http://www.livescience.com/health/080710-onenight-stand.html
Realities of One-Night Stands Revealed
By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer
When it comes to one-night stands, men and women are poles apart. Guys just want, well, you know, while gals go to bed with the false impression of flattery and a craving for feeling desirable.
The upshot, according to new research, is great for most men and the pits for most women. The study goes further under the covers, delving into the nuances of casual sex and its potential as a Venus-and-Mars minefield.
Among the findings: Women were not hooking up in an effort to secure a long-term beau, but because they felt flattered by the overnight proposition.
They were mistaken.
As the researcher points out, men lower their standards when it comes to one-night stands, so the presumed flattery is a fantasy or close to it.
"Often [women] said things like, 'I felt so flattered, so happy that he found me attractive. It was so nice to be wanted,'" said researcher Anne Campbell, a psychologist at Durham University in England. "What women don't seem to see is that men drop their standards massively for a one-night stand."
She added, "No woman should be flattered because a man wants to have sex with her once."
Real feelings, real data
While most research on the topic of casual sex has relied on fictitious vignettes or just having participants imagine they had a one-night stand, the new findings are based on self-reports of feelings following an actual hook-up.
Campbell says in the June issue of the journal Human Nature that the findings suggest women are not well adapted to promiscuity.
Women have much more to lose, while men are in a win-win situation. For the ladies, a baby on the way is a huge responsibility, but a guy can just bail.
"The bottom line is the risks are potentially greater for women," said Todd Shackelford, an evolutionary psychologist at Florida Atlantic University who was not involved in the current study. "It's not surprising they indicate the experience is somewhat less positive, but importantly somewhat more negative."
However, promiscuity does offer natural advantages for women from an evolutionary perspective, Shackelford said. These advantages could explain why women participate in one-night stands even though they feel so lousy afterward.
Flings provide women with the potential to snag the best genes for offspring or they could be spurred by a chemical nudge at the peak of the menstrual cycle.
The morning after
Campbell surveyed more than 3,300 individuals, most of whom were between the ages of 17 and 40. Of the heterosexual respondents, more than half reported a one-night stand, about evenly split between men and women.
Overall women's morning-after feelings were more negative than men's. While 80 percent of men had overall positive feelings, just 54 percent of women had positive feelings.
Women predominantly reported "regret at being used," with additional comments including: "I felt cheap," "horrified afterward," and "I felt degraded. Made myself look cheap and easy. Total regret."
Contrary to popular belief, women said they didn't view casual sex as a prelude to a long-term relationship.
"It's not that they wanted the man to whisk them off and marry them," Campbell told LiveScience. "It's that they wanted the man to understand that they weren't like this normally. That they were doing this for him on this night as a particular event."
Men reported feelings of success since the partner was desirable to others and found the experiences much more sexually satisfying than women did.
Typical positive comments from men included: "euphoric," "excitement and lust," "I believe that one-night stands are a good way of blowing off steam."
For men who reported negative feelings, the prevailing tone was one of emptiness and loneliness.
Why women do it
Why then, if women feel so crappy after a casual roll in the hay, do they hop in again?
They could be collecting healthy genes for their offspring. So even if a woman can't score a lengthy relationship with a guy whose sperm could offer, say, disease-resistant genes or genes for a particular kind of intelligence, her thinking might be, "Why not grab the guy for sex?"
"If you've got a Brad Pitt character - absolutely gorgeous and incredibly loaded with money and so on - the chances of getting him to commit himself to you for the rest of your life are pretty slim," Campbell said. "But the chances of him giving you a half an hour on a Wednesday afternoon in a hotel are probably much better."
Friday, July 11, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
AN ARMY OF FUN!
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06152008/news/regionalnews/an_army_of_fun_115560.htm
AN ARMY OF FUN
By HOLLY M. SANDERS
June 15, 2008 -- We're going to Army World! In August, the military plans to open its first Army Experience Center, a combination recruiting center/video arcade/retail store to promote serving your country.Rumored to becoming to Times Square, it'll be like the Disney Store, except with guns and camouflage.The 14,500-square-foot center will be a multimedia extrava ganza with high-tech gadgetry, including flight simulators and life-size soldier video games.That person greeting you at the door? That's an actual Army of ficer.While the Army will sell a small amount of merchandise at the venue, the focus is on building "brand experi ences" that give poten tial recruits a taste of military service.Last summer, the Army appointed its first official chief marketing officer, Edward Walters, a 38-year-old West Point grad armed with an MBA and a marketing stint at Kraft Foods.Walters said the Army store is a prototype for a new kind of recruitment office and is the latest example of the military's increasing use of marketing tools to attract the next generation of soldiers."We're moving away from normal recruiting offices and desks to places where men and women can experience military service," he said."We've been doing that with innovative techniques like interaction with real soldiers and high-tech virtual experiences."The Army already holds elaborate marketing events around the country to entice potential recruits. For instance, mobile Army Strong Zones offer rock-climbing walls and weapons demonstrations. It also has started to use Facebook and MySpace, as well as online gaming and cellphone messages.In 2006, the Army tapped ad agency McCann Erickson to craft a $200 million ad campaign with the "Army Strong" tagline."Traditional marketing has been challenging," Walters said. "When you're just focused on TV and the Web, it's hard to get the full message out there."The Army barely exceeded its overall goal of adding 80,000 soldiers last year, and only after relaxing standards, such as allowing recruits who lacked high-school diplomas.
