World

Recent items of interest on the environment, politics, life and work, international affairs, technology, science, and health.

**********************************************************

How does evolution produce kindness, generosity, and heroism, asks evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson. In a fine six-page article in the October 2007 issue of The Atlantic, she says there’s evidence the answer lies in our genes. One particularly interesting excerpt from that article appears below.

The Selfless Gene
Excerpt:

“Punishment Games: I’ll be dictator. Here’s how we play: An economist puts some money on the table — let’s say $1,000. Since I’m dictator, I get to decide how you and I are going to split the cash; you have no say in the matter. How much do you think I’ll give you?

“Now, let’s play the ultimatum game. We’ve still got $1,000 to play with, and I still get to make you an offer. But the game has a wrinkle: If you don’t like the offer I make, you can refuse it. If you refuse it, we both get nothing. What do you think I’ll do here?

“As you’ve probably guessed, people tend to play the two games differently. In the dictator game, the most common offer is nothing, and the average offer is around 20 percent. In the ultimatum game, the most common offer is half the cash, while the average is around 45 percent. Offers of less than 25 percent are routinely refused — so both players go home empty-handed.

“Economists scratch their heads at this. In the first place, they are surprised that some people are nice enough to share with someone they don’t know, even in the dictator game, where there’s nothing to lose by not sharing. Second, economists predict that people will accept any offer in the ultimatum game, no matter how low, because getting something is better than getting nothing. But that’s not what happens. Instead, some people forgo getting anything themselves in order to punish someone who made an ungenerous offer. Money, it seems, is not the only currency people are dealing in.

“Bring in the neuroscientists, and the other currency gets clearer. If you measure brain activity while such games are being played… you find that the reward centers of the brain — the bits that give you warm, fuzzy feelings — light up when people are cooperating. But they also light up if you punish someone who wasn’t generous, or watch the punishment of someone who wasn’t.

“Whether these responses are universal isn’t clear… But the results suggest an intriguing possibility: that humans have evolved both to be good at conforming to the prevailing cultural norms and to enjoy making sure that those norms are enforced…”

Access to the entire article is available at theatlantic.com (subscription required).

An interview with the author is available without subscription. Included are Olivia Judson’s comments on Williams Syndrome and the genetic component to being nice.

**********************************************************

For many Americans and a fair number of Europeans, it’s long been fashionable to deride legislation coming out of the European Union. “Brussels,” often said with a sneer, is responsible for all kinds of overreach and intrusions into the operations of free markets. Yet, as the following excerpts from Harper’s Magazine make clear, the EU’s actions are often designed to protect its citizens from avoidable hazards and enhance their standard of living. One piece of recently enacted legislation called REACH — Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals — is designed to identify and ferret out toxins that Europeans are exposed to. In an age where hazardous chemicals are discovered coating the toys our children play with and poisons make their way into our pet foods, toothpaste, and who-knows-what-else, the EU’s action deserves commendation, not criticism. Would that all governments exhibit such enlightened behavior and concern for its citizenry.

Mark Schapiro wrote the six-page piece, available in the October 2007 issue.

Toxic Inaction: Why poisonous, unregulated chemicals end up in our blood
Excerpts:

“In the late 1990s, citizens of several European countries learned from newspaper reports that their infants were constantly being exposed to a host of toxic chemicals. Babies were sleeping in pajamas treated with cancer-causing flame retardants; they were sucking on bottles laced with plastic additives believed to alter hormones; their diapers were glued together with nerve-damaging toxins normally used to kill algae on the hulls of ships. When European health officials tried to look into the matter, they were confounded by how little they actually knew about these and other potentially hazardous chemicals. Regulators discovered that they had no way of assessing the dangers of long-term exposure to everyday products. Some manufacturers of baby goods did not even know what was in their own products, since chemical producers were under no obligation to tell them. Such data, if it existed at all, was secreted away in the vaults of chemical companies and had never been submitted to any government authority…”

