at its worse, yet the average amount might be something to embrace. Privately, aspects of our lives like loneliness, lack of popularity ( she also touches on shallowness) have always been part of the human experience. It has always been the case that publicly one did not go around professing loneliness. That was fine to express in a novel, poem or song lyric, but public confessions of loneliness implied a flaw, a lack of virtue even. You must lack some inner strength, some quality of character or perhaps lack of faith, if you are lonely. This went hand in hand with the pressure to walk around like a perpetually happy clown. If you were unhappy you must not possess the kind of mind set that makes for happiness. Though you could be as tragically unhappy as you like in your plays, biography or other artistic expression. The more tragic and unhappy, almost the better. You served society’s need for socially acceptable catharsis.
Why did they send me so far and so lonely,
Up where the moors spread and grey rocks are piled?
Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only
Watch o’er the steps of a poor orphan child. – Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre, Chapter 3.
And he broke into a long string of complaints. When he accepted the post of manager, he understood that he would have been allowed to reside in Paris, and not be forced to bury himself in this country district, far from his friends, deprived of newspapers. No matter! he had overlooked all that. But Arnoux appeared to pay no heed to his merits. He was, moreover, shallow and retrograde—no one could be more ignorant. – Gustave Flaubert. Sentimental Education, Chapter 9.
My father’s impulses, never under his own controul, perpetually led him into
difficulties from which his ingenuity alone could extricate him; and the
accumulating pile of debts of honour and of trade, which would have bent to
earth any other, was supported by him with a light spirit and tameless
hilarity; while his company was so necessary at the tables and assemblies
of the rich, that his derelictions were considered venial, and he himself received with intoxicating flattery. (shallowness and self delusions) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The Last Man, Chapter 1.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. – William Wordsworth. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.
For the photo illustrations for this week’s profile of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, we asked Louis-Dreyfus to channel Audrey Hepburn — but with a twist. You’ll notice that in each of the three film publicity stills we recreated — from “Funny Face,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and “Charade” — something is awry. The idea was to put Louis-Dreyfus in these iconic poses that she (comically) can’t quite pull off.
I cannot post those photos here for obvious reasons, but I do have an original of Audrey Hepburn.
The AFL-CIO has released its CEO Paywatch with 2011 data. So how do CEOs stack up against ordinary workers? Well, the average CEO of a company on the S&P 500 Index earned 380 times the average American worker’s wage, with average CEO pay having increased 13.9 percent in 2011
CEOs in a merit based society such as ours work 380 times harder? Intelligence – by way of technical, scientific or management skills have value in a merit based economy. Thus these 380 people are the smartest people in the nation?
Factory Child Bean Stringers 1909. If we could only get rid of child labor laws, environmental laws, get rid of health and safety regulations, just get gov’mint outa our lives – the USA could return the paradise we once were.
Ill Wind
This piece is composed by Harold Arlen, arranged by Benny Carter (1942), transcribed by Dick Domek and was performed live by the University of Kentucky Jazz Ensemble directed by Miles Osland at the 2007 UK Band Spectacular. It features Angie Ortega on alto saxophone.
In environmental philosophy there is something called an aesthetic moment. A moment when the viewer is deeply moved by something or an event that is of the natural world. A Caribbean sunset, the lights of mountain cabins of a clear winter night, a cactus flower, a sea tornado just off the beach, a school of parrot fish. Not everyone has perfectly match aesthetic moments, and intensity can vary, but observing and having a reaction to natural beauty is universal. The same seems to be true for human-made works of art and be cause for contemplation as well, Aesthetic Appeal May Have Neurological Link to Contemplation and Self-Assessment
A network of brain regions which is activated during intense aesthetic experience overlaps with the brain network associated with inward contemplation and self-assessment, New York University researchers have found. Their study sheds new light on the nature of the aesthetic experience, which appears to integrate sensory and emotional reactions in a manner linked with their personal relevance.