AN ARMY OF FUN
By HOLLY M. SANDERS
June 15, 2008 -- We're going to Army World! In August, the military plans to open its first Army Experience Center, a combination recruiting center/video arcade/retail store to promote serving your country.Rumored to becoming to Times Square, it'll be like the Disney Store, except with guns and camouflage.The 14,500-square-foot center will be a multimedia extrava ganza with high-tech gadgetry, including flight simulators and life-size soldier video games.That person greeting you at the door? That's an actual Army of ficer.While the Army will sell a small amount of merchandise at the venue, the focus is on building "brand experi ences" that give poten tial recruits a taste of military service.Last summer, the Army appointed its first official chief marketing officer, Edward Walters, a 38-year-old West Point grad armed with an MBA and a marketing stint at Kraft Foods.Walters said the Army store is a prototype for a new kind of recruitment office and is the latest example of the military's increasing use of marketing tools to attract the next generation of soldiers."We're moving away from normal recruiting offices and desks to places where men and women can experience military service," he said."We've been doing that with innovative techniques like interaction with real soldiers and high-tech virtual experiences."The Army already holds elaborate marketing events around the country to entice potential recruits. For instance, mobile Army Strong Zones offer rock-climbing walls and weapons demonstrations. It also has started to use Facebook and MySpace, as well as online gaming and cellphone messages.In 2006, the Army tapped ad agency McCann Erickson to craft a $200 million ad campaign with the "Army Strong" tagline."Traditional marketing has been challenging," Walters said. "When you're just focused on TV and the Web, it's hard to get the full message out there."The Army barely exceeded its overall goal of adding 80,000 soldiers last year, and only after relaxing standards, such as allowing recruits who lacked high-school diplomas.
The myth of the deadbeat dad
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2001/08/09/black_fathers/print.html
The myth of the deadbeat dad
A researcher who interviewed black fathers who don't live with their kids talks about their surprising views on parenting.
By Suzy HansenAug. 09, 2001
The national controversy over "deadbeat dads" intensified last month when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered a man who fathered nine children by four different women to stop having kids until he started supporting them properly. Men, women, liberals and conservatives all feel fairly comfortable in reviling deadbeat dads (that is, fathers who don't live with their kids and don't pay child support), but depriving them of a basic human right -- reproduction -- seemed a little overboard to many, particularly to the three women justices who dissented from the decision. Women, especially those left alone with the financial and emotional burden of parenting, are usually the ones sounding the alarm about absent fathers. The Wisconsin ruling illustrates the conundrum of punishing those who can't or won't face up to the role of daddy. There are a lot of unmarried fathers, too; according to the National Center for Health Statistics, one-third of American children are born to an unwed mother.Low-income fathers are often singled out for being particularly neglectful. But according to Ronald Mincy, a Columbia University professor of social work, we know very little about how low-income, unmarried fathers behave or what they think about fatherhood. Mincy works with a team of researchers at Columbia's Social Indicators Survey Center who, in partnership with the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University, are conducting one of the first national studies on fatherlessness. Their Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey follows the unmarried parents of 3,600 children -- a representative sample of white, black and Latino couples from 20 U.S. metropolitan areas -- from birth until age 4."So far, the data does not indicate that during the first three years of the child's life, most low-income fathers are irresponsible," Mincy said. "Fathers are helping during the pregnancy, making financial contributions and visiting the child. But over time these informal contributions wane as the relationship between the couple deteriorates. The father becomes discouraged and the mother gets annoyed. The father's inability to make financial contributions seems part of that deterioration. Static will be introduced in the relationship that will serve to bar fathers from seeing their kids."The Fragile Families report fills in many of the gaps surrounding low-income, nonresidential fathers, as will Mincy's new book, "Fathers, Families and Public Policy," due out this fall. In her recent book "What It Means to Be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away From Their Children," Jennifer Hamer looks at how we think about black low-income fathers and, perhaps more provocatively, uses her subjects' own voices to challenge the simplistic image of the black deadbeat dad. As Hamer writes, black unwed fathers "are often publicly portrayed as unemployed, uneducated and unwilling to provide."Statistics affirm that the majority of black children are daddyless. About 70 percent of all African-American births are out of wedlock and over 85 percent of African-American children will spend some years of their childhood without a father in the home.These are astounding statistics, but Hamer, now an associate professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, found that hardly anything had been written about fatherhood from the perspective of black men. Armed with recording equipment and at times accompanied by her own son, Hamer visited car washes, housing projects and Wal-Marts in search of low-income black men willing to talk about what it means to be a daddy. She ended up spending hours with 88 men hailing from places like East Texas, Detroit and North Carolina.Hamer spoke to Salon from her office in Edwardsville, Ill.What did you want to add to the discussion about black fatherhood?Low-income black fathers who have never been married are a group that has been very difficult to access -- at least people have argued that that's why they haven't been researched. Also, if you look at what we know about black fatherhood, we tend to know it based on interviews with black mothers. Or it's coming from a very top-down perspective: The researcher comes up with categories about men and then places men in those categories.This book takes a bottom-up perspective. I go directly to the fathers, and to some of the mothers, and ask them what it's like to be a black man in the United States and to be a father who doesn't live with his child. We get a completely different perspective of fatherhood when we talk to them directly.Why are they so hard to track down and how did you find them?Even the Census has a difficult time getting ahold of low-income black men. I didn't find it that difficult. I'm African-American and grew up in and out of black communities -- I simply went where black men hang out. I would walk through certain neighborhoods. I found them through word of mouth, but I also found an awful lot of fathers simply by walking up to them, say, at a car wash. I did not have that fear of black men that a lot of researchers do, particularly those in low-income neighborhoods or housing projects. Black women live in low-income housing projects so black men are going to be there as well -- just not officially.Do you think that your study is representative of all black fathers?I was only able to interview 88 fathers. It is representative in the sense that they are all saying the same thing regardless of where they're coming from. But we would really need a much larger sample to say, yes, this is definitely representative of black fathers in the U.S.What were the one or two sentiments that all of them seemed to express?If you were to read most of the limited information out there on black fathers, you would assume that black fathers simply weren't around and that they didn't care about their children or the mothers of their children. One of the things that struck me when I first began interviewing was that these black fathers wanted to talk. They actually felt grateful that there was someone interested in listening to them. And they really did care about their children. Just talking about their children would bring tears to their eyes. They talked about how they wished they could have done something different or how they were sorry that the relationship with the mother didn't work out. They were very conscious of their decisions and of their parenting.Most people think that, whatever their background, "deadbeat dads" do exist. Did you find yourself coming to that conclusion as you were sitting there with these men?I have a difficult time looking at the men I interviewed and using the phrase "deadbeat dad." It's a lot more complex than that. Certainly, there were fathers who weren't spending any time with their children -- they weren't providing anything. But if you asked them why, then you'd find out how this came about and how they disengaged from their children. And it's different for different fathers. It's not as simple as: He's a deadbeat dad and he doesn't care about his kids.What were their reasons for disengaging from their children?They decided that they weren't going to be a father and fatherhood wasn't for them. But even if they said that, there tended to be other things going on. For example, they didn't have a lot of support from the mother or the mother's family. When I learned about their childhood, I learned that they didn't have support systems. Then there were those who had substance-abuse problems and decided that they just weren't good fathers. Sometimes they actually encouraged the mothers to find someone else to be a father to their children.It seems that a lot of them did not think they were good role models for their children or that they did not have the financial means to care for them. Eighty-six percent of them earned less than $20,000 a year. How were these men affected by the idea that a father should be a provider?They often blamed themselves