Category: Interesting Reads

Better child care = better vocabulary, but more child care = more behavior problems

In a recently released study, researchers say children who receive better childcare have better vocabularies, but are more likely to show behavioral problems in later elementary years as their time in childcare increases.

The findings come from the largest study of child care and development conducted in the United States. The 1,364 children in the analysis had been tracked since birth as part of a study by the National Institutes of Health.

In the study’s latest installment, being released Monday, researchers evaluated whether characteristics observed between kindergarten and third grade were still present in fifth grade or sixth grade. The researchers found that the vocabulary and behavior patterns did continue, though many other characteristics did dissipate.

The researchers said the increase in vocabulary and problem behaviors was small, and that parenting quality was a much more important predictor of child development.

Just something to think about if you shuffle your kids off to childcare every chance you get and pass on spending more time with them when you have the chance to. I’m certainly feeling more guilty than I used to about the amount of time my children spend in daycare.

On the other hand, it looks like the folks over at Slate smelled a rat on this. So Emily Bazelon at Slate contacted the study’s author, Margaret Burchinal, who wanted to explain what was not being reported properly about the study. Turns out the study wasn’t quite being reported properly in the news, or hadn’t fully expressed the negative findings as intended.

“I’m not sure we communicated this, but the kids who had one to two years of daycare by age 4½-which was typical for our sample-had exactly the level of problem behavior you’d expect for kids of their age. Most people use center care for one or two years, and for those kids we’re not seeing anything problematic.”

Could it be that most media outlets are over-reporting the negative aspects of childcare? It seems that perhaps the potential downsides of childcare make for a more sensationalistic report than the upsides or the importance of genetics and parenting. I’ll have to say, this certainly bears some small resemblance to my often repeated claim that mass media is biased towards sensationalism more than any particular political bias (which generally is expressed as the liberal media bias). I’m starting the think that maybe my evaluation of mass media providers is a better descriptor than the view held by those convinced of the liberal bias of the media. Of course, I’m used to believing myself more than anyone else. Yes, there is often a liberal bias, but I think more often the bias is sensationalism over all other things.

[tags]Better vocabulary from better childcare but more behavioral problems from more childcare?, How childcare quality and time correlates to vocabulary and behavioral states[/tags]

High class service? Goes down hard

When the headline says High-class hooker service goes down hard, you just have to see what the story is. And when the article ends with

“They didn’t provide us with any hands-on training or even an instruction manual, so at least in the beginning, the blow jobs we dispensed really sucked — in the negative sense of the term,” she complained.

you just have to laugh at the whole story. The real story is a high-cost prostitution service drew too much police attention, got less selective about the call-girls hired, didn’t provide training, and eventually got shut down because of lack of quality service and police pressure. But it’s way funnier to just read the headline, read the last paragraph, and fill in the rest yourself.

[tags]High-class hooker service goes down hard[/tags]

A possible restoration of rights and protections for Americans?

Finally we see a few members of Congress are growing the spines we need them to have to take back our rights and freedoms that have been slowly stripped away by President Bush, his lackies, and the until-recently roll-over-and-give-him-everything Congress. We have Senators questioning and harshly criticizing FBI Director Robert Mueller for the abuses of the PATRIOT act that have recently come to light. Members of the House Judiciary Committee look to be working to curtail the FBI’s record-gathering powers if these abuses aren’t fixed. Congress-critters, aware that since Karl Rove can’t even tell the truth under oath (premium content – I can post some of the information if requested, but it should be viewable via temporary pass), he and others in the Bush enclave shouldn’t be trusted to give believable statements in non-transcribed, non-recorded, non-mass media provided, not under oath questioning.

That means that subpoenas are authorized for certain White House advistors to require testifying under oath on the recent firing of several US attorneys general last year. It appears that the Congress-critters aren’t willing to accept Tony Snow’s “Executive Privilege is bad for Clinton and good for Bush” flip-flopping now. So maybe, just maybe, we’ll start to see our rights actually protected by our government rather than secretly stripped away via classified executive orders and Presidential signing statements which lack any legal force. Only time will tell.

Of course, I don’t expect this will lead to impeaching the man who is so committed to violating our rights, but I can always hope for that positive outcome.

