Earth and Science News- Earth and Science Videos and News // Current

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22 days ago

Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and "as a result ill-informed". The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was "in a league by himself". Bush himself has described his thinking style as "not very analytical".

How can someone with a high IQ have these kinds of intellectual deficiencies? Put another way, how can a "smart" person act foolishly? Keith Stanovich, professor of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, has grappled with this apparent incongruity for 15 years. He says it applies to more people than you might think. To Stanovich, however, there is nothing incongruous about it. IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity - how much information you can hold in mind.

But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That's because they are unable to assess things such as a person's ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray.

This is the kind of rational thinking we are compelled to do every day, whether deciding which foods to eat, where to invest money, or how to deal with a difficult client at work. We need to be good at rational thinking to navigate our way around an increasingly complex world. And yet, says Stanovich, IQ tests - still the predominant measure of people's cognitive abilities - do not effectively tap into it. "IQ tests measure an important domain of cognitive functioning and they are moderately good at predicting academic and work success. But they are incomplete. They fall short of the full panoply of skills that would come under the rubric of 'good thinking'."

Read the full article here:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427321.000-clever-fools-why-a-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart.html?full=trueIS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent... more

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22 days ago

Multiplying universes: How many is the multiverse?

HOW many universes are there? Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California calculate that... more

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3 comments

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22 days ago

Where do ghosts come from?

It was in the 1970s that Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, proposed that... more

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2 comments

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22 days ago

Toyota Develops New Flower Species To Reduce Pollution

Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The flowers, derivatives of... more

Tyrannous
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22 days ago

Government to ban organic farming?

This bill is sitting in committee and I am not sure when it is going to hit the floor. One thing I do know is that very few of... more

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22 days ago

Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather... more

Tyrannous
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22 days ago

Ceramic pots purify water

FilterPure has developed a program based upon strategies of affordable water filtration, sustainable enterprise, and local... more

JanforGore
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22 days ago

Evolution May Lead To Shorter, Stouter Women

"Yale University researchers have detected the effects of natural selection among two generations of contemporary women and... more

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22 days ago

Brazilian social movements reject REDD carbon market mechanisms

We are socio-environmental organizations and movements, male and female workers in family and peasant agriculture, agroextractivists, members of Quilombola (descendants of runaway slaves) communities, women's organizations, urban grassroots organizations, fishermen and women, students, traditional peoples and communities, and native peoples sharing the struggle against deforestation and for environmental justice in the Amazon and in Brazil at large. We gathered at the seminar "Climate and Forest - REDD and market-based mechanisms as a solution for the Amazon?," held in Belém, state of Pará, Brazil, on October 2-3, 2009, to analyze proposals for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) for the region in the light of our experiences with policies and programs implemented in the region in recent decades. In this letter, we are publicly calling on the Brazilian Government to reject the idea of using REDD as a carbon market-based mechanism and of accepting it as a means to compensate the emissions from Northern countries.

We reject the use of market-based mechanisms as tools to reduce carbon emissions based on the firm conviction that the market cannot be expected to take responsibility for life on the planet. The Conference of the Parties (COP) and its ensuing results showed that governments are not willing to take on consistent public commitments and that they tend to transfer the practical responsibility for achieving (notoriously insufficient) targets to the private initiative. As a result, public investments in and control of compliance with targets falter, while the expansion of a global CO2 market is legitimized as a new form of financial capital investment and a means to ensure the survival of a failed production and consumption model.

The REDD proposals under discussion do not make any distinction between native forests and large-scale tree monoculture, and they allow economic actors - which have historically destroyed ecosystems and expelled populations from them - to resort to standing forest appreciation mechanisms to preserve and strengthen their economic and political power to the detriment of those populations. In addition, we run the risk of allowing industrialized countries not to reduce their fossil-fuel emissions drastically and to maintain an unsustainable production and consumption model. We need agreements to force Northern countries to recognize their climate debt and to assume the commitment to pay it off.