for not finding work or not finding the perfect job. At the same time that they would say, "I live in a city where there aren't a lot of jobs"; they would also say, "I could be doing more to get a job," without realizing that if there are no jobs, it's pretty difficult to get one. Talking about finances was actually very difficult for these fathers. But it wasn't very important to them with regard to their relationship with their children. Instead, they said, "The most important thing that I can do for my child is be there, talk to them on the phone, go and see them." They didn't talk about their fatherhood in financial or provider terms.Does this differentiate black fathers from other fathers?Yes. The Western notion of fatherhood begins with the provider role and everything else follows it. These fathers simply turn that on its head. They have a difficult time with the provider role and that's something that's recognized by the mother as well. Instead, they start with the emotional aspect of fatherhood and the expressive element of parenting. If they define themselves in a financial sense, then there's no way that they could say they were good fathers.Did the men you interviewed quantify fatherhood in terms of time? For example, would they mention how many days out of the week they see their child?This is interesting -- these fathers actually have a definition of a deadbeat father. Fathers who are involved with their children, regardless of how much they're involved, recognize that they're better fathers than those who aren't involved at all. They do argue that the most important thing that a father can do is spend time with their child. If you're not doing that, then you're a "father" but you aren't a "daddy." There's a difference between a father and a daddy.Did the mothers share the same definition?Yes, some of the mothers used the same terms.You write, "Most mothers did not seem to feel it necessary that fathers live in their children's homes to be good fathers." Was that surprising?Increasingly, you will find, particularly among working-class or low-income families, who are beginning to have the same patterns of family structure as black families, that women respond this way: "No, I don't need this person to live in my home to be a good father." Especially if it's a father who's not working, or is in and out of jail, or perhaps a substance abuser. If you think about it, low-income women couple with low-income men. If you have a low-income father in the house, then the house is still going to be low-income. Even though people get married for love and sexual gratification, it's still a practical decision. In the case of low-income black families, it's not always logical to get married.Why do the fathers say they don't get married?Some of the fathers didn't feel that they were ready for marriage or felt that they weren't marrying material -- meaning that they didn't have a full-time job. Some weren't ready to be with one person for a long time. Some of them just didn't want to marry the mother of the child. Some of them were very young when they met these women and they didn't feel that they were settled down enough, or they thought that they were too wild. Part of it is finances, but the other part is the meaning of marriage.Did the mothers share the same reasons for not getting married?The women also didn't necessarily want to get married. The families of these mothers were not encouraging marriage either. The mothers were better off staying at home with their own family, where they had financial and social support. They could have the father come into that situation, but, typically, that wouldn't last long because the fathers would feel like a third wheel in the household.Did you find that a deteriorating relationship between the mother and father affected how much the father was involved with the child over time? Did the mothers say anything like that?Yes, relationships between mothers and fathers seemed to influence what men provided. Relationships changed over time. Responses from women seemed to indicate that they encouraged men to be around their children regardless of their relationship and regardless of how much cash the men contributed. Simultaneously, some men argued that mothers kept them away from their children, that they only wanted money, and/or served as gatekeepers.Nevertheless, it does seem that those who report close or "friendly" relationships with their children's mother also report spending time with the child -- this includes those who shifted from "intimate" to "friendly." Does this mean that they provided financial contributions on a consistent basis? No, not necessarily. In other words, even when men report spending a significant amount of time with children -- weekly visits -- this does not mean that they are providing any more or less cash consistently than someone who is not around as much, though most men suggest that they give money when they can. They also report providing children some clothing, food, payment for extracurricular activities and other goods.What about fathers and mothers who had very antagonistic relationships?They spoke about difficulties when it came to visitation. The relationship between mothers and fathers may play a significant role in the father's involvement but it does not suggest that fathers are always completely to blame for their diminished parenting. Fathers also reported increased difficulties with visitation when they are in other relationships, have substance-abuse problems or have transportation problems. All of these may actually contribute to a deteriorating relationship, not only between mothers and fathers but between fathers and children as well.One of the interesting things about the book is that it brought out details like the difficulties of transportation.Whenever you're talking about low-income families, transportation is always important -- whether they're talking about getting to see their child, getting to their job or getting to their classes. If they had to take a job across town, then that would mean they would see their child less because by the time the father got home, the child would be going to bed. Not only that, but the father would be exhausted and not feel like being around anyone, even though they might love their child and want to spend time with them.Do you believe that this single mother/nonresidential father family structure has been institutionalized?This family structure is more pronounced among African-American families, but we also see it more pronounced among low-income families. African-Americans are disproportionately poor. Increasingly, we're beginning to see it among white families as well. It's just an institutionalized family structure whether we want to recognize it that way or not. We have a system that encourages it.But you write that black men often bear the weight of the stereotype in public perception. Why do you think that is so?These negative stereotypes are used to justify treating certain groups in certain ways. It goes back to slavery. Historically, black men have never really had access to living-wage employment, so how does the dominant group justify not providing that access? Through these negative images. We still have them today: Black men are lazy, they're drug abusers, all they want to do is gamble, all they want to do is drink. It's much easier to say that it's their fault so we don't have to change the system.Did most of the men you interviewed have a goal or desire to achieve a certain type of relationship -- emotional or financial -- with their child? Or did they seem disillusioned about what they could do for them?No, I would say the majority of them were optimistic and felt good about their relationship with their children. They actually did have very high hopes for their children and saw themselves contributing to their children's lives throughout their lifetime. Essentially, they were very optimistic about their children's future and more realistic about their own. These fathers just wanted a full-time stable job that would pay them enough money to buy a car or buy a house. They wanted to work for places like Coca-Cola, Boeing, the post office -- jobs that they know are stable.What did they regret?Many of them say there are things they could do differently. If you asked these fathers what would be the optimal environment for their child, their answer would be to have a mother and a father living in the home. The mothers would say that too: In a perfect world, all children should live with their mother and father. But at the same time they would say that is not reality.By the end of the book, you seem to say that what has to change is the financial situations of these men.Basically, the government is saying that fathers need to be providers. Well, if we want fathers to be providers, then we have to give them access to living-wage employment. Men and women want to get married. But they're not going to get married if they don't have a job. And if they did, it would be a very contentious relationship because a lack of stable employment creates conflict in a relationship.If we don't measure fatherhood by men's financial contributions, then how would you propose that we do it?We need to think about how we think about fathers and what we expect fathers to do. I don't have the answer for how we would measure fatherhood outside of finances. But children need more in their lives than just money or a check every month. If we really want to encourage fathers to be there for their children, then we need to encourage a relationship between the mother and the father, not necessarily a marital one, but one that enhances the well-being of the children.Why do you believe that faith-based initiatives can help support these relationships?They're one avenue. It's the easiest at this moment. In black communities, churches are already present, so if we want to do something quickly, then we already have a network of faith-based organizations out there. Many of them have programs, but it's a matter of managing and expanding the programs that bring mothers and fathers together for their children.So marriage isn't the answer?I don't assume that men and women have to be married or living together to produce a healthy child, but they do need to learn how to work together and we don't have a system that encourages that.
