Eideard

A star’s spectacular death in the constellation Taurus was observed on Earth as the supernova of 1054 A.D. Now, almost a thousand years later, a super dense object — called a neutron star — left behind by the explosion is seen spewing out a blizzard of high-energy particles into the expanding debris field known as the Crab Nebula. X-ray data from Chandra provide significant clues to the workings of this mighty cosmic “generator,” which is producing energy at the rate of 100,000 suns.

This composite image uses data from three of NASA’s Great Observatories. The Chandra X-ray image is shown in blue, the Hubble Space Telescope optical image is in red and yellow, and the Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared image is in purple. The X-ray image is smaller than the others because extremely energetic electrons emitting X-rays radiate away their energy more quickly than the lower-energy electrons emitting optical and infrared light. Along with many other telescopes, Chandra has repeatedly observed the Crab Nebula over the course of the mission’s lifetime. The Crab Nebula is one of the most studied objects in the sky, truly making it a cosmic icon.

Back in 1054 – this scared the Beejeebus out of your everyday superstitious supplicant. Couldn’t happen today – right?

Do you spell Ballmer with one or two “l’s”?
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Microsoft has had talks with News Corp about a tie up, which would involve News Corp getting paid to take its news websites off Google. News Corp, which owns such papers as the Wall Street Journal and the Sun, started the discussions, which were at an early stage, the source said.

News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has said he wants to make people pay for access to his news websites. Other publishers including The New York Times are also searching for ways to charge for news online, convinced that they must not give news through search engines such as Google and Yahoo…

Microsoft, which relaunched its search engine as Bing this year, has been looking for ways to challenge market leader Google.

Earlier this year, it signed a 10-year global web search partnership with Yahoo, a deal that U.S. and European antitrust regulators are evaluating.

This not only sounds like an anti-trust violation, seems to me it would be restraint of trade under the Robinson-Patman Act. Not that either Murdoch or Ballmer really gives a hoot about ethics.

Then, there are reasonable considerations of the reception this cabal might receive among ordinary users of the Web and search engines. Yes, I might be concerned that Google wasn’t offering me 100% of what’s extant. No, I wouldn’t touch Bing with a 10-foot pole if they were skewing search results to offer up their business partners.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

East Antarctica’s ice started to melt faster from 2006, which could cause sea levels to rise sooner than anticipated, according to a study by scientists at the University of Texas.

In the study published in Nature’s Geoscience journal, scientists estimated that East Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an average rate of 5 to 109 gigatonnes per year from April 2002 to January 2009, but the rate speeded up from 2006.

The melt rate after 2006 could be even higher, the scientists said.

“The key result is that [we] appear to start seeing a large amount of ice loss in East Antarctica, mostly in the long coastal regions (in Wilkes Land and Victoria Land), since 2006,” Jianli Chen at the university’s centre for space research and one of the study’s authors, told Reuters.

“This, if confirmed, could indicate a state change of East Antarctica, which could pose a large impact on global sea levels in the future,” Chen said…

Climate change is turning Antarctica’s ice into the one of the biggest risks for coming centuries. Even slight melting could drive up sea levels and could affect world’s cities.

Over the several years I have been studying climate change Antarctic ice was thought to be less-affected than the Northern Pole. Now that means and methods have improved, we get to figure out the bad news is universal.

note: at post time, the direct link to the study – in the Reuters article – was broken.

When it comes to America’s most famous Catholic family, no true compass guides the Roman Catholic Church. After Ted Kennedy’s death, that’s clearer than ever.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley presided over the funeral of the world-famous US senator, who also happened to be an abortion rights advocate. When challenged by conservative Catholics, O’Malley defended his participation as a way to promote civility when discussing divisive issues…

With Patrick Kennedy, the cassocks are off.

After Representative Kennedy of Rhode Island questioned why the church is vowing to fight any health care bill that does not explicitly ban the use of public money for abortions, Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence fired back. Tobin called Kennedy’s support of abortion rights “a deliberate and obstinate act of will’’ that was “unacceptable to the church and scandalous to many of our members…’’

It’s an echo of what happened in 1975, when the bishop of Fall River denounced Ted Kennedy for supporting Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion…

More important, that decision legalized women’s right to choose. Something the Catholic Church and their Bible Belt allies fear.

The fight between Patrick Kennedy and the Providence bishop signals the start of another new day.

Echoing his father’s letter to the pope in which Ted Kennedy acknowledged human imperfections, Patrick Kennedy wrote his own letter to Tobin, saying “I embrace my faith which acknowledges the existence of an imperfect humanity.’’

