Eideard

Former President George W. Bush made his debut as a motivational speaker Monday night, telling a Fort Worth, Texas crowd it’s futile to waste energy chasing popularity.

“It’s so simple in life to chase popularity, but popularity is fleeting, it’s not real,” Bush said at a “Get Motivated!” business seminar, a multi-city event its organizers describe as an “energizing, action-packed, star-studded, fun-filled, spectacular stage show.”

The president himself saw wild popularity swings during his eight years in the White House, garnering nearly a 90 percent approval rating in the months following the attacks on September 11, 2001 and exiting office with only the support of 31 percent of Americans, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll….

“Every single day, I was honored to be your president by bringing honor and dignity to the office,” he said. Bush also added later that his faith played a large role in guiding his decisions: “From a personal perspective, I don’t see how you can be president without relying upon an almighty.”

An almighty what? I’m so tired of self-proclaimed “motivational speakers”. I wish Chris Farley would come back.

People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor. The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

Katie Liljenquist…is the lead author on the piece in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science…

“Companies often employ heavy-handed interventions to regulate conduct, but they can be costly or oppressive,” said Liljenquist, whose office smells quite average. “This is a very simple, unobtrusive way to promote ethical behavior.”

He’s very clean…!

The study titled “The Smell of Virtue” was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.

The first experiment evaluated fairness. As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic “trust game.” Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly…

The second experiment evaluated whether clean scents would encourage charitable behavior. Subjects indicated their interest in volunteering with a campus organization for a Habitat for Humanity service project and their interest in donating funds to the cause…

“Basically, our study shows that morality and cleanliness can go hand-in-hand,” said Galinsky of the Kellogg School. “Researchers have known for years that scents play an active role in reviving positive or negative experiences. Now, our research can offer more insight into the links between people’s charitable actions and their surroundings…”

Har! I could relate some of my adventures on the BYU campus back in the day – right about here. But, our site would probably be relegated to the “Adult” bin.

Professional skeptics and pundits should skip this article as it actually deals with science instead of talking about science as if you really read anything.

It’s worth remembering that the currency among professional researchers is in publications – research papers. They are the manifestation of a research group’s work, a reference document, the bar by which a researcher is measured and the stock-in-trade of the knowledge that they produce, use, share, and archive.

The problem has always been that those research papers are on paper…

“The manner in which you become ‘literature aware’ can be slow and is limited in scope to the views and criticisms of your physically immediate peers,” said Ali Salehi-Reyhani, a researcher in single cell proteomics at Imperial College London.

“Web 2.0 throws that open to a global community of experts with tools like f1000 and Twitter.”

F1000 is a tool that highlights high impact papers and allows scientists to subject them to post-publication peer review.

“The viral nature of Twitter allows information to be rapidly and critically spread to an audience thousands to millions wide,” said Mr Salehi-Reyhani. “Tweeting scientists can exploit this to quickly pass on that hot new paper to their peers with minimal effort yet maximum effect.”

The imminent release of Google Wave could also be a boon for the cat-herding exercise of collaborating on a research paper, as each participant in a given conversation – or “wave” – using the service can add, delete, or change a given document, with a live, most-current version of a document in progress visible to everyone in the wave, no matter the time zone.

“Science always builds on what’s gone before and sharing results and data and ideas is a core part of that – it’s just that in the past we haven’t been able to do that as efficiently as we can today.”

RTFA. It’s not so much about the software utilized for the process of collaborative research, writing, editing and discussion. It’s about developing the process with what the Web has to offer 24/7.

The lights are going down in Toulouse. Early-rising residents of the Allée Camille-Soula in the south-western French city will set out to work with the morning gloom held at bay by radical new technology which turns on streetlights only when pedestrians pass.

Installed on a 500-metre section of pavement last weekend, the lampposts double the strength of the light they cast when they detect human body heat. Ten seconds later they revert to normal.

“It’s a prototype. Nothing like this exists anywhere in the world. We pretty much built the technology ourselves,” said Alexandre Marciel, the deputy mayor in charge of works, highways, sanitation and lighting.

The aim is to cut energy consumption by around 50%, first on the busy street which runs between a sports stadium and university halls, then more widely. If it is a success, it will be rolled out across the city of around 450,000 people, France’s fourth largest.

Light pollution at night is a serious issue for quality of life in many locales. Also a task assisted by this experiment in technology and power consumption.

Got to stay in touch with this one and see how it goes, eh?

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The European Union can cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 at almost no cost, according to a report by climate consultancy firm Ecofys.

EU leaders have a target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. They have pledged to increase the target to 30 percent if other world leaders at a U.N. climate summit this December agree to join in.