The myth of the deadbeat dad
A researcher who interviewed black fathers who don't live with their kids talks about their surprising views on parenting.
By Suzy HansenAug. 09, 2001
The national controversy over "deadbeat dads" intensified last month when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered a man who fathered nine children by four different women to stop having kids until he started supporting them properly. Men, women, liberals and conservatives all feel fairly comfortable in reviling deadbeat dads (that is, fathers who don't live with their kids and don't pay child support), but depriving them of a basic human right -- reproduction -- seemed a little overboard to many, particularly to the three women justices who dissented from the decision. Women, especially those left alone with the financial and emotional burden of parenting, are usually the ones sounding the alarm about absent fathers. The Wisconsin ruling illustrates the conundrum of punishing those who can't or won't face up to the role of daddy. There are a lot of unmarried fathers, too; according to the National Center for Health Statistics, one-third of American children are born to an unwed mother.Low-income fathers are often singled out for being particularly neglectful. But according to Ronald Mincy, a Columbia University professor of social work, we know very little about how low-income, unmarried fathers behave or what they think about fatherhood. Mincy works with a team of researchers at Columbia's Social Indicators Survey Center who, in partnership with the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University, are conducting one of the first national studies on fatherlessness. Their Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey follows the unmarried parents of 3,600 children -- a representative sample of white, black and Latino couples from 20 U.S. metropolitan areas -- from birth until age 4."So far, the data does not indicate that during the first three years of the child's life, most low-income fathers are irresponsible," Mincy said. "Fathers are helping during the pregnancy, making financial contributions and visiting the child. But over time these informal contributions wane as the relationship between the couple deteriorates. The father becomes discouraged and the mother gets annoyed. The father's inability to make financial contributions seems part of that deterioration. Static will be introduced in the relationship that will serve to bar fathers from seeing their kids."The Fragile Families report fills in many of the gaps surrounding low-income, nonresidential fathers, as will Mincy's new book, "Fathers, Families and Public Policy," due out this fall. In her recent book "What It Means to Be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away From Their Children," Jennifer Hamer looks at how we think about black low-income fathers and, perhaps more provocatively, uses her subjects' own voices to challenge the simplistic image of the black deadbeat dad. As Hamer writes, black unwed fathers "are often publicly portrayed as unemployed, uneducated and unwilling to provide."Statistics affirm that the majority of black children are daddyless. About 70 percent of all African-American births are out of wedlock and over 85 percent of African-American children will spend some years of their childhood without a father in the home.These are astounding statistics, but Hamer, now an associate professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, found that hardly anything had been written about fatherhood from the perspective of black men. Armed with recording equipment and at times accompanied by her own son, Hamer visited car washes, housing projects and Wal-Marts in search of low-income black men willing to talk about what it means to be a daddy. She ended up spending hours with 88 men hailing from places like East Texas, Detroit and North Carolina.Hamer spoke to Salon from her office in Edwardsville, Ill.What did you want to add to the discussion about black fatherhood?Low-income black fathers who have never been married are a group that has been very difficult to access -- at least people have argued that that's why they haven't been researched. Also, if you look at what we know about black fatherhood, we tend to know it based on interviews with black mothers. Or it's coming from a very top-down perspective: The researcher comes up with categories about men and then places men in those categories.This book takes a bottom-up perspective. I go directly to the fathers, and to some of the mothers, and ask them what it's like to be a black man in the United States and to be a father who doesn't live with his child. We get a completely different perspective of fatherhood when we talk to them directly.Why are they so hard to track down and how did you find them?Even the Census has a difficult time getting ahold of low-income black men. I didn't find it that difficult. I'm African-American and grew up in and out of black communities -- I simply went where black men hang out. I would walk through certain neighborhoods. I found them through word of mouth, but I also found an awful lot of fathers simply by walking up to them, say, at a car wash. I did not have that fear of black men that a lot of researchers do, particularly those in low-income neighborhoods or housing projects. Black women live in low-income housing projects so black men are going to be there as well -- just not officially.Do you think that your study is representative of all black fathers?I was only able to interview 88 fathers. It is representative in the sense that they are all saying the same thing regardless of where they're coming from. But we would really need a much larger sample to say, yes, this is definitely representative of black fathers in the U.S.What were the one or two sentiments that all of them seemed to express?If you were to read most of the limited information out there on black fathers, you would assume that black fathers simply weren't around and that they didn't care about their children or the mothers of their children. One of the things that struck me when I first began interviewing was that these black fathers wanted to talk. They actually felt grateful that there was someone interested in listening to them. And they really did care about their children. Just talking about their children would bring tears to their eyes. They talked about how they wished they could have done something different or how they were sorry that the relationship with the mother didn't work out. They were very conscious of their decisions and of their parenting.Most people think that, whatever their background, "deadbeat dads" do exist. Did you find yourself coming to that conclusion as you were sitting there with these men?I have a difficult time looking at the men I interviewed and using the phrase "deadbeat dad." It's a lot more complex than that. Certainly, there were fathers who weren't spending any time with their children -- they weren't providing anything. But if you asked them why, then you'd find out how this came about and how they disengaged from their children. And it's different for different fathers. It's not as simple as: He's a deadbeat dad and he doesn't care about his kids.What were their reasons for disengaging from their children?They decided that they weren't going to be a father and fatherhood wasn't for them. But even if they said that, there tended to be other things going on. For example, they didn't have a lot of support from the mother or the mother's family. When I learned about their childhood, I learned that they didn't have support systems. Then there were those who had substance-abuse problems and decided that they just weren't good fathers. Sometimes they actually encouraged the mothers to find someone else to be a father to their children.It seems that a lot of them did not think they were good role models for their children or that they did not have the financial means to care for them. Eighty-six percent of them earned less than $20,000 a year. How were these men affected by the idea that a father should be a provider?They often blamed themselves for not finding work or not finding the perfect job. At the same time that they would say, "I live in a city where there aren't a lot of jobs"; they would also say, "I could be doing more to get a job," without realizing that if there are no jobs, it's pretty difficult to get one. Talking about finances was actually very difficult for these fathers. But it wasn't very important to them with regard to their relationship with their children. Instead, they said, "The most important thing that I can do for my child is be there, talk to them on the phone, go and see them." They didn't talk about their fatherhood in financial or provider terms.Does this differentiate black fathers from other fathers?Yes. The Western notion of fatherhood begins with the provider role and everything else follows it. These fathers