Inside Your Little Brain

With a name that means 'little brain' in Latin, the cerebellum comprises just 10 percent of the entire brain's mass. Don't let that small size fool you, though; with more than three-quarters of the brain's neurons packed within that small space, there's a lot going on inside.

Traditionally it's thought this part of the nervous system located at the base of the skull is mostly concerned with coordinating motor functions like balance and movement. Now new research backs up a hypothesis that's gathering momentum: it also plays a key role in learning.

In this new study, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University wanted to build on previous research identifying the cerebellum's posterior-lateral region as playing a role connecting what we see to the movements we make.     READ MORE...

Our US Electric Grid

CNN: As heat ramps up ahead of what forecasters say will be a hotter than normal summer, electricity experts and officials are warning that states may not have enough power to meet demand in the coming months. And many of the nation’s grid operators are also not taking climate change into account in their planning, even as extreme weather becomes more frequent and more severe.

All of this suggests that more power outages are on the way, not only this summer but in the coming years as well.

Power operators in the Central US, in their summer readiness report, have already predicted “insufficient firm resources to cover summer peak forecasts.” That assessment accounted for historical weather and the latest NOAA outlook that projects for more extreme weather this summer.

But energy experts tell CNN that some power grid operators are not considering how the climate crisis is changing our weather — including more frequent extreme events — and that is a problem if the intent is to build a reliable power grid.

“The reality is the electricity system is old and a lot of the infrastructure was built before we started thinking about climate change,” said Romany Webb, a researcher at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s not designed to withstand the impacts of climate change.”

Webb says many power grid operators use historical weather to make investment decisions, rather than the more dire climate projections, simply because they want to avoid the possibility of financial loss for investing in what might happen versus what has already happened. She said it’s the wrong approach and it makes the grid vulnerable.  READ MORE...

Fighting COVID with Superstition

Columbia University reverted their COVID-19 policy, requiring students to mask indoors.

Gabriele Holtermann

Boy, is US higher education full of idiots: Columbia University, affiliated Barnard College and Pace University, among other schools, have all started requiring masking indoors again.

Columbia-Barnard only scrapped the mandate on March 14, so students got less than a month to breathe free, and now will be muzzled through June.

And all because campus administrators deem it more important to virtue-signal than to follow the actual science. They blame an uptick in COVID cases, though COVID poses no significant risk to their fully vaccinated student bodies.

Plus, as noted above, case numbers stopped being a useful indicator of coronavirus perils at least a year ago.

And just 0.001% of 15- to 24-year-olds are at risk of dying from COVID, per data from Johns Hopkins. And masking does very little to reduce transmission risks, anyway.

COVID is now endemic, not pandemic — meaning we’ll have to learn to live with the background risks it poses, just like the flu. It’ll help that learning process when the supposedly smartest folks in America stop relying on superstition to “fight” it.

America's Appetite for Fake News

Soldiers from the 42nd Infantry Division, several of whom read newspapers, stand aboard the U.S. troop transport USS President Lincoln in October 1917. US NAVY/INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES


Do Americans even want the news media to tell them the truth? After reading journalist and historian Andie Tucher’s important new history of fakery in U.S. journalism, I’m not so sure.

From the very first American newspaper in 1690, sham journalism—for power, profit, politics, entertainment, or mischief—has held center stage in U.S. media. Permutations varied from the penny press in the 1830s, to the yellow press in the 1890s, to the tabloids in the 1920s, to much of Fox News today—all feeding entertainment, propaganda, and sensational conspiracy theories to a hungry public.


Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History, Andie Tucher, Columbia University Press, 384 pp., $28, March 2022

As the United States faces an ongoing pandemic, reverberations from an insurrection, and a devastating war in Europe, the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 100 years ago, journalist and critic Walter Lippmann lamented that “the present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism.” 