By replacing all energy equipment at the end of its life with low-carbon technologies, the 27-nation bloc could halve its greenhouse gas emissions within two decades, the report found…

The study, called Sectoral Emission Reduction Potentials and Economic Costs for Climate Change (.pdf), examined 650 technologies over two years and compared their costs across 10 major sectors and EU countries…

The study used a cost curve calculating the rate at which technologies became cheaper over time, using discount rates of 4 percent and energy prices before taxation.

The report found that the overall costs to society of reaching the total reductions potential in 2030 are negligible or even negative.

There is an amazing amount of savings available just by building to Green codes. Around 30% of all energy consumed in a commercial or industrial building results from traditional right-angle bends instead of home-runs – in pumped fluids and air-handling.

Apparently, way too complicated for Congress to comprehend. Corporate lawyers can manipulate trusts, expenses and legislation. Plumbing and HVAc is beyond their ken.

Los Angeles City Council approved a US$7.25 million five-year deal in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps.

Google is touting the deal as a major endorsement of its cloud-based approach to computing, but it turns out that some of the funding is indirectly coming from an unlikely source: Microsoft.

According to Los Angeles City Council minutes, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft…

The migration from the city’s Novell GroupWise e-mail servers will be handled by contractor Computer Sciences Corp. Other applications such as calendaring, document sharing and chat will be handled by Google Apps too.

The five-year contract will cost Los Angeles about $1.5 million more than simply sticking with Novell. But because the city will get extra storage capacity from Google, while at the same time being able to run other software on the Novell servers, it’s worth the cost, according to an Oct. 7 city finance committee memo written by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana.

Google has pushed Google Apps as an option for government agencies, promising to ship a product called Government Cloud, which will be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), sometime next year.

The Los Angeles deal may hint at how this product will work.

RTFA. See how the GovCloud data environment will be implemented.

Of course, we’ll all be watching and waiting for security screw-ups. I don’t think they’ve figured out how to remove the last vestige of human carelessness. But, then – that’s just as much a problem with existing systems.

A former State Department official who is now a lobbyist has been charged with earning hundreds of thousands of dollars representing the Sudanese government in violation of United States sanctions.

A federal indictment accuses the lobbyist, Robert J. Cabelly, who had worked on Africa issues for the State Department during the 1980s and ’90s, with illegally acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign country, money laundering, passport fraud and making false statements.

Between 2005 and 2007, the indictment says, Mr. Cabelly violated United States sanctions against Sudan by helping it find international investors to develop that country’s largely untapped oil reserves…

According to the indictment, Mr. Cabelly was paid at least $530,000 a year, and had additional unreported funds directly deposited into accounts in the Cook Islands.

Once the Oil Patch Boys get their greedy fingers into a country they are relentless. They have enough of our dollars to pay for any size flunky they wish for – to do their dirty work.

That includes Cabelly, btw – if you thought I was only referring to Bush and Cheney.

An analysis of sediment cores indicates that biological and chemical changes occurring at a remote Arctic lake are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years and likely are the result of human-caused climate change, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

While environmental changes at the lake over the past millennia have been shown to be tightly linked with natural causes of climate change — like periodic, well-understood wobbles in Earth’s orbit — changes seen in the sediment cores since about 1950 indicate expected climate cooling is being overridden by human activity like greenhouse gas emissions. The research team reconstructed past climate and environmental changes at the lake on Baffin Island using indicators that included algae, fossil insects and geochemistry preserved in sediment cores that extend back 200,000 years.

“The past few decades have been unique in the past 200,000 years in terms of the changes we see in the biology and chemistry recorded in the cores,” said lead study author Yarrow Axford of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on Earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes…”

Axford emphasized the multiyear research project required expertise from each of the five institutions involved in the PNAS study. “This was a team effort all the way around, and each of the institutions has a unique set of skills that allowed us to carry out this study,” she said. “We needed people who understood algae, insects, glaciers and geochemistry, not to mention how to drive snowmobiles and extract the cores.”

You should RTFA.

Interesting multi-disciplinary approach and methods. And of course all the nutballs with whom you get to discuss climate change will NOT have read it. They don’t read anything.

A Vancouver-area man has learned that if driving erratically in a clown suit is not enough to signal intoxication, then crashing into a police car certainly is.

A police officer in suburban West Vancouver was searching for suspects involved in a reported fight early on Sunday when he spotted a man, later found to be wearing a brightly colored clown costume, driving at him on the wrong side of the road.

The officer stopped his own car and turned on its emergency lights to warn the other driver, who nonetheless crashed head-on into the cruiser at 20-30 km per hour…

A 29-year-old man is facing charges including impaired driving. He “will have some explaining to do in court,” police said in a statement.

Har!