Saw a review for this book and given how obsessed some dagbloggers are with the issue, thought they might be interested in it and/or reviews of it that I will collect in comments as I encounter them.
Mara Hvistendahl made waves in 2011 with Unnatural Selection, her book profiling the global rise of sex-selective abortions. But two new studies highlighted by The Economist say the problem is poised to get worse.
The studies look at the Caucasus, where the popularity of sex-selection rivals Asia’s high rates of male preference. The natural ratio of men to women is 105 men born for every 100 females. But in places like Georgia, the ratio is 120 to 100, and in Armenia, if the first child is a female, 61 percent of second children are sons. The scariest thing uncovered by the studies is that there could be more to come
A suicide attack on a historic Christian church in northwestern Pakistan killed at least 78 people on Sunday in one of the deadliest attacks on the Christian minority in Pakistan in years.
The attack occurred as worshipers left All Saints Church in the old quarter of the regional capital, Peshawar, after a service on Sunday morning. Up to 600 people had attended the service and were leaving to receive free food being distributed on the lawn outside when two explosions ripped through the crowd.
The federal government, a key innovator in the early years of computing, knew at least 30 years ago that email was going to disrupt the United States Postal Service (USPS).
a rising tide of research clearly shows that breath analysis by artificial noses is very close to being a fast, noninvasive, and practical everyday diagnostic tool—as papers presented at the American Chemical Society National Meeting (ACS, 8-12 Sept. in Indianapolis, Ind.) and the European Respiratory Society Annual Congress (ERS, 7-11 Sept. in Barcelona) underscore.
Odor has been a key diagnostic criterion as long as there have been people. Even today, parents and doctors know that there’s a “nose” in diagnosis.
From Moscow’s point of view, a U.S. military strike on Syria would not only cripple its long-standing ally, but it would also undermine Russia’s biggest trump card on the international stage — its veto power in the U.N. Security Council.
...we seek a Middle East where Israelis and Palestinians live in two states, side by side, in peace and security. Yet, Assad’s indiscriminate use of chemical weapons increases the possibility that they could someday be used against Israel and Palestinians. This only heightens the sense of vulnerability many in Israel feel about the turmoil that engulfs their nation, and it might make it even harder for Israelis and Palest
President Obama finds himself in the biggest and ugliest public mess of his career, with a total policy meltdown playing out on the front pages and cable TV studios of the world. It is like a slow motion Bay of Pigs, unrolling at an agonizing, prestige wrecking pace from day to day and week to week.
From the Arctic to the equator and on to the Antarctic, jellyfish plagues (or blooms, as they’re technically known) are on the increase. Even sober scientists are now talking of the jellification of the oceans. And the term is more than a mere turn of phrase. Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field,” as Gershwin puts it, that covers over 30,000 square miles. The curtain is formed of jelly extruded by the creatures, and it includes stinging cells.
The U.S. has intercepted an order from Iran to militants in Iraq to attack the U.S. Embassy and other American interests in Baghdad in the event of a strike on Syria, officials said, amid an expanding array of reprisal threats across the region.
Iraq and Libya have been taken out, and Iran has been heavily boycotted. Syria is now in the cross-hairs. Why? Here is one overlooked scenario. --- Ellen Brown
As the controversy over possible U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war reminds us, we Americans often talk past each other when we debate U.S. foreign policy. In the words of the ’60s saying, “The issue is not the issue.” Whatever the ostensible issue may be — in this case, the idea of punitive airstrikes to punish, but not topple, the Syrian regime — the heat and passion of foreign policy debates is usually explained by the existence of other, larger conflicts over American values and strategy in the world.
To be specific, there are three perennial debates in American foreign policy — over the legitimacy of military force, the rules of world order, and power politics. If you are a consistent thinker, then the position you take on these broad foreign policy issues tends to predict the position you will take in any particular controversy.
We experience cultural continuity with our parents' and our children's generations. Even when we don't see eye to eye with our parents on political questions or we sigh in despair about our kids' fashion sense or taste in music, we generally have a handle on what makes them tick. But a human lifetime seldom spans more than three generations, and the sliding window of one's generation screens out that which came before and that which comes after; they lie outside our personal experience.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
The list of highest-paid active [public] employees counts 27 football coaches, 13 basketball coaches, and 1 hockey coach. The leftover ten include five college presidents, a medical school chancellor, a medical school department chair, a medical school plastic surgeon, and a law school dean. (The math gets you to 51 positions because Minnesota’s football and basketball coach are each earning $1.2 million.)
... financial crises aren’t things which just happen, like asteroids or earthquakes. They have causes — which means that they can also be prevented. Crisis management is an important skill, and it’s one where Larry Summers has a lot of experience. But crisis prevention is the thing which really matters. Summers has demonstrated essentially zero crisis-prevention skills: his deregulatory instincts helped make the financial crisis more likely and more severe when it happened.
(Reuters) - The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.
[...] The remarks came as the agency is facing scrutiny after Snowden, who had been one of about 1,000 system administrators who help run the agency's networks, leaked classified details about surveillance programs to the press.
