Blue Monday: The unhappiest day of the year | the Daily Mail
Dr Cliff Arnall, a Cardiff University psychologist, devised the formula that shows today is the most depressing.
His equation takes into account six factors: weather, debt, time since Christmas, time since failing our new year’s resolutions, low motivational levels and the feeling of a need to take action.
Taken together they pinpoint today as ‘Blue Monday’.
Controlled Chaos: European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News
European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren — by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs.
A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende.
In other words, it is only when the road is made less predictable and less certain that drivers will stop looking at signs and start looking at other people.
Recalling his first project, Monderman said, “When we do traditional traffic calming with speed bumps we typically expect about a 10% drop in speed. But with no disincentives, the speed was down by almost 50% – down from 57 km/h to under 30 km/h. I could not believe my eyes. All we had done was make a village look more like a village.” Thanks to Maria for this one.
OpinionJournal – Extra
In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements–medicine, engineering, law, the sciences and academia–the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have IQs over 120, or about 15 million people in today’s labor force-. Evidence about who enters occupations where the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people with IQs of 120 or higher also occupy large proportions of positions in the upper reaches of corporate America and the senior ranks of government. People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.
Experts Call Sharks Misunderstood Fish | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited
Last year there were 86 known and suspected shark encounters, with seven confirmed deaths and the shark involvement in another two ocean fatalities uncertain, according to the Global Shark Attack File.
Meanwhile, about 100 million sharks and their close relatives are killed each year, either deliberately or as fishermen’s bycatch, according to the Shark Alliance, a five-month-old international coalition of advocacy and ocean recreation groups.
That would make for a fatality ratio of about 1 human to every 10 million sharks, some conservation advocates point out. Check out more of Chip’s Underwater Photos. This one is of a Bull Shark, They have more testosterone per body weight than any other creature on the planet and are responsible for a dis-ordinate amount of attacks on humans. The small fish are Remora or Sucker Fish, who are along for the ride.
New York Daily News – Home – Drove her up the wall!
He slept like a baby. She tossed and turned.
That’s how the quarrelsome couple in Brooklyn’s “War of the Roses” spent their first night on opposite sides of a court-mandated wall dividing their home.
If the slab of Sheetrock was supposed to stop Simon and Chana Taub from fighting over the Borough Park house during their divorce case, they clearly need something thicker
Wired News: Thumb-Print Banking Takes India
There are 35,000 non-biometric ATMs in India today. In three years the number of machines is expected to triple to more than 100,000. Officials hope the plan will bring billions of rupees currently being held in private hands into the banking mainstream, and that it might even shelter the country’s poor from the ravages of inflation, theft and widespread corruption.
For example, some believe e-banking will help eliminate several layers of middlemen who manage, and often siphon off, government-allocated funds earmarked for low-income workers.
Under the current system, money gets sent from the government coffers and passes through the desks of dozens of bureaucrats and private contractors. Each tends to take a cut along the way so the money that reaches workers is usually only a fraction of what was allocated. Electronic banking will eliminate the middlemen, and provide a real increase in rural wages
Mao was cruel – but also laid the ground for today’s China | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
Few western critics today appreciate the scale of the task confronting any moderniser of China in 1949. Western economies created the surpluses to finance industrialisation through incredible exploitation – of their own working class, and in the US via slavery. It was never likely that China could achieve self-sustaining economic growth without great collective pain to achieve its own surpluses, or that this could be done without the involvement of the state. Spontaneous market-led industrialisation is a myth. Continue reading “Mao was cruel – but also laid the ground for today’s China”
Psychology Today: The Ideological Animal
We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we’re easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect.
As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
Will Al Gore Melt? – WSJ.com
In his movie he shows scary sequences of 20-feet flooding Florida, San Francisco, New York, Holland, Calcutta, Beijing and Shanghai. But were realistic levels not dramatic enough? The U.N. climate panel expects only a foot of sea-level rise over this century. Moreover, sea levels actually climbed that much over the past 150 years. Does Mr. Gore find it balanced to exaggerate the best scientific knowledge available by a factor of 20?
He considers Antarctica the canary in the mine, but again doesn’t tell the full story. He presents pictures from the 2% of Antarctica that is dramatically warming and ignores the 98% that has largely cooled over the past 35 years. The U.N. panel estimates that Antarctica will actually increase its snow mass this century. Similarly, Mr. Gore points to shrinking sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, but don’t mention that sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is increasing. Shouldn’t we hear those facts?
