I have issues with the research essay, "Make Birth Control, Not War," (May-June 2010) written by Thomas Hayden and Malcolm Potts in which they claim that it is our genetic evolutionary heritage and especially the generous amount of testosterone in young males that are the causes of war. Young males (and now some females) may be the human carriers of weapons and slaughter, but as far as I know, wars have been and still are engendered and manipulated by older men of wealth, status and power. What is wrong (and could be corrected with education and training) is that our "value" system is ... Read More
Snakeheads: the Asian Fish That Terrified Arkansas
July 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Lee Holt, a biologist with the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, aims his Chevy Silverado south, heading from his field office in Brinkley, Ark., out to the rice and soybean farms that surround this small Delta town. It's a hot, sticky summer day, and the A/C is thrumming inside the cab as Holt passes a Lutheran church on Highway 49 with a marquee that reads, "We Don't Serve A Wimpy God." This is the same road that he traversed a few months earlier, when he got a call from Russell Bonner's farm that changed his life and launched a sort of paranoia — and eventually an unprecedented ... Read More
The Poverty Solution: Cash
July 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Who's responsible for the poor? Back in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, English lawmakers said it was the government and taxpayers. They introduced the compulsory "poor tax" of 1572 to provide peasants with cash and a "parish loaf." The world's first-ever public relief system did more than feed the poor: It helped fuel economic growth because peasants could risk leaving the land to look for work in town. By the early 19th century, though, a backlash had set in. English spending on the poor was slashed from 2 percent to 1 percent of national income, and indigent families were ... Read More
Prisoners of the States
July 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In March 2004, the Abu Ghraib scandal seared unsightly images of prisoner abuse into the consciousness of a new generation of Americans. The allegations blindsided citizens who — galvanized by the specter of a nuclear Saddam — had been mostly supportive of the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Not since the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam 42 years earlier had so many questioned whether the nation held higher moral ground than its enemies. Despite the courts-martial of the guards involved, the ensuing media frenzy only muddled the policy debate regarding the status of "unlawful combatants." The ... Read More
How Congress Uses Twitter
June 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Like other Tweeters, U.S. senators and representatives who use the Twitter micro-messaging service choose whose feeds they wish to follow; these attention preferences are depicted below by arcs connecting followers to followees. Members of Congress and associated entities (the Hispanic Caucus and the Prayer Caucus, for example) are arrayed and colored on our diagram according to the partisan lean of the congressional people and entities they choose to follow — going from most Democratic in blue on the left, to most Republican-leaning in red on the right. The arcs are colored according to ... Read More
Betting Against the Euro
June 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The destruction of Greek credit on international markets this year has been framed as a drama between laissez-faire instincts in Britain and the United States on the one hand, and slower, cud-chewing, pseudo-socialist European tendencies on the other. "There is a part of the Anglo-Saxon press that no longer bothers to hide its desire to see the euro zone disappear," Jean Quatremer wrote in Libération in February, referring to Anglo-American economic areas by the traditional misleading term. Europeans like to talk about a conspiracy against the euro. But was there really some kind of ... Read More
Which Countries Rank Highest in Adventure?
June 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In February, the Adventure Travel Trade Association and the International Institute of Tourism Studies at The George Washington University released their annual Adventure Tourism Development Index, a joint project that ranks countries according to their potential as adventure/nature travel destinations. The survey is not an opinion poll. It uses data produced by a variety of organizations, including United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Transparency International and the U.S. State Department, along with the input of advisory boards to score adventure travel ... Read More
Can Tourism Be Sustainable?
June 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
It was an adventure getting to Veinte de Enero. From Lima, Peru's capital, it was a two-hour flight to Iquitos, a jungle-locked city of 600,000 people whose streets buzz with "mosquitoes," or motorcycles rigged with wagons to carry passengers. From there, it was another two hours in a taxi that had one main peril — its driver, who may not have had as great a need for the religious icons that swayed from his rearview mirror if he'd slowed down and stayed in his lane. Then the fun began. A narrow wooden boat partly covered by a thatched roof and powered by a 15 horsepower engine idled on ... Read More
‘House,’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Violate Codes of Conduct?
June 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Next time the brilliant Dr. House resuscitates a patient using a pair of tweezers, household twine and the foil from a chewing gum wrapper, you're right to be skeptical. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics analyzed a full season of two hugely popular medical shows — ABC's Grey's Anatomy and Fox's House — and discovered that the dramas were "rife" with incidents that violated professional codes of conduct. Analyzing the second seasons of the shows, researcher Matthew Czarny pinpointed 179 depictions of bioethical dilemmas, ranging from issues surrounding ... Read More