simply turn that on its head. They have a difficult time with the provider role and that's something that's recognized by the mother as well. Instead, they start with the emotional aspect of fatherhood and the expressive element of parenting. If they define themselves in a financial sense, then there's no way that they could say they were good fathers.Did the men you interviewed quantify fatherhood in terms of time? For example, would they mention how many days out of the week they see their child?This is interesting -- these fathers actually have a definition of a deadbeat father. Fathers who are involved with their children, regardless of how much they're involved, recognize that they're better fathers than those who aren't involved at all. They do argue that the most important thing that a father can do is spend time with their child. If you're not doing that, then you're a "father" but you aren't a "daddy." There's a difference between a father and a daddy.Did the mothers share the same definition?Yes, some of the mothers used the same terms.You write, "Most mothers did not seem to feel it necessary that fathers live in their children's homes to be good fathers." Was that surprising?Increasingly, you will find, particularly among working-class or low-income families, who are beginning to have the same patterns of family structure as black families, that women respond this way: "No, I don't need this person to live in my home to be a good father." Especially if it's a father who's not working, or is in and out of jail, or perhaps a substance abuser. If you think about it, low-income women couple with low-income men. If you have a low-income father in the house, then the house is still going to be low-income. Even though people get married for love and sexual gratification, it's still a practical decision. In the case of low-income black families, it's not always logical to get married.Why do the fathers say they don't get married?Some of the fathers didn't feel that they were ready for marriage or felt that they weren't marrying material -- meaning that they didn't have a full-time job. Some weren't ready to be with one person for a long time. Some of them just didn't want to marry the mother of the child. Some of them were very young when they met these women and they didn't feel that they were settled down enough, or they thought that they were too wild. Part of it is finances, but the other part is the meaning of marriage.Did the mothers share the same reasons for not getting married?The women also didn't necessarily want to get married. The families of these mothers were not encouraging marriage either. The mothers were better off staying at home with their own family, where they had financial and social support. They could have the father come into that situation, but, typically, that wouldn't last long because the fathers would feel like a third wheel in the household.Did you find that a deteriorating relationship between the mother and father affected how much the father was involved with the child over time? Did the mothers say anything like that?Yes, relationships between mothers and fathers seemed to influence what men provided. Relationships changed over time. Responses from women seemed to indicate that they encouraged men to be around their children regardless of their relationship and regardless of how much cash the men contributed. Simultaneously, some men argued that mothers kept them away from their children, that they only wanted money, and/or served as gatekeepers.Nevertheless, it does seem that those who report close or "friendly" relationships with their children's mother also report spending time with the child -- this includes those who shifted from "intimate" to "friendly." Does this mean that they provided financial contributions on a consistent basis? No, not necessarily. In other words, even when men report spending a significant amount of time with children -- weekly visits -- this does not mean that they are providing any more or less cash consistently than someone who is not around as much, though most men suggest that they give money when they can. They also report providing children some clothing, food, payment for extracurricular activities and other goods.What about fathers and mothers who had very antagonistic relationships?They spoke about difficulties when it came to visitation. The relationship between mothers and fathers may play a significant role in the father's involvement but it does not suggest that fathers are always completely to blame for their diminished parenting. Fathers also reported increased difficulties with visitation when they are in other relationships, have substance-abuse problems or have transportation problems. All of these may actually contribute to a deteriorating relationship, not only between mothers and fathers but between fathers and children as well.One of the interesting things about the book is that it brought out details like the difficulties of transportation.Whenever you're talking about low-income families, transportation is always important -- whether they're talking about getting to see their child, getting to their job or getting to their classes. If they had to take a job across town, then that would mean they would see their child less because by the time the father got home, the child would be going to bed. Not only that, but the father would be exhausted and not feel like being around anyone, even though they might love their child and want to spend time with them.Do you believe that this single mother/nonresidential father family structure has been institutionalized?This family structure is more pronounced among African-American families, but we also see it more pronounced among low-income families. African-Americans are disproportionately poor. Increasingly, we're beginning to see it among white families as well. It's just an institutionalized family structure whether we want to recognize it that way or not. We have a system that encourages it.But you write that black men often bear the weight of the stereotype in public perception. Why do you think that is so?These negative stereotypes are used to justify treating certain groups in certain ways. It goes back to slavery. Historically, black men have never really had access to living-wage employment, so how does the dominant group justify not providing that access? Through these negative images. We still have them today: Black men are lazy, they're drug abusers, all they want to do is gamble, all they want to do is drink. It's much easier to say that it's their fault so we don't have to change the system.Did most of the men you interviewed have a goal or desire to achieve a certain type of relationship -- emotional or financial -- with their child? Or did they seem disillusioned about what they could do for them?No, I would say the majority of them were optimistic and felt good about their relationship with their children. They actually did have very high hopes for their children and saw themselves contributing to their children's lives throughout their lifetime. Essentially, they were very optimistic about their children's future and more realistic about their own. These fathers just wanted a full-time stable job that would pay them enough money to buy a car or buy a house. They wanted to work for places like Coca-Cola, Boeing, the post office -- jobs that they know are stable.What did they regret?Many of them say there are things they could do differently. If you asked these fathers what would be the optimal environment for their child, their answer would be to have a mother and a father living in the home. The mothers would say that too: In a perfect world, all children should live with their mother and father. But at the same time they would say that is not reality.By the end of the book, you seem to say that what has to change is the financial situations of these men.Basically, the government is saying that fathers need to be providers. Well, if we want fathers to be providers, then we have to give them access to living-wage employment. Men and women want to get married. But they're not going to get married if they don't have a job. And if they did, it would be a very contentious relationship because a lack of stable employment creates conflict in a relationship.If we don't measure fatherhood by men's financial contributions, then how would you propose that we do it?We need to think about how we think about fathers and what we expect fathers to do. I don't have the answer for how we would measure fatherhood outside of finances. But children need more in their lives than just money or a check every month. If we really want to encourage fathers to be there for their children, then we need to encourage a relationship between the mother and the father, not necessarily a marital one, but one that enhances the well-being of the children.Why do you believe that faith-based initiatives can help support these relationships?They're one avenue. It's the easiest at this moment. In black communities, churches are already present, so if we want to do something quickly, then we already have a network of faith-based organizations out there. Many of them have programs, but it's a matter of managing and expanding the programs that bring mothers and fathers together for their children.So marriage isn't the answer?I don't assume that men and women have to be married or living together to produce a healthy child, but they do need to learn how to work together and we don't have a system that encourages that.