“Bio-monitoring tests have revealed… dangerous chemicals making their way into the blood of Americans. In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed screening for the presence of 148 toxic chemicals in the blood of a cross-section of Americans; it found that the vast majority of subjects harbored almost all the toxins. In the same year, the CDC’s National Survey on Family Growth concluded that rates of infertility were rising for women under the age of twenty-five, a spike many scientists attribute, at least in part, to routine exposure to toxic chemicals. The Environmental Working Group conducted tests on the umbilical cords of newborns in 2006 and discovered that cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting, and gene-mutating chemicals had passed from the mothers to their fetuses through the placenta…”

“Europeans have recently decided to do something about all the untested chemicals that are ending up in their blood. ‘The assumption among Americans is, “If it’s on the market, it’s OK,”‘ explained Robert Donkers, an EU official who was asked to review Europe’s regulatory laws after the baby-product scare. ‘That fantasy is gone in Europe.’…”

“Indeed, Europe is now compelling other nations’ manufacturers to conform to regulations that are far more protective of people’s health than those in the United States. Europe has emerged not only as the world’s leading economic power but also as one of its moral leaders. Those roles were once filled by the United States…”

“US companies could be put at a serious economic disadvantage if they do not acknowledge the changes taking place across the Atlantic. Americans are already losing ground to Europeans in the chemical business, having slipped in the past decade from a trade surplus with European manufacturers to a more than $28 billion deficit. That deficit promises to increase as environmentally aware consumers are given the opportunity to choose between European goods with chemicals that have undergone toxicity screening and American goods with unscreened chemicals. Because American companies interested in exporting to the EU will also have to supply toxicity data to the European authorities, REACH does present opportunities for US consumers. Not only will these chemicals be subject to their first-ever health- and environmental-impact review but the findings will then be available on the European Chemical Agency’s website. At that point, US consumers may no longer choose to use untested American goods.

“The American public, along with the American media, has so far been mostly oblivious to the new chemical regulations coming out of Europe. The Bush Administration and US manufacturers, however, have been fixated on it for years. REACH is far more than just another foreign ban of a specific chemical with which US industry will have to contend; it strikes at the fundamental belief that the United States decides what can and cannot be contained in the goods sold all over the world. So as REACH was being debated in the European Parliament from 2003 to 2006, the US government and the nation’s industries teamed up to undertake an unprecedented international lobbying effort to kill or radically weaken the proposal…”

“The US lobbying effort amounted to an historic intrusion into European affairs. Robert Donkers, who in 2003 was stationed in the United States to explain REACH to Americans, invited me to consider the reverse scenario: European officials descending on Washington to lobby against a bill being considered in Congress. ‘It wouldn’t be tolerated,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t last ten minutes!’…”

“When US Representative Henry Waxman conducted an investigation into the Bush Administration’s efforts to undermine REACH, he unearthed dozens of pages of diplomatic cable traffic showing how the government had coordinated its efforts with those of industry. Talking points, lobbying junkets, statistics (many of them proven inaccurate) had been shared. Instead of considering these reforms on their merits, or revising its own failed regulations, our government demonstrated once again that it puts business interests ahead of the safety of its own — and the world’s — citizens.

“The European Parliament finally voted to approve REACH on December 13, 2006…”

“Many American states, tired of waiting for direction from Washington, are now looking to Brussels for ideas on environmental reform. California, Massachusetts, and New York have begun exploring the possibility of implementing elements of REACH in their state regulations; Maine and Washington have cited Europe’s precedent in their efforts to ban particular chemicals, such as those poly-brominated flame retardants found in children’s sleepwear…”

“European consultants also traveled to China to show industry and government officials there what exporters will have to do to abide by the chemical regulations. The Europeans were willing to aid their competitors in China, with whom they have a significant trade deficit, because just about anything made in Chinese factories can end up in the hands of Europeans. To protect its population, Europe is working backward, toward the potential sources of future chemical contamination…”

**********************************************************

Japan Rockets Ahead into the Internet’s Future
Lightning-Fast Broadband Connections Leave U.S. Infrastructure in the Dark Ages
Excerpt:

(Tokyo) “Americans invented the Internet, but the Japanese are running away with it.

“Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States – and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world’s fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

“Accelerating broadband speed in this country – as well as in South Korea and much of Europe – is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

“The speed advantage allows the Japanese to watch broadcast-quality, full-screen television over the Internet, an experience that mocks the grainy, wallet-size images Americans endure.