For Brazil, international climate negotiations should not be focused on discussing REDD and other market-based mechanisms, but rather on the transition to a new production, distribution and consumption model based on agroecology, on a solidarity-based economic approach, and on a diversified and decentralized energy matrix capable of ensuring food security and sovereignty.

The main challenge for addressing deforestation in the Amazon and in other biomes in Brazil lies in solving the serious land ownership problems facing the country, which are at the roots of its socio-environmental conflicts.

Deforestation - resulting from the advance of monoculture and of policies that favor agribusiness and a development model based on the predatory exploitation and export of natural resources - can only be avoided if the land issue is appropriately addressed through a Land Reform and sustainable territorial reorganization measures, and if territories occupied by traditional peoples and communities and by native peoples are legally recognized.

We have a different vision on what territory, development and economics are all about, which we are building over time, based on the sustainable use of forests and free use of biodiversity. A set of public policies is necessary for ensuring recognition of and appreciation for traditional practices, on the basis of a balanced relationship between production and environmental preservation.

We are committed to keep on fighting for what we believe in the light of this vision and to make sure that any mechanism for reducing deforestation is based on a comprehensive set of public policies and public and voluntary funds that can ensure our rights and life in the Amazon and on the planet.We are socio-environmental organizations and movements, male and female workers in family and peasant agriculture,... more

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23 days ago

Bhopal: horrendous legacy

THE rickshaw driver pulls in to the side of the road to allow us to take shelter from torrential rain. There, under a shop's awning, a small crowd is waiting for the weather to break. The group includes Sapna Sharma and her brother-in-law, Sanjay. Sanjay is holding his 18-month-old nephew, Anshul, who has kohl-rimmed eyes and silver bracelets on his ankles.

As we stand talking, some of the people start pointing to the child's hands and feet while speaking animatedly to us in Hindi, and then Sapna explains through our translator that her son was born with 12 toes and 12 fingers.

Shortly afterwards, about a kilometre away in the Shankar Nagar area of Bhopal, we meet another Indian child with congenital malformations, three-year-old Raj, who is visually impaired, cannot walk and whose head is oversized. ''The doctors said bad water could have been a cause of my son's condition. Older people here are gas victims and now the younger people are victims of the water,'' his mother, Poona Bai, says.

Here, in the city of Bhopal, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, hundreds of children are being born with deformities and mental health problems. As we walk back to our rickshaw, we come across more afflicted youngsters who have followed us along the road. They include 12-year-old Rajesh, who is barefoot and bald. The other children make fun of him as his mother, Yashdabai, explains that they do so because they believe he is mad. Rajesh's older sister, Sonia, scolds the other children and says she has to protect her brother from bullies. Sonia is barefoot, too, and as she speaks a colleague notices that the young girl has huge feet.

This is the horrendous legacy Bhopal is facing 25 years on from the world's worst industrial accident. The Bhopal gas disaster, as it became known, has been dubbed the ''Hiroshima of the chemical industry''. It happened shortly after midnight on December 3, 1984, when a cloud of poisonous gas escaped from a Union Carbide pesticide plant. The release of 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (known as MIC) from the factory exposed more than 500,000 people to toxic gas. Up to 10,000 are thought to have died within the first 72 hours after the leak.

At least 25,000 people exposed to the gas have since died, and today in Bhopal tens of thousands more Indians suffer from a variety of debilitating gas-related illnesses such as respiratory and psychiatric problems, joint pains, menstrual irregularities, tuberculosis and cancers. Then there is the escalating number of birth defects, including cleft palates, webbed feet and hands, twisted limbs, brain damage and heart problems.

Shankar Nagar is a slum area of the city, just north of the derelict Union Carbide factory. For years local campaigners have been demanding that Union Carbide, now owned by US multinational Dow Chemicals, clean up the abandoned pesticide plant, but so far their pleas have been ignored.

In 1999, a Greenpeace investigation found severe chemical contamination of the environment surrounding the former factory, which, the NGO said, was polluted with heavy metals and chemical compounds.

The report said: ''Analysis of water samples drawn from wells serving the local community has also confirmed the contamination of groundwater reserves with chemicals arising either from previous or ongoing activities and/or incidents. As a result of the ubiquitous presence of contaminants, the exposure of the communities surrounding the plants to complex mixtures of hazardous chemicals continues on a daily basis.

''Though less acute than the exposure that took place as a result of the 1984 MIC release, long-term chronic exposure to mixtures of toxic synthetic chemicals and heavy metals is also likely to have serious consequences for the health and survival of the local population.''

The Greenpeace study was backed in 2004 by Amnesty International, whose Clouds of Injustice report said, ''toxic wastes continue to pollute the environment and water supply … and it is appalling that no one has been held
accountable.THE rickshaw driver pulls in to the side of the road to allow us to take shelter from torrential rain. There, under a shop's... more

JanforGore
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26 days ago

Current Green Blog: Biodynamics- A Celebration of Life Through Farming

This is my third entry for the Current Green Blog as a guest poster, and covers biodynamics. This is the way to farm for optimal... more

JanforGore
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23 days ago

Tree Nation: planting trees for a better planet

Many of us feel as though being here we cannot make a marked difference elsewhere in the world to help mitigate deforestation and... more

JanforGore
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2 comments

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23 days ago

Bioengineered plants gone wild

You can think this is nothing or that it isn't important. Tell that to your children in another ten to twenty years. There... more

JanforGore
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16 comments

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23 days ago

The Long and Warming Road

Who coined "the greenhouse effect"? Which year was the hottest on record? A timeline of climate change milestones, from... more

pjacobs51
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23 days ago

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Electronic Wasteland

So what can we do about it? The United States, one of the largest producers of electronic waste, is one of 23 member countries... more

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24 days ago

Happy Halloween From Space

The Cassini team posted this image today, sending "bats wishes" for a happy, healthy and fun Halloween. And enjoy the... more

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3 comments

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24 days ago

Why are we so obsessed with 'miracle' techno fixes?

This article poses an increasingly pressing question: Why are we so obsessed with "miracle" non-existent techno-fixes... more

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8 comments

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24 days ago

Multiyear ice in the Arctic gone

The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished, a startling development that will make it easier to open up... more

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24 days ago

Report: Americans getting better at conserving water

Americans are using less water per person now than they have since the mid-1950s, thanks to water-saving technologies and a nationwide push to safeguard dwindling supplies.

A report released Thursday by the U.S. Geological Survey also shows that industries as well as the general population are sucking up less water overall than in 1980, when the nation's thirst for water peaked.

Experts said it was particularly welcome news in the burgeoning West, where cities built in dry regions are grappling with intense disputes and ecosystem collapse tied to dwindling supplies.

"Even during a time of population growth and economic growth, we are all using less water," said Susan Hutson, a USGS hydrologist in Memphis, and an author of the report. "It's exciting to see we have responded to these crises by really seeking solutions."

California, in the third year of a withering drought, was the most water-hungry state in 2005, the most recent year for which figures were available.

California used about 9 percent of all water extracted from lakes, rivers and underground aquifers, followed by Texas, Idaho and Illinois. All told, those four states drew more than a quarter of the country's total freshwater supplies in 2005.

Nationwide, about 80 percent of the 410 billion gallons used each day went to produce electricity at thermoelectric power plants and to irrigate farm fields.

But as the drought and environmental battles persist in California, some of the state's most productive farmers are receiving as little as 10 percent of their normal supplies, forcing growers to leave hundreds of thousands of acres unplanted and lay off thousands of farmworkers.

This year, city dwellers, too, have been forced to shorten their showers and let their lawns turn brown under mandatory water rations.

"We still have collapsing ecosystems because of water use, we still have rivers and aquifers that are overtapped, and we still have rapid population growth," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland. "I guess the optimistic way to put it is, we're learning our lessons about smart water use but we have a long way to go."

http://current.com/groups/water-is-life/Americans are using less water per person now than they have since the mid-1950s, thanks to water-saving technologies and a... more