[ ]…However, for paintings receiving a “4”—indicating a piece truly moved a subject—fMRI results showed the engagement of an additional neurological process. While subjects varied in which paintings received “4s,” the brains of all subjects showed a significant increase in activity in a specific network of frontal and subcortical regions in response to artworks they reported as highly moving. This activity included several regions belonging to the brain’s “default mode network” (DMN), which had previously been associated with self-referential mentation.
“Aesthetic judgments for paintings are highly individual, in that the paintings experienced as moving differ widely across people,” the researchers observed. “But the neural systems supporting aesthetic reactions remain largely the same from person to person. Moreover, the most moving paintings produce a selective activation of a network of brain regions which is known to activate when we think about personally relevant matters such as our own personality traits and daydreams, or when we contemplate our future.”
That would seem to indicate that we’re all wired by evolution to experience beauty, but what we feel or think is beautiful can be shaped by environment – or nurturing. At the opposite end of the spectrum this might also explain why people have such visceral reactions to things they personally find ugly or gross.
3. “[Angelina Jolie’s] been with so many guys she makes me look like a baby, OK, with the other side. And, I just don’t even find her attractive.” [2006]
5. “Well, you know ‘The National Enquirer’ did a story they said, ‘Who’s had more supermodels than any man ever in history?’ ‘Let’s name ‘em, let’s each of us name ‘em’ ‘I’ve had a lot of them, I’ll tell you that.” [2011]
So Trump thinks of himself as quite the man for all his alleged conquests. Yet he regards women who may have acted like him as immoral. Doesn’t that mean that by his own definition for proper moral behavior, that he is a whore.
Prior investigators have asserted that certain group characteristics cause group members to disregard outside information and that this behavior leads to diminished performance. We demonstrate that the very process of making a judgment collaboratively rather than individually also contributes to such myopic underweighting of external viewpoints. Dyad members exposed to numerical judgments made by peers gave significantly less weight to those judgments than did individuals working alone. This difference in willingness to use peer input was mediated by the greater confidence that the dyad members reported in the accuracy of their own estimates.
(a dyad is a group of two people)
I would not reject the two heads are better than one in all circumstances. I’m not a mathematician so while I can do some higher math, in situations where my figures will land on someone else’s desk I tend to have them double checked. The study does show that when working on a solution to a problem that might not be as cut and dry as math, your partner can actually give you more confidence in a solution that will not work. Even to the point that you both reject real solutions to the problem provided by an outside authority. It only takes two to begin to have a group bias. Bias that resists new information.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky. gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 13, 2012. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) (Credit: AP)
Topics:Opening Shot
Senate Republicans used a filibuster to kill the Buffett Rule last night.
The Senate minority kill the Buffet Rule – a minimum 30% tax on millionaires – even though the majority of the public supports such a change in the tax code. If you know that conservatives are going to use the filibuster to kill such a change, why bother. The thinking goes that this will embarrass conservatives. That might be with independents. Though is not likely to have much effect on conservatives since one would have to honestly look at the deficit, our infrastructure issues and slashes in education funding among other items and see that conservatives have no shame. They have no shame about making bridges crumble, letting education deteriorate, the elderly and disabled do without Medicaid in order to make government less effective at solving problems that individuals in this very complex economy, cannot fix on their own. So Democrats may be using the only tool they have in trying to highlight the regressive conservative agenda. It will only have limited effect on a political movement that takes joy in seeing the U.S. decay. Look at the nation’s that make a large share of our manufactured goods – Germany, Japan, Sweden China. They all, except China, have unions. They all have public health care plans. Their economies are in better shape than ours. Conservatives have no real world example now or in history they can point to and and say look at how great this country was government by conservative dogma. Everything they advocate is simply taken as a matter of political canon The Book of Right-Wingisms Verse 2 Chap 3. Where in those who were not born into wealth can suck it.