"Swingtown" the latest cbs sitcom displays American decadance
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.htmlTELEVISION
Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours.
By JACQUES STEINBERG
LOS ANGELES: when the television series “Swingtown” has its premiere on June 5, viewers can expect tosee the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smokingpot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes andcocaine; and the sight of the neighborhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how amiddle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of anairline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing thebusinessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street.Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programstend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But “Swingtown,” a one-hour scripted drama,will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like“Murder, She Wrote” and “Touched by an Angel” defined its airwaves, this network tends tobe more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexualexperimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — “Swingtown” is set in themid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself.“Swingtown” was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBSexecutive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the networkwas looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas andmainstream comedies. “Swingtown,” then, is something of a trial balloon.One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on“Without a Trace,” the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to“Swingtown,” would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaseralready on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping tobeckon new viewers without alienating old ones.“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, thepresident of CBS Entertainment and the person who greenlighted the series. “The summergives you a kind of different license.”‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 1 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008In setting the tone for “Swingtown,” its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for “TheOC” and “Jericho”) and Alan Poul (a principal director of “Six Feet Under”) — said theyaimed to combine the raucous abandon of “Boogie Nights,” Paul Thomas Anderson’stongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of “The Wonder Years,”the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing inthe late ’60s and early ’70s.While “Swingtown” does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back onhis childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., theChicago suburb in “Swingtown.” And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by hismemories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fueled parties that his parents and their friends stagedon Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother tookof those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto “Swingtown.” Onecharacter drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr.Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favored and sips gimletmartinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s atNew Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.)Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments arebased on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some ofthe parents in the neighborhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “Itfelt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages brokeup.”In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at herside, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through youngeyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anythingremotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episodetwice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples,most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescentchildren, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages.“A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apartbecause they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to seeyour parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelleyrecalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which isnear Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 2 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.”He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally,personally,” he added.With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelleysaid he has taken their experience to heart.“Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she andher friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I canbe in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think orsay about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me onmarriage and monogamy.”Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had ahandful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deemconventional.”In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as “Swingtown,” Mr. Kelley said, he did notimmediately think of the broadcast networks.Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had adevelopment deal following his run on “Six Feet Under.” HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at leastin part because “Big Love,” which is about polygamy and was already in production, and“Tell Me You Love Me,” a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was indevelopment, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea toShowtime.But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinnercompanion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckierstill, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “OpenMarriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimentingsexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sellnearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.)“I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in mysweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said.“I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’ ”‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 3 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction ofsexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultationwith Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite.“I think we’re able to be more groundbreaking and more culturally subversive by putting thison a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal withthese adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said.Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things everyweek to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing ofclothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than anafternoon soap opera — and far less than “NYPD Blue” had on prime time on ABC in the1990s.Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely toquiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficientlypolluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed ingroups of three, four or more.“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director ofcommunications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog groupthat has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on showsincluding “NYPD Blue” and, recently, “30 Rock.”“It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental toour culture and to our society,” she said.Ms. Henson said she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’recertainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker,who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in“Deadwood” and “Six Feet Under” on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband,Bruce, was in the original British version of “Coupling,” a sex-obsessed comedy.The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of “MelrosePlace,” though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play TomDecker, the pilot.Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 4 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about toembark.“Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertentlyspilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit.“My wife,” Tom says, a smile broadening on his face, “is going to love you.
Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours.