He may as well have been speaking of today. The overwhelming volume of misinformation these days might feel like an aberration, but as Tucher makes clear, it is not. The U.S. public has always been all too eager to consume narratives that titillate, distract, or accord with what they want to believe—true or not.

False news almost entirely dominated the media market for the first 200 years of the U.S. press. It was not until the turn of the last century that something we might recognize as responsible journalism in the public interest took hold. 

Tucher tells lively anecdotes from the 19th and 20th centuries, clearly relishing the more outrageous fictions masquerading as news. Along the way, we learn some surprising tidbits about the history of U.S. journalism, such as the birth of the interview: an American media invention that dates back only to 1836 when the New York Herald, covering the murder of a prostitute, featured a verbatim conversation with a local madam. 

Unfortunately, like much of the media at the time, the reporter’s goal was to be as sensational as possible. When the madam proved not quite salacious, he filled his piece with made-up quotes.  READ MORE...

Cheating College Students

Mariam Aly, an assistant professor at Columbia University, has tried everything to keep her students from cheating. In her cognitive neuroscience class, she gives her students a week to complete an open-book exam. And, as part of that exam, the nearly 180 students in the class have to sign an honor code.

But they're still cheating. And dealing with student misconduct, she says, is the worst part of her job. "It's just awkward and painful for everybody involved," Aly says. "And it's really hard to blame them for it. You do feel disappointed and frustrated."

Her students are facing unprecedented levels of stress and uncertainty, she says, and she gets that. "I didn't go to school during a pandemic."

As college moved online in the COVID-19 crisis, many universities are reporting increases, sometimes dramatic ones, in academic misconduct. At Virginia Commonwealth University, reports of academic misconduct soared during the 2020-21 school year, to 1,077 — more than three times the previous year's number. 

At the University of Georgia, cases more than doubled; from 228 in the fall of 2019 to more than 600 last fall. And, at The Ohio State University, reported incidents of cheating were up more than 50% over the year before.  READ MORE...

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/27/1031255390/reports-of-cheating-at-colleges-soar-during-the-pandemic

Capitalism

Capitalism is a system of largely private ownership that is open to new ideas, new firms and new owners—in short, to new capital. Capitalism’s rationale to proponents and critics alike has long been recognized to be its dynamism, that is, its innovations and, more subtly, its selectiveness in the innovations it tries out. At the same time, capitalism is also known for its tendency to generate instability, often associated with the existence of financial crises, job insecurity and failures to include the disadvantaged.

There are basic questions about capitalism that have hardly begun to be studied.  

1. What economic and social institutions engender innovation in the more capitalist of today’s advanced economies, and what institutions function badly in this regard? 
2. How large are the benefits of this system both in productivity and more broadly in the rewards to its participants? 
3. How much worse (if at all) is this system with respect to stability and inclusion - compared with corporatist systems found in continental western Europe and east Asia? 
4. What changes or additions to those institutions and policies could be hoped to improve its dynamism, stability or inclusiveness? 
5. Are capitalists systems more or less prone to financial crises than corporate ones? 

The mandate of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society is to advance our scholarly understanding of capitalism’s workings, its social benefits and costs, and its place in a democracy.

The Debate Over Capitalism
The claims for capitalism differ from the classical case for a competitive market economy. Adam Smith’s thesis two centuries ago was that the presence of many buyers and many sellers competing with one another in the marketplace would weed out wasteful resource allocations “as if by an invisible hand.” (So, in equilibrium conditions, one person’s earnings could not be further increased except at the expense of another’s.) This valuable ability of unimpeded markets could not be matched by a central government bureau, as Ludwig von Mises warned the socialists in the 1920s. But Smith’s insights left it unclear how or whether economic change might be generated. Would competition among firms suffice to generate change, with or without private ownership?