The same cultural zeitgeist that gave us the metrosexual – the urban male obsessive about grooming and personal appearance – is also creating its digital equivalent: the datasexual. The datasexual looks a lot like you and me, but what’s different is their preoccupation with personal data. They are relentlessly digital, they obsessively record everything about their personal lives, and they think that data is sexy. In fact, the bigger the data, the sexier it becomes. Their lives – from a data perspective, at least – are perfectly groomed.
[ ]…True datasexuals, however, will not stop at just collecting and recording bits of data from the Web. They are obsessively driven to use a proliferating number of mobile devices and apps to make data-grooming a reality. Consider the example of Placeme, a new app that is as “scary” as it is “futuristic.” What PlaceMe does is plug into the ambient monitoring functionality of your mobile device in order to relentlessly record all of your personal data on a highly granular level. Consider a typical trip to a retail store — Placeme would be able to record everything from which door of the store you entered, to how long you spent in each aisle, to the approximate speed at which you traversed various departments.
I’ll admit to being an info addict. Not a news addict – the latest headlines are not necessarily the most important events of the day. These people seem too obsessed with the mundane and what stuff other people consume. For most of us the trick is to whittle down all the information that comes at us to get at the marrow of what matters. Or even hopefully, something entertaining , or reason to have hope.
The Strypes – You Can’t Judge A Book By The Cover. In black and white. Some very young guys who might be the next generation’s revival of a blend of R&B with rockabilly.
We all have them – positive memories of personal events that are a delight to recall, and painful recollections that we would rather forget. A new study reveals that what we do with our emotional memories and how they affect us has a lot to do with our gender, personality and the methods we use (often without awareness) to regulate our feelings.
[ ]…The researchers used questionnaires and verbal cues to assess personality and to elicit more than 100 autobiographical memories in each of 71 participants (38 of them women). Their analysis revealed that both men and women who were high in extroversion (gregarious, assertive, stimulus-seeking) tended to remember more positive than negative life events. Men who were high in neuroticism tended to recall a greater proportion of negative memories than men who were low in neuroticism, while women who were high in neuroticism tended to return to the same negative memories again and again, a process called rumination.
Rumination is known to be associated with depression, Florin Dolcos said.
“Depressed people recollect those negative memories and as a result they feel sad,” he said. “And as a result of feeling sad, the tendency is to have more negative memories recollected. It’s a kind of a vicious circle.”
None of the study subjects had been diagnosed with depression or other emotional disorders, but, as might be expected, both male and female participants were likely to experience a lower mood after recalling negative autobiographical memories. (Positive memories generally preceded a more positive mood, but the association was indirect and mediated by extroversion, the researchers reported.)
The most pronounced differences between men and women involved the effects of the emotional strategies they used when recalling negative autobiographical memories. Men who engaged in reappraisal, making an effort to think differently about their memories, were likely to recall more positive memories than their peers, while men who used suppression, trying to tamp down their negative emotional responses, saw no pronounced effect on the recall of positive or negative memories. In women, however, suppression was significantly associated with the recall of negative memories and with a lower mood afterward.
“I think that the most important thing here is that we really need to look concomitantly at sex- and personality-related differences and to acknowledge that these factors have a different impact on the way we record our memories, on what we are doing with our memories, and later, how what we are doing with our memories is impacting our emotional well-being,” said Sanda Dolcos.
The findings are instructive for both men and women, she said. Being more outgoing, interrupting rumination and using reappraisal seems to work best for men and women as a strategy for dealing with negative memories and cherishing the positive ones, she said.
So some – let’s say men – have similar bad experiences. Some of them are what – better at putting those bad memories in a little box or are they truly better at developing coping mechanisms. If some men or women are better at denial that would explain why some people make the same mistakes in their relationships or political allegiances or career mistakes, over and over again. That ability to shrug things off might have some immediate benefit in terms of mood, but how about in terms of applying lessons learned. Those that ruminate – put those bad memories on the mental Ferris wheel would be the ones to be concerned about. Something terrible to maybe just unpleasant happened and it gets churned around over and over again. The inability to find a way forward is terrible. I’ve experienced about some short term personal issues that just get trapped like an old vinyl LP with a scratch, the lyrics repeated over and over. They have eventually gotten to the point that I get tired of them. The OK that’s enough of that, its time to move on point. It must be horrible to have that feeling over a memory persist for months or years.