By JACQUES STEINBERG
LOS ANGELES: when the television series “Swingtown” has its premiere on June 5, viewers can expect tosee the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smokingpot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes andcocaine; and the sight of the neighborhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how amiddle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of anairline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing thebusinessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street.Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programstend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But “Swingtown,” a one-hour scripted drama,will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like“Murder, She Wrote” and “Touched by an Angel” defined its airwaves, this network tends tobe more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexualexperimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — “Swingtown” is set in themid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself.“Swingtown” was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBSexecutive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the networkwas looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas andmainstream comedies. “Swingtown,” then, is something of a trial balloon.One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on“Without a Trace,” the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to“Swingtown,” would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaseralready on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping tobeckon new viewers without alienating old ones.“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, thepresident of CBS Entertainment and the person who greenlighted the series. “The summergives you a kind of different license.”‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 1 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008In setting the tone for “Swingtown,” its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for “TheOC” and “Jericho”) and Alan Poul (a principal director of “Six Feet Under”) — said theyaimed to combine the raucous abandon of “Boogie Nights,” Paul Thomas Anderson’stongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of “The Wonder Years,”the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing inthe late ’60s and early ’70s.While “Swingtown” does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back onhis childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., theChicago suburb in “Swingtown.” And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by hismemories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fueled parties that his parents and their friends stagedon Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother tookof those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto “Swingtown.” Onecharacter drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr.Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favored and sips gimletmartinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s atNew Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.)Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments arebased on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some ofthe parents in the neighborhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “Itfelt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages brokeup.”In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at herside, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through youngeyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anythingremotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episodetwice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples,most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescentchildren, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages.“A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apartbecause they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to seeyour parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelleyrecalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which isnear Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 2 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.”He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally,personally,” he added.With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelleysaid he has taken their experience to heart.“Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she andher friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I canbe in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think orsay about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me onmarriage and monogamy.”Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had ahandful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deemconventional.”In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as “Swingtown,” Mr. Kelley said, he did notimmediately think of the broadcast networks.Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had adevelopment deal following his run on “Six Feet Under.” HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at leastin part because “Big Love,” which is about polygamy and was already in production, and“Tell Me You Love Me,” a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was indevelopment, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea toShowtime.But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinnercompanion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckierstill, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “OpenMarriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimentingsexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sellnearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.)“I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in mysweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said.“I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’ ”‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 3 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction ofsexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultationwith Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite.“I think we’re able to be more groundbreaking and more culturally subversive by putting thison a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal withthese adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said.Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things everyweek to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing ofclothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than anafternoon soap opera — and far less than “NYPD Blue” had on prime time on ABC in the1990s.Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely toquiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficientlypolluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed ingroups of three, four or more.“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director ofcommunications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog groupthat has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on showsincluding “NYPD Blue” and, recently, “30 Rock.”“It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental toour culture and to our society,” she said.Ms. Henson said she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’recertainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker,who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in“Deadwood” and “Six Feet Under” on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband,Bruce, was in the original British version of “Coupling,” a sex-obsessed comedy.The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of “MelrosePlace,” though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play TomDecker, the pilot.Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that‘Swingtown’: Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours. - New York Times Página 4 de 5http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/arts/television/11stei.html?_r=3&sq=swingtown... 15/05/2008YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about toembark.“Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertentlyspilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit.“My wife,” Tom says, a smile broadening on his face, “is going to love you.
MSG - Slowly Poisoning America
MSG - SlowlyPoisoning America