“Ultra-high-speed applications are being introduced for low-cost, high-definition teleconferencing, for telemedicine – which allows urban doctors to diagnose diseases from a distance – and for advanced telecommuting to help Japan meet its goal of doubling the number of people who work from home by 2010…”

SF Gate has the entire article.

**********************************************************

In an excellent article in the September 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, McKenzie Funk writes about how nations and corporations are positioning themselves to capitalize on a warmer world.

Cold Rush: The Coming Fight for the Melting North
Excerpt:

“Farther north, in the Arctic, the ‘ice albedo feedback’ effect — the fact that sea ice, which reflects 85 to 90 percent of solar radiation, melts to become seawater, which absorbs all but 10 percent — is expected to keep temperatures climbing at twice the current global rate. This will speed up the melt, and the melt may speed up northern economies. More than a fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil and liquid gas — 175 billion barrels, according to one estimate — is thought to be hiding in the Arctic. The less ice there is, the more oil there is within reach. Meanwhile, the Northwest Passage, along with its counterpart across the top of Russia, the Northeast Passage, could someday cut 5,000 miles out of the shipping route between northern Europe and East Asia, 10,000 miles out of the trip around Cape Horn for ships too large for the Panama or Suez Canal, and a thousand dollars out of the cost — $1,500 — of sending a container to Japan.

“The $49 million grossed by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may have been global warming’s first true financial windfall, but a new mentality is taking hold. Reports by Citigroup, UBS, and Lehman Brothers have recently advised investors on how to wring a buck out of global tailspin. Citigroup’s report, ‘Climatic Consequences: Investment Implications of a Changing Climate,’ released in January, is particularly helpful. It highlights investment opportunities at seventy-four companies in twenty-one industries in eighteen countries, including Aguas de Barcelona (drought-afflicted Spain’s ‘leader in water supply’), Monsanto (drought-resistant crops), and John Deere (more tractors needed in America as drought wipes out Australia’s wheat exports). It shows a graph of the top six natural-gas-producing countries in the world. Four of them — Russia, the United States, Canada, and Norway — are Arctic nations.”

**********************************************************

Hundreds Go Naked at Photo Shoot to Expose Global Warming
Excerpt:

“Hundreds of people posed naked at a glacier in Switzerland for a photo shoot by New York artist Spencer Tunick to draw attention to global warning.

” ‘The melting of the glaciers is an indisputable sign of global climate change,’ said Greenpeace, which co-organized the event at the Aletsch glacier on Saturday.

“The environmental group said most of Switzerland’s 1,800 glaciers will be gone by 2080 if the warming trend continues at its current pace. Alpine glaciers have lost about half their volume over the past 150 years.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has the entire article.

**********************************************************

How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life
Excerpt:

“Then there’s the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn’t much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden’s in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM’s Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke’s Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27.”

Wired has the entire article.

**********************************************************

Two Words: Bad Plastic
Excerpt:

“You can’t taste it or smell it, but if you ate canned soup for lunch or sipped from a shiny transparent water bottle at the gym, a chemical called bisphenol A probably entered your body. The American Chemistry Council tells us that bisphenol A makes our lives ‘healthier and safer, each and every day.’ But accumulating scientific research indicates the chemical may be adversely affecting women’s ability to have children and children’s reproductive health. Recent studies link bisphenol A to obesity, breast and prostate cancer, and neurological disorders.

“The official bisphenol A industry group Web site maintains its products ‘pose no known risks to human health.’ A growing number of scientists disagree, and bisphenol A, which appears to produce adverse impacts at low levels of exposure, is now at the center of a controversy challenging established methods of determining chemical safety.”

Salon has the entire article.

**********************************************************

Gore: Polluters Manipulate Climate Info
Excerpt:

” ‘There has been an organized campaign, financed to the tune of about $10 million a year from some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community’ about global warming, Gore said at a forum in Singapore. ‘In actuality, there is very little disagreement.’

“Gore likened the campaign to that of the millions of dollars spent by U.S. tobacco companies years ago on creating the appearance of uncertainty and debate within the scientific community on the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes.”

MyWay has the entire article.