[tags]Some in Congress may be growing enough spine to protect America from Presidential abuse[/tags]

On the DC gun ban ruling

I’ve just read the best commentary on the DC gun ban ruling I’ve seen (out of the very few places that have covered it) over at the Reason magazine web site. As the real root of the article, the author wonders why the federal appeals court ruling the gun ban unconstitutional is “interpreting the Second Amendment broadly,” as The New York Times reports. After all, as he points out, actually protecting free speech rights or unreasonable search and seizure rights would not be seen as overly broad interpretations of First or Fourth Amendments.

This oddly bifurcated view of an enumerated constitutional right helps explain why the gun control debate in this country is so acrimonious. When one side considers the Second Amendment a nullity and the other side thinks it counts for something, there is no safe middle ground.

. . .

The court did not say Americans have a right to own anti-aircraft missiles or nuclear warheads. It did not even say they have a right to carry guns publicly (although that does seem to be implied by the “bear” part). It said they have a right to keep guns in their own homes for self-protection.

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The effects of a nuclear attack on US cities

While scanning through stories on Digg tonight, I saw this link to a ZDNet article on the effects of a nuclear attack on various American cities. The article examines a Center for Mass Destruction Defense (CMADD) simulation of the catastrophic impact a nuclear attack would have on American cities. The complete study paper is 33 pages, and freaky scary to read over.

Continue reading “The effects of a nuclear attack on US cities”

Lies your mother told you

Headline ripped straight from the original article over at Nearorama. Learn the truth about some of the lies you heard when you were younger.

The Lie: Throwing rice at weddings causes birds to explode.

The Truth: Throwing rice at weddings causes birds to have something new and delicious and totally undangerous to eat. In fact, there are many species of birds in Asia who survive primarily on uncooked rice, which they take from fields. The myth had its start in a 1988 Ann Landers [wiki] column in which she discouraged readers from the practice. The USA Rice Federation (motto: “Proving There Is a Federation for Everything”) immediately debunked Landers’s story, but, surprisingly, Ann Landers had a broader readership than the USA Rice Federation.

The Lie: Hair grows back thicker and darker after you shave it.

Fun reading. Original post on Neatorama credits Mental Floss (specifically, the book Scatterbrained) with the goods on the goodies listed.

[tags]Lies your mother told you, Mental Floss teaches you the truth[/tags]

Department of Justice issues massive report on PATRIOT act abuse

The federal government has a web site dedicated to spreading lies and propaganda stating that the PATRIOT act is good for the country and never has caused anything bad. What’s so odd about that is that while it appears to be a Department of Justice site, that is the department that has just written a massive, damning report on the many abuses of the PATRIOT act. Of course, there are still too many Americans (not surprisingly, mostly conservatives with a smattering of independents) blinded by their love of our current President, regardless of how many times he lies and deceives, who believe the executive branch representatives when they say the PATRIOT act is not abused and that Americans’ rights are protected under the PATRIOT act.

We have to suffer Presidential signing statements, though they carry no legal force, regardless of President Bush’s determinination to make the Executive branch also function as the Legislative branch. We have an attorney general who states that Constitutional protections against taking rights away don’t mean we actually have those rights. We had ongoing discussion among various high-level political folks about the validity, legality, and appropriateness of torture, especially in terms of dealing with Al Queda prisoners. To me, the fact that even the easily followed guidelines in the PATRIOT act which allow our government to ignore our Constitutionally protected rights are not followed is not hard to believe.

I’ve been opposed to this law even when I thought the bad provisions were at least subject to the oversight written into the law. Now that I see that those charged with protecting us can’t even resist abusing the simple rules which allow for paper trails, I’m totally disheartened. When are we going to see this undone? Why can’t the liberals do something useful with their tiny majority in Congress to get rid of this? My theory is lack of backbone, but I’m open to other interpretations.

[tags]Department of Justice issues massive document of PATRIOT act abuses, PATRIOT act abuses, Continuing loss of rights in America[/tags]

Recording industry again trying to chase off their audience

Year after year, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) pursues tactics which drive away music listeners or turn the listening audience to other entertainment venues. Sueing the demographic most likely to listen to and purchase music in recent years wasn’t enough. Now to drive more potential customers away, recording industry representatives have plans to set music royalty fees so high that the vast majority of American-based internet radio stations will have to shut down. This move was originally planned for a few years ago, but the otherwise unthinkable ally of Senator Jesse Helms worked to block legislation that would have allowed this in 2002.

