Many May Tabs

More tabs than I know what to do with once again, so here's a screen dump.

A TED talk on sexual violence, geared to men, by Jackson Katz. One point Katz makes is that when a Marine officer or a sports figure makes a sexist comment, "He doesn't need sensitivity training. He needs leadership training. He's being a bad leader." Lots of good points. Worth the 19 minutes.


Who really uses math in their jobs?


Clearly, it's "upper blue collar" workers, which I assume means people like tool and die makers or other manufacturing workers working with advanced equipment. Least likely to use math: "low white collar" workers. Not sure who that is exactly -- service workers, like fast food or convenience store clerks? From The Atlantic.

Kerrie Miller had a recent show on the U.S. power grid -- I only heard half of it so far, but it sounded like it would be worth hearing the whole thing. The guests were Massoud Amin, director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, and Michael Noble, executive director of Fresh Energy.

Are happy gut bacteria key to weight loss? From Mother Jones.

Climate change isn't just about the environment -- it's a health problem. From the Guardian.

Elusive Energy: Why is saving energy so hard -- and what can we do about it?. From ensia.com

The New York Police Departments's stop and frisk policy not only violates the Constitution, it's ineffective as well:


Even white people, who are relatively unaccosted, are searched 27 times for each time something is found -- and more drugs and non-gun weapons are found on the 435,000 whites who are searched than on the 2.3 million blacks.

Big surprise: Extreme political attitudes may stem from an illusion of understanding. A Kennedy School of Government study found that if people are asked to explain an issue (such as raising the Social Security retirement age or implementing merit-based pay for teachers), they suddenly realize they don't know as much as they thought they did, and the extremity of their views is moderated.

The most basic freedom is the freedom to quit by Peter Gray on PsychologyToday.com. Full of great points, such as:

• Divorce availability correlates with less domestic violence against women.
• Freedom to leave your country keeps government abuse in check, and countries where people are not free to leave are the most likely to abuse human rights.
• Hunter gatherer peoples don't put up with crap from their fellows because they're already highly mobile, and it's easy to move to a new group. This results in social organization that is less hierarchical and more consensus-based.

And this quote about schools, which is Gray's main research area: "When children are truly free to walk away from school, then schools will have to become child-friendly places in order to survive. Children love to learn, but, like all of us, they hate to be coerced, micromanaged, and continuously judged."

The Star Tribune reported recently that Consumer Reports found antibiotic-resistant bacteria in most of the ground turkey they analyzed. CR took 257 samples of raw ground turkey from a range of brands and retailers and tested for five bacteria. Four of those cause food poisoning in people. The result: 90 percent had at least one of the bacteria, and more than half of the bacteria were resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics. Organic and antibiotic-free turkey products were much less likely to be resistant, though it doesn't mention if they had a lower prevalence of bacteria. All of these bacteria would be killed by sufficient heat, of course, but that leaves the possibility of contamination during preparation, let alone under-cooking.

Did you hear Sandra Day O'Connor now says that she was wrong on Bush v. Gore in 2000? As Slate put it, Sandra Day Late.

Carbon bubble will plunge the world into another financial crisis. Reported by the Guardian.

Trademarks: the good, the bad and the ugly. It's time we stopped giving trademark bullies a free pass to tell us what our own words mean – it's time to take them back. By Cory Doctorow, writing in the Guardian. "The law is there to protect the public interest, and the public interest isn't undermined by the strength or weakness of an association with a specific word or mark with a specific company. The public interest extends to preventing fraud, and trademark uses the motivation of protecting profits to incentivise firms to uphold the public interest."