Brian McCarty is a Memphis-born toy photographer and director/producer. Working with toys for over 15 years, McCarty’s unique and innovative vision has attracted a huge international following. His postmodern integration of concept and character has earned McCarty’s photography a prominent position in the so-called “Art-Toy” movement. McCarty is featured in several books chronicling the artistic movement such as Vinyl Will Kill, Dot Dot Dash, and Toys: New Designs from the Art-Toy Revolution. His first monograph, titled Art-Toys, was released in 2010 by Los Angeles based Baby Tattoo Books.
I have some inexplicable fascination with photos of toys seeming to cope with the hazards of the real world.
Flamboyant Tea Party Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said at town hall meeting last night that “he’s heard” of up to 80 Democratic congressmen who are members of the Communist Party. The entire House Democratic Caucus is 190 members, so West is claiming that almost half are card-carrying Communists. Not surprisingly, he would not name names.
Is West five years old, suffer from some kind of mental incapacity. Who knows. I have heard that West is a necrophiliac and engages in bestiality. Since I have heard that, that makes it true and in no way is it irresponsible or immoral to spread my conclusions. West is a conservative and a self proclaimed Christian and man of values. If West, by his example, says it is moral to think and reason in this manner, than it must be moral and rational to think West is a degenerate until he proves otherwise. I also understand that he likes to dress up in his Nazi uniform when having degenerate sex.
Some short history about the labor movement in the U.S. by the Smithsonian for the short attention span internet age. The entry includes Frances Perkins, Samuel Gompers and César Chávez, but I’ll just post part of the entry on Perkins (1880-1965). Perkins makes Sarah Palin look like like a scared gerbil on a treadmill,
That Frances Perkins devoted so much of her life to the plight of the American worker is noteworthy in itself. However, the fact that she also blazed a trail for women in American politics makes her accomplishments all the more extraordinary. While organizers like Samuel Gompers attempted to enact labor reform from within the labor community, Perkins attacked the same problems from the level of city, state, and finally national government.
Perkins was a pioneer in women’s issues in addition to her role in labor reform. Originally born Fanny Coralie Perkins, she later changed her first name to Frances because she thought people would take her more seriously. In later life she shocked many in polite society when she refused to take her husband’s name after marriage.
Perkins’s interest in social reform began during her years at Mt. Holyoke College, when she joined the National Consumers League, a group organized to improve labor conditions through consumer pressure. After college she became a teacher and spent holidays working in settlement houses and other social service organizations. In 1909 she won a fellowship to study at the New York School of Philanthropy, where she met many of the city’s leading reformers. In 1910 she received a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University. At the same time, as head of the New York City Consumers League, she monitored workers’ conditions and lobbied the state legislature on their behalf. When Perkins’s acquaintance Al Smith won the New York governorship in 1918, he invited her to sit on the governing board of the state labor department. In that capacity she became known as an expert in both industrial regulation and labor-management mediation.
In 1928, Franklin D. Roosevelt, recently elected governor of New York, appointed Perkins as head of the state labor department. For a woman to assume such a post was unprecedented. It was also the beginning of a close working relationship between Roosevelt and Perkins. Four years later, after Roosevelt was elected president, he invited Perkins to serve as his secretary of labor. During their years together, Perkins was an integral part of Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression, and an advocate of social security, wage and hour regulation, and the abolition of child labor. She distanced herself from labor leaders but earned their respect as she deftly managed some of the era’s most volatile labor disputes.