I wondered if there could be an actual chemical causing the massive obesity epidemic, so did a friend of mine, John Erb. He was a research assistant at the University of Waterloo, and spent years working for the government.He made an amazing discovery while going through scientific journals for a book he was writing called The Slow Poisoning of America. In hundreds of studies around the world, scientists were creating obese mice and rats to use in diet or diabetes test studies.No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so the scientists have to create them. They make these morbidly obese creatures by injecting them with a chemical when they are first born. The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates, causing rats (and humans?) to become obese They even have a title for the race of fat rodents they create: "MSG-Treated Rats" .MSG?I was shocked too. I went to my kitchen, checking the cupboards and the fridge.MSG was in everything! The Campbell's soups, the Hostess Doritos, the Lays flavored potato chips, Top Ramen, Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper, Heinz canned gravy, Swanson frozen prepared meals, Kraft salad dressings, especially the 'healthy low fat' ones. The items that didn't have MSG had something called Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein, which is just another name for Monosodium Glutamate. It was shocking to see just how many of the foods we feed our children everyday are filled with this stuff. They hide MSG under many different names in order to fool those who catch on.But it didn't stop there. When our family went out to eat, we started asking at the restaurants what menu items had MSG. Many employees, even the managers, swore they didn't use MSG. But when we ask for the ingredient list, which they grudgingly provided, sure enough MSG and Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein were everywhere. Burger King, McDonalds, Wendy's, Taco Bell, every restaurant, even the sit down ones like TGIF, Chilis', Applebees and Denny's use MSG in abundance. Kentucky Fried Chicken seemed to be the WORST offender: MSG was in every chicken dish, salad dressing and gravy. No wonder I loved to eat that coating on the skin, their secret spice was MSG!So why is MSG in so may of the foods we eat? Is it a preservative or a vitamin?Not according to my friend John. In the book he wrote, an expose of the food additive industry called The Slow Poisoning of America, (www.spofamerica.com ), he said that MSG is added to food for the addictive effect it has on the human body.Even the propaganda website sponsored by the food manufacturers lobby group supporting MSG at http://www.msgfacts.com/facts/msgfact12.html explains that the reason they add it to food is to make people eat more. A study of elderly people showed that people eat more of the foods that it is added to. The Glutamate Association lobby group says eating more benefits the elderly, but what does it do to the rest of us?'Betcha can't eat just one', takes on a whole new meaning where MSG is concerned!And we wonder why the nation is overweight? The MSG manufacturers themselves admit that it addicts people to their products. It makes people choose their product over others, and makes people eat more of it than they would if MSG wasn't added.Not only is MSG scientifically proven to cause obesity, it is an addictive substance: NICOTINE for FOOD!Since its introduction into the American food supply fifty years ago, MSG has been added in larger and larger doses to the prepackaged meals, soups, snacks and fast foods we are tempted to eat everyday.The FDA has set no limits on how much of it can be added to food. They claim it's safe to eat in any amount.How can they claim it is safe when there are hundreds of scientific studies with titles like these?The monosodium glutamate (MSG) obese rat as a model for the study of exercise in obesity. Gobatto CA, Mello MA, Souza CT, Ribeiro IA. Res Commun Mol Pathol Pharmacol. 2002Adrenalectomy abolishes the food-induced hypothalamic serotonin release in both normal and monosodium glutamate-obese rats. Guimaraes RB, Telles MM, Coelho VB, Mori RC, Nascimento CM, Ribeiro Brain Res Bull. 2002 AugObesity induced by neonatal monosodium glutamate treatment in spontaneously hypertensive rats: an animal model of multiple risk factors. Iwase M, Yamamoto M, Iino K, Ichikawa K, Shinohara N, Yoshinari FujishimaHypertens Res. 1998 MarHypothalamic lesion induced by injection of monosodium glutamate in suckling period and subsequent development of obesity. Tanaka K, Shimada M, Nakao K, Kusunoki Exp Neurol. 1978 OctYes, that last study was not a typo, it WAS written in 1978. Both the medical research community and food "manufaturers" have known MSG's side effects for decades!Many more studies mentioned in John Erb's book link MSG to Diabetes,Migraines and headaches, Autism, ADHD and even Alzheimer's.But what can we do to stop the food manufactures from dumping fattening and addictive MSG into our food supply and causing the obesity epidemic we now see?Even as you read this, George W. Bush and his corporate supporters are pushing a Bill through Congress. Called the "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act" also known as the "Cheeseburger Bill", this sweeping law bans anyone from suing food manufacturers, sellers and distributors. Even if it comes out that they purposely added an addictive chemical to their foods. Read about it for yourself at: http://www.yahoo.com.http://story.news.yahoo.com/news? tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040311/ap_on_go_co/obesity_lawsuits_4The Bill has already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and is due for the same rubber stamp at Senate level. It is important that Bush and his corporate supporters get it through before the media lets everyone know about MSG, the intentional Nicotine for food.Several months ago, John Erb took his book and his concerns to one of the highest government health officials in Canada. While sitting in the Government office, the official told him "Sure I know how bad MSG is, I wouldn't touch the stuff!" But this top level government official refused to tell the public what he knew.The big media doesn't want to tell the public either, fearing legal issues with their advertisers. It seems that the fallout on the fast food industry may hurt their profit margin.So what do we do?The food producers and restaurants have been addicting us to their products for years, and now we are paying the price for it.Our children should not be cursed with obesity caused by an addictive food additive.But what can I do about it? I'm just one voice, what can I do to stop the poisoning of our children, while guys like Bush are insuring financial protection for the industry that is poisoning us.I for one am doing something about it.I am sending this email out to everyone I know in an attempt to show you the truth that the corporate owned politicians and media won't tell you.The best way you can help save yourself and your children from this drug-induced epidemic, is to forward this email to everyone. With any luck, it will circle the globe before Bush can pass the Bill protecting those who poisoned us.The food industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry. Imagine if big tobacco had a bill like this in place before someone blew the whistle on Nicotine?Blow the whistle on MSG.If you are one of the few who can still believe that MSG is good for us, and you don't believe what John Erb has to say, see for yourself. Go to the National Library of Medicine, at www.pubmed.comhttp://www.pubmed.com . Type in the words "MSG Obese", and read a few of the 115 medical studies that appear.We do not want to be rats in one giant experiment, and we do not approve of food that makes us into a nation of obese, lethargic, addicted sheep, waiting for the slaughter.With your help we can put an end to this, and stop the Slow Poisoning of America. Let's save our childrenhttp://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/FluoridePoisoning/message/1908Hidden Sources Of MSG In FoodsFrom the book 'Excitotoxins - The Taste That Kills'By Dr. Russell Blaylock, MD3-6-3What if someone were to tell you that a chemical (MSG) added to food could cause brain damage in your children, and that this chemical could effect how your children's nervous systems formed during development so that in later years they may have learning or emotional difficulties?What if there was scientific evidence that these chemicals could permanently damage a critical part of the brain known to control hormones so that later in life your child might have endocrine problems? How would you feel?Suppose evidence was presented to you strongly suggesting that the artificial sweetener in your diet soft drink may cause brain tumors to develop, and that the number of brain tumors reported since the introduction of this widespread introduction of this artificial sweetener has risen dramatically? Would that affect your decision to drink these products and especially to allow your children to drink them? What if you could be shown overwhelming evidence that one of the main ingredients in this sweetener (aspartate) could cause the same brain lesions as MSG? Would that affect your buying decisions?And finally, what if it could be demonstrated that all of these types of chemicals, called excitotoxins, could possibly aggravate or even precipitate many of today's epidemic neurodegenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, ALS, and Alzheimer's disease? Would you be concerned if you knew that these excitotoxin food additives are a particular risk if you have diabetes, or have ever had a stroke, brain injury, brain tumor, seizure, or have suffered from hypertension, meningitis, or viral encephalitis?Would you also be upset to learn that many of the brain lesions caused by these products in your children are irreversible and can result from a SINGLE exposure of these products in sufficient concentration?How would you feel when you learn the food industry hides and disguises these excitotoxin additives (MSG and Aspartate) so they can't be recognized? Incredulous? Enraged? The fact is many foods are labeled as having "No MSG" but in fact not only contain MSG but also are laced with other excitotoxins of equal potency and danger.All of the above are true. And all of these well known brain toxins are poured into our food and drink by the thousands of tons to boost sales. These additives have NO OTHER purpose other than to enhance to TASTE of food and the SWEETNESS of various diet products.Hidden Sources Of MSGAs discussed previously, the glutamate (MSG) manufacturers and the processed food industries are always on a quest to disguise the MSG added to food. Below is a partial list of the most common names for disguised MSG. Remember also that the powerful excitotoxins, aspartate and L-cystine, are frequently added to foods and according to FDA rules require NO LABELING AT ALL.* Food Additives that ALWAYS contain MSG *Monosodium GlutamateHydrolyzed Vegetