Reader analyzes how PMEs have covered current economic crisis
March 11, 2009 - We live in the age of personal media environments, or PMEs, with newspapers, Internet sites, blogs, cable news stations, radio stations, viral e-mails, et cetera. PMEs are customized information sources we build for ourselves over time that closely align with our particular ideologies. We mold our PMEs to reaffirm what we already believe as true. We largely ignore and discredit news items and opinions that are contrary to our belief systems, and we focus in on anything that supports our mindsets. How have our PMEs covered the economy? Media Matters for America analyzed 139.5 hours of programming on the stimulus plan on all major news stations from Jan. 25 through Feb. 8. They found that CNN, Fox News and MSNBC did not have a single economist on to discuss the stimulus plan. What about the rest? "Of the 460 guests making appearances, only 25 were economists — a mere 5 percent." If news outlets really cared about informing their viewers, why would they fill the airwaves with pundits over experts? A good example is this idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are to blame for the current economic crises because of their participation in backing sub-prime loans. The data shows otherwise. By 2006, more than 70 percent of the sub-prime mortgages were privately held and backed — Fannie and Freddie held only 24 percent. As a matter of fact, when you dig in to the Treasury Department data, as McClatchy Newspapers did, it is surprisingly glaring how wrong this pundit-forced accusation is. Space does not permit the details, but two items will shed light on the sub-prime mess. One is David X. Li’s Gaussian Copula Formula, adopted by Wall Street to assess the risks of credit default swaps. According to Wired.com, in 2001, there was $920 billion in these credit default swaps outstanding; in 2007, more than $62 trillion. That’s right, $62 trillion. There was 48 times more fiat money in Wall Street gambling on the securities of home mortgages than there were sub-prime mortgages — more than four times the entire U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The second issue that requires your research is the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, a 262-page amendment added at the last minute to an appropriations bill by Sen. Phil Gramm. This bill later became known as the "Enron Loophole" and is the law that made these credit default swaps on mortgages possible. So, how could the market that had worked so long and so well for us fail? The simple answer is that it failed because it was not our grandfather’s market anymore. It was a new, untested and radical market, based largely on a faulty mathematical formula, poor legislation, and, of course, a certain degree of consumer ignorance and Wall Street greed. If your PME has been telling you otherwise, it may be time to review the reliability and credibility of your sources. Karl Frank Jr. Oakville Editor’s note: Mr. Frank has served on the Mehlville Board of Education since 2005.
Earlier I posted these worm/life-like pieces of metal as something that could lead to further discoveries about the origin of life on Earth. Now Wired.com posts this, which when taken in tandem makes for some pretty intriguing science.
An uber-primitive plant pathogen made from naked strands of genetic material mutates faster than any other known organism — and it might just illuminate the origins of life.
Called hammerhead viroids, their mutation rates are orders of magnitude more rapid than those of viruses, the next-most-primitive organisms, which are orders of magnitude more rapid than lowly bacteria.
In less academic terms, the hammerhead viroid blueprint of life is being constantly redrawn.
Such accelerated mutation could have been useful four billion years ago, after a few quirky chemicals assembled into ribonucleic acid, or RNA — DNA’s single-stranded forerunner.
This is pretty amazing, and it certainly does provide the foundation for a visual thought experiment on the original formation of complicated life systems.
ARGONNE, Illinois — In the basement of a nondescript building here at Argonne National Laboratory, nickel particles in a beaker are building themselves into magnetic snakes that may one day give clues about how life originally organized itself.
These chains of metal particles look so much like real, living animals, it is hard not to think of them as alive. (See exclusive video below.) But they are actually bits of metal that came together under the influence of a specially tuned magnetic field.
"It behaves like some live object," says physicist Alex Snezhko. "It moves. It crashes onto free-floating particles and absorbs them."
I certainly am a doodler during meetings. If I am not careful, I will fill up the entire meeting agenda with useless scribbling. Now I come to find out that this may be helping me pay attention. The logic is that it prevents you from all out daydreaming, which takes up more brain resources than the simple act of doodling. When I find myself scratching around, I generally stop out of fear that the speaker may think that I am not listening or that I may be distracting someone in the meeting with me. Maybe I will happily doodle along from now on.
Good news, doodlers: What your colleagues consider a distracting, time-wasting habit may actually give you a leg up on them by helping you pay attention.
Asked to remember names they’d heard on a recording, people who doodled while listening had better recall than those who didn’t. This suggests that a slightly distracting secondary task may actually improve concentration during the performance of dull tasks that would otherwise cause a mind to wander.
"People may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate," said study co-author Jackie Andrade, a University of Plymouth psychologist. "We might not be aware that we’re doing it, but it could be a trick that people develop because it helps them from wandering off into a daydream."
What do you think is the most important image ever captured by humankind?
NASA and the European Space Agency thinks they have the answer. No, it is not the piece of toast with an image of the Big Bang in it, like I know some of you are thinking.
I have to warn you. If you have any kind of ego at all, and if you have never pondered the size of the universe, this will destroy you for at least an hour or two. As a matter of fact, you may even have to read my post from a couple of hours ago on ‘Meet Dave‘ just to get through the evening tonight.
I first saw this on the Geek Dad blog from Wired.com. The article itself is from New Scientist: Life. It is really a common sense article, but it is good to see some empirical data to back it up. The key is that it is not enough to be the father, but the type of father you are matters as well.
When picking out that perfect Father’s Day gift next year, sons and daughters might want to look to their own accomplishments before deciding between a gaudy polyester tie or splurging on a new set of golf clubs.
The more effort a father invests in his children, the smarter they are as kids and more successful as adults, new research shows. And highly educated fathers make even more of a difference than less educated dads, all things being equal.
“It’s not [just] about having dad around, it’s about what kind of dad he is,” says Daniel Nettle, a psychologist at the University of Newcastle, UK, who led the new analysis, based on surveys of more than 10,000 children over half a century.
I would hate to be the first test pilot for this ejector seat. Of course, if I was an astronaut, I would prefer this over the alternative. Maybe our cars in twenty or thirty years will have something similar.
NASA test-fired the latest ejector seat for the Space Shuttle replacement this week, sending flames shooting into the Utah sky.
To get the crew away from the launch rocket in case of an emergency, the Launch Abort System motor delivers half a million pounds of thrust; by design, it burns through more than half of its fuel in just three seconds, which will mean the astronauts in the escape vehicle will have to endure G-force of several times a standard Shuttle launch.
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I first saw this on the Geek Dad blog from Wired.com. The article itself is from New Scientist: Life. It is really a common sense article, but it is good to see some empirical data to back it up. The key is that it is not enough to be the father, but the type of father you are matters as well.
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