Responded Tobin: “Sorry you can’t chalk it up to ‘imperfect humanity.’ ’’

For the church, the time for comfort and civility is over. That’s using the compass of expedience.

Reactionary politics remain consistent over time. Just as McCarthyism was characterized by red-baiting, the Republican Southern Solution was defined by race-baiting, today’s single-issue clerics rely on fear and obedience to affect broader political issues. Healthcare reform being the best example.

Nor do very many politicians have the gumption to stick to the issues in the face of a braying crusade.

This week, the science of medicine bumped up against the foundations of American medical consumerism: that more is better, that saving a life is worth any sacrifice, that health care is a birthright.

Two new recommendations, calling for delaying the start and reducing the frequency of screening for breast and cervical cancer, have been met with anger and confusion from some corners, not to mention a measure of political posturing.

The backers of science-driven medicine, with its dual focus on risks and benefits, have cheered the elevation of data in the setting of standards. But many patients — and organizations of doctors and disease specialists — find themselves unready to accept the counterintuitive notion that more testing can be bad for your health.

Counterintuitive? Baloney! There is nothing intuitive or counterintuitive about these questions. There only is the latest data, advancing understanding through scientific analysis. Leave the psychologizing for the nutballs and skeptical paranoids.

“People are being asked to think differently about risk,” said Sheila M. Rothman, a professor of public health at Columbia University. “The public state of mind right now is that they’re frightened that evidence-based medicine is going to be equated with rationing. They don’t see it in a scientific perspective…”

“They” aren’t even attempting to read and examine a scientific perspective. “They” are only accustomed to being led about by pundits and talking heads.

Dr. H. Gilbert Welch said, “Now we’re trying to negotiate that balance,” he said. “There’s no right answer, but I can tell you that the right answer is not always to start earlier, look harder and look more frequently…”

As throughout history, it may take decades for medical culture to catch up to medical science. Dr. Rothman pointed out that it took 20 years for the public to accept the discovery in 1882 that tuberculosis was caused by a bacterium and not by heredity or behavior. More than 160 years after the Hungarian-born physician Ignaz Semmelweis posited that hand-washing could prevent the spread of infectious disease, studies still show that half of all hospital workers do not follow basic hygiene protocols.

Dr. Welch has the appropriate historic perspective. When analytical skills were less, testing not as precise, a shotgun approach had statistics on its side. The fact of that diminishing as a requirement is a positive. Discouraging unnecessary fattening of the wallets of medical specialists ain’t bad either.

One of South Korea’s most prolific mass murderers has killed himself while on death row.

The Justice Ministry said Jeong Nam-kyu died in hospital on Sunday – a day after being found hanging in his cell.

In 2007, the 40-year-old was convicted of murdering 13 people and robbing, raping and assaulting 20 others during a two year spree.

In a statement, the ministry said Jeong is thought to have died from a heart attack or brain injuries resulting from what is believed to be his suicide attempt…

He is believed to have left a note indicating he was worried about his execution, the Associated Press news agency reported…

Bye. Save the country the expense.

Daylife/Reuters Picture used by permission – passed by Iranian censors

A former Iranian vice president has been sentenced to six years in jail after being accused of fomenting unrest to overthrow the government.

Mohammad Ali Abtahi is the most senior reformer to face imprisonment following the disputed presidential election in June. Abtahi was vice president for parliamentary and legal affairs during the 1997-2005 presidency of Mohammad Khatami.

His lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, said he planned to appeal against the verdict. He has 20 days to submit the appeal. Abtahi was released on $700,000 bail after the verdict was delivered…

Iran’s security forces have warned the opposition not to take part in demonstrations, in an attempt to avoid a revival of the protests that erupted after the presidential elections on 12 June in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad secured a second term. The turmoil after the election was the worst in Iran since its 1979 Islamic revolution. Authorities deny vote-rigging and portrayed the unrest as a foreign-backed bid to undermine the Islamic state…

Iran’s judiciary said last week that five people have been sentenced to death and 81 have received jail terms of up to 15 years in connection with protests and violence after the poll, but it did not give their names.

My personal association with freedom fighters in Iran goes back to the days of the resistance to CIA-led gangsters overthrowing the democratically-elected Mossadegh government. The contradictions are tough.

Still, reluctance to allow a broader democracy in the nation which led that fight in the region is despicable. A political decision resented by Iranians that matches their contempt for the hypocrites in Congress and the Knesset who have suddenly discovered a need for freedom.