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Peer to peer distribution not just hurting recording and movie industry

Over on TorrentFreaks, we get the story of Tony, a seller/distributor of counterfeit software in the 1990s.  He’s out of that business now, and he blames online P2P distribution.  Curse you BitTorrent, et al.

Tony started his life of piracy sometime in the 1990’s working markets, car-boot sales and pubs in the UK, selling counterfeit PC applications/games and console discs for a fraction of the retail price. “The profit was amazing back then” he recalls “We were getting £25 ($48) for a couple of PSX games and £15 ($29) for a single CDR with the latest utilities on. We couldn’t make them fast enough.” Things were looking good for his little enterprise and before long he was clearing up to £1000 ($1,942) profit each week.

. . .

“In 2005 we shut down the factory unit” said Tony, “we just couldn’t keep going on that scale, nobody was buying anything in quantity anymore. So we closed up and moved back into a bedroom at home with my wife and her sister operating the burners, something they hadn’t done in years. They weren’t happy.”

. . .

Tony is very clear about why his rags to riches story has gone back to rags again. “File-sharing, P2P – call it what you like. When you asked a customer why he wasn’t buying anything, 9 times out of 10 it was ‘BitTorrent this, LimeWire that’.

Peer to peer doesn’t just hurt the archaic industries running on obsolete business models.  It also hurts the pirates who specialize in physical duplication and distribution.  So the next time you are downloading that cool new song or game, whether it’s a legal or illegal copy you are getting, think of Tony and how you drove him out of his nice house and made him give up his fancy sports car and fine wines.  And remember, Valve’s Steam distribution center doesn’t just suck for gamers.
[tags]P2P hurts pirates as well as industry, The other victim of online distribution[/tags]

Apples and Oranges – the Gonzales 8 firings

I have my own planned article on the firings last year of 8 Attorneys General. In the meantime, try to learn a little bit how this event differs from the standard clean-up of federal prosecutors that takes place with each incoming President.

There is so much disinformation and misinformation floating around cyberspace these days about the firing of eight federal prosecutors that you would almost think people on one side of the debate and the other are writing about and analyzing two completely different stories.

. . .

…let’s all stop trying to compare the “Reno 93” with the “Gonzales 8.” Even Republican lawmakers are growing uneasy with that inapt comparison. One legal scholar after another, and one veteran Justice Department watcher after another, has come forward to say that it is extraordinary for a White House to fire a federal prosecutor mid-term, or even mid-presidency, absent some extraordinary misfeasance or malfeasance on the part of the U.S. Attorney. Here is just the latest to do so.

One important thing to note about these 8 attorneys is that they were republican appointees. I mention this, because I know some people feel they should have been fired when Bush took office since Clinton appointees should not stay in under the new President. Just trying to share some information with those that haven’t read up on a lot of the controversy.

Interesting facts about Google

I learned something new today. I suppose I can go back to bed. Here are a few trivialities on Google for you to ruminate over.

  1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
  2. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
  3. One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did you mean…” feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the bottom of the results was the most effective area.

Plus over a dozen other interesting bits about Google. (via Digg)

[tags]Google founders didn’t know HTML, Interesting trivia about Google[/tags]

The art of deception

Last year, LiveScience.com posted an article by Massimo Polidoro from The Skeptical Inquirer on how so-called psychics deceive their audiences to give the appearance of supernatural or paranormal powers. He writes of what he learned from the Amazing Randi how many of these deceptions occur. I found the article so fascinating that I’ve read over it a couple of times, and held on to the bookmark with plans to post it. Finally, I’m putting this up here so others can learn how we are fooled, and how often we are willing fools for it.

The great fake psychics are great improvisationists. This means that a really good pseudo-psychic is able to produce phenomena under almost any circumstance. A quick mind and a good knowledge of the techniques and psychology of deception are all that is needed. Sometimes, only a quick mind is enough.

In one early test of telepathy, in 1882, pseudo-psychic G.A. Smith and his accomplice, Douglas Blackburn, were able to fool researchers of the Society for Psychical Research. In a later confession, Blackburn described how they had to think fast and frequently invent new ways of faking telepathy demonstrations.

Continue reading “The art of deception”