As Perkins rose in prominence and position, she was forced to become more acutely aware of her status as a woman. After all, at the time she joined the New York state government, women in many states were still two years away from being allowed to vote. As a consequence, she was very careful about her demeanor and appearance when interacting with her male colleagues. On the subject of dress, she once remarked: “Many good and intelligent women do dress in ways that are very attractive and pretty, but don’t particularly invite confidence in their common sense, integrity or sense of justice.”
You can view this as a five minute long commercial for the travel industry ot an experimental short film about travel, Obus – The Traveller
Written, Directed and Photographed by: Liam Gilmour, Peter Ryle and Tomas Friml
liamgilmour.com
peterryle.com
tomasfriml.com
Styling: Nadja Mott
Hair and Makeup: Samantha Coles
Model: Erin Jolley w/ Giant Management
The term anthropomorphism was coined by the Greek philosopher Xenophanes when describing the similarity between religious believers and their gods — that is, Greek gods were depicted having light skin and blue eyes while African gods had dark skin and brown eyes. Neuroscience research has shown that similar brain regions are involved when we think about the behavior of both humans and of nonhuman entities, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be using similar processes as those used for thinking about other people.
Anthropomorphism carries many important implications. For example, thinking of a nonhuman entity in human ways renders it worthy of moral care and consideration. In addition, anthropomorphized entities become responsible for their own actions — that is, they become deserving of punishment and reward.
Like being able to assign values anthropomorphism can go either way, making a nonhuman entity like a dog or a whale worthy of moral consideration. It also means that we can shroud something nebulous with omnipotence and be willing to kill or die for its sanctity, real or not. Its been a while and I cannot find the link, but a few years ago there was a brief YouTube craze involving the destruction of toy robots or toys that could speak and move. Things came to a head when children saw them and became upset. Thus a related issue arose of hurting robots – non-felling things, because while the robot did not fell pain, those destroying the robots were inflicting pain on children who had assigned human-like qualities to the robots and toys. While the feelings of those children may have been a nuance to some odd strain of geekdom that was just having what it thought was fun, the phenomenon of children bonding with robots may have some benefits for parents of the future – Children perceive humanoid robot as emotional, moral being
Robot nannies could diminish child care worries for parents of young children. Equipped with alarms and monitoring capabilities to guard children from harm, a robot nanny would let parents leave youngsters at home without a babysitter.
Sign us up, parents might say.
Human-like robot babysitters are in the works, but it’s unclear at this early stage what children’s relationships with these humanoids will be like and what dangers lurk in this convenient-sounding technology.
Will the robots do more than keep children safe and entertained? Will they be capable of fostering social interactions, emotional attachment, intellectual growth and other cognitive aspects of human existence? Will children treat these caregivers as personified entities, or like servants or tools that can be bought and sold, misused or ignored?
Today on April 9,1865 the treasonous Confederate Army surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox, VA, ending the Civil War.
We Are Not All In It Together. Perhaps a super slow economic recovery, but we do seem to be recovering. Though some people are clearly recovering while others struggle.
Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.
The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.
If you worked – repaired roofs, drove a delivery truck, waited tables, worked as a clerk selling athletic shoes, mopped the floors in an office building, supervised warehouse deliveries answered customer service call you are barely treading economic water. Fox News and Paul Ryan(R-WI) say that you are a part of the smoocher class. Those people who put on a few thousand dollars in elegant haberdashery, drove a Mercedes to the office and labored in their orthopedic-ally correct chairs for eight to ten hours, they are doing the economy such a favor that conservatives want to reward them with more tax breaks.
Caracol / Certitudes. Some of the photographer neighbors here at WordPress might enjoy the very photographic quality of today’s video.
Chanson / Track : CERTITUDES
Artiste / Artist : CARACOL [caracolmusique.com]
Étiquette + Producteur / Label + Producer : INDICA RECORDS [indica.mu]
Maison de Production / Production House : PARCE QUE FILMS [parcequefilms.com]
inkbluesky 
You must be logged in to post a comment.