Kayla Rosenblum sat upright and poised as she breezed through the shapes and numbers, a leopard-patterned finger puppet resting next to her for moral support.

But then came something she had never seen before: a visual analogy showing a picture of a whole cake next to a slice of cake. What picture went with a loaf of bread in the same way?

Kayla, who will be 4 in December, held her tiny pointer finger still as she inspected the four choices. “Too hard,” she peeped.

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

Motivated by a recession putting private schools out of reach and concern about the state of regular public education, parents — some wealthy, some not — are signing up at companies like Bright Kids NYC. Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program…

“It’s unethical,” said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School [private] on the Upper East Side. “It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.”

No similar message, however, has come from the public schools. In fact, the city distributes 16 Olsat practice questions to “level the playing field,” said Anna Commitante, the head of gifted and talented programs for the city’s Department of Education.

As for parents doing more — like hiring a tutor — Ms. Commitante said she finds “anything else a little too stressful for young kids” but that “we can’t dictate what parents choose to do…”

While disgusted by that portion of a society that doles out disposable income to acquire an advantage for their kids – when they really are thinking of it that way – I can’t condemn parents who feel they’re unable to help their kids on their own. Maybe they feel they lack sufficient education to help. Maybe parents – when they’re both available – are working too many hours to have the time.

I wouldn’t call that unfair.

Nathanael J. Fast, an assistant professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business and Larissa Tiedens, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, conducted four different experiments and found that publicly blaming others dramatically increases the likelihood that the practice will become viral. The reason: blame spreads quickly because it triggers the perception that one’s self-image is under assault and must be protected.

The study called “Blame Contagion: The Automatic Transmission of Self-Serving Attributions” is believed to be the first to examine whether shifting blame to others is socially contagious. The results will be published in the November issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“When we see others protecting their egos, we become defensive too,” says Fast, the study’s lead author. “We then try to protect our own self-image by blaming others for our mistakes, which may feel good in the moment.” He adds that in the long run, such behavior could hurt one’s reputation and be destructive to an organization and further to our society as a whole.

Tiedens said the study didn’t specifically look at the impact of hard economic times, but it undoubtedly makes the problem worse.

“Blaming becomes common when people are worried about their safety in an organization,” she said. “There is likely to be more blaming going on when people feel their jobs are threatened.”

Fast says that when public blaming becomes common practice — especially by leaders — its effects on an organization can be insidious and withering: Individuals who are fearful of being blamed for something become less willing to take risks, are less innovative or creative, and are less likely to learn from their mistakes.

“Blame creates a culture of fear,” Fast said, “and this leads to a host of negative consequences for individuals and for groups.”

Har! I’ve worked for a few companies that sound just like this study.

I imagine it’s a global phenomenon. More representative of our species than individual cultures.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The $1.4 billion Mérida Initiative, an anti-drug package designed under the Bush administration, ends next year. In an interview with The Dallas Morning News, the senior official outlined Obama administration priorities in supporting the government of President Felipe Calderón in its battle with the cartels and the violence and corruption they engender – much of it along the Texas border.

U.S. and Mexican officials are looking for ways to gradually move the focus of their efforts from dismantling and disrupting cartels to strengthening Mexico’s weak democratic institutions and weeding out corruption, the official said.

“Corruption remains a pretty significant concern,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “That’s a serious, serious problem. It’s gotten better than it was, but we need more trusted counterparts to mount effective operations.”

The bleak assessment is shared by some Mexican officials. The battle has “exposed Mexico’s corruption and vulnerabilities and weak judicial institutions,” Joel Ortega, Mexico City’s former police chief, said recently at Columbia University in New York City.

“To win this war, we will need the full participation of society, including the media and law enforcement,” Ortega said. “We’re facing the biggest threat to our country’s national security…”

In recent weeks, officials from the two countries have been meeting in Washington and Mexico City to coordinate efforts beyond the Mérida Initiative…

The Obama administration will seek to fund a counternarcotics package to Mexico and Central America, though under a different name to reflect the administration’s shift in priorities, the official said. Those priorities include focusing on training judges and law enforcement officials and working with communities to create job opportunities to prevent young people from seeking jobs with cartels…

RTFA. Overcoming Mexico’s tradition of institutional corruption, supporting a barely-existing movement for democracy and freedom – ain’t ever going to be easy. The same structures that enforced national unity brought all the trappings of fiefdom, as well.

Not so easy for the United States to overcome when the same traits stain our own border states.