A few central European economies twice became laboratories in recent decades for testing competition without private ownership. From the late 1960s to the late 1980s they allowed each state-owned firm to set their own prices, outputs, wages and workforce in competition with the others. Whether or not efficiency improved, it was clear that economic dynamism did not ensue. It was said in defense of these state firms that their managers’ plans for them were often blocked by the state and that the managers knew they could get their losses covered by the state so they didn’t need to take chances. In the 1990s, the state firms were put on their own. This time, with their backs to the wall, they began innovating like mad, hoping that with luck it would be their ticket to survival. But these state firms were not able to innovate successfully.1 Competition, it appears, is not sufficient for economic dynamism.

More recently, it has come to be argued that the corporatist economies of east Asia, which had achieved wonders when there was a yawning gap with the West, ran into trouble in the 1990s because state intervention in the corporate sector through permissions, subsidies and guarantees led ultimately to mass overinvestment and insolvency.2 On this thesis, private ownership is not sufficient for dynamism either: capitalism, in which capital is free to go in new directions without a green light from the state, becomes necessary at some point in economic development if dynamism is to continue.  READ MORE...

Sowellisms

THOMAS SOWELL

He's still alive at 87, but retired. So we don't hear much from him these days.

Sowell grew up in Harlem, served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War,

graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard, Masters from Columbia, economist,

social theorist, philosopher, author, Senior Fellow Hoover Institution,

Stanford University, National Humanities Medal, Francis Boyer award.


MANY COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES ARE OPENLY OPPOSED TO PERMITTING

MR. SOWELL TO LECTURE THEIR STUDENTS AND FACULTY.

Renate



















































































Forget it – we’re there now!!





























“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
― Thomas Sowell

Getting a Lean Body

Whether your main motivator is an attractive physique or simply healthier living in general, there's no wrong reason to pursue improved fitness at any age. In fact, while many middle-aged and older adults make the mistake of assuming exercise is reserved solely for those under the age of 40, the truth is, consistent physical activity is much more important the older we become.

For instance, according to research published in the scientific journal Neurology, a mere 10 minutes per day of exercise in middle age protects the brain against cognitive decline. "Our study suggests that getting at least an hour and 15 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity a week or more during midlife may be important throughout your lifetime for promoting brain health and preserving the actual structure of your brain," says study author Professor Priya Palta, Ph.D., of Columbia University.

If that isn't enough motivation to start making your lean body goals a reality, consider this study published in the scientific journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity: Scientists from Iowa State University actually discovered that excess belly fat appears to actively work against older adults' ability to think quickly and react to situations on the fly. That's right, besides a major self-confidence boost, building a leaner physique can also benefit your brain health.

Of course, like so much else in life, attaining that lean, toned look you've always wanted is often easier said than done. One recent survey of middle-aged American men even found that as many as one in three would be willing to give up watching the NFL entirely if it led to a smaller waistline!

Luckily, there are a few secret tricks that can help you get a lean body after 40. Read on to learn more, and next, don't miss these Exercise Tricks for a Slimmer Body After 40, According to Experts.  READ MORE...

World's Biggest Carbon Removal Plant

The world’s largest plant designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into rock has started running in Iceland, the companies behind the project – Switzerland’s Climeworks and Iceland’s Carbfix – said on Wednesday.

The plant, named Orca after the Icelandic word “orka” meaning “energy”, consists of four units, each made up of two metal boxes that look like shipping containers.

Constructed by Climeworks, when operating at capacity the plant will draw 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, the companies say.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, that equates to the emissions from about 870 cars. The plant cost between US$10 and 15m to build, Bloomberg reported.

To collect the carbon dioxide, the plant uses fans to draw air into a collector, which has a filter material inside. Once the filter material is filled with CO2, the collector is closed and the temperature is raised to release the CO2 from the material, after which the highly concentrated gas can be collected.

Then, Carbfix’s process mixes the CO2 with water and injects it at a depth of 1,000 metres into the nearby basalt rock where it is mineralised. Carbfix says the CO2-water mixture turns to stone in about two years, and hydride of sulphur (HS2), within four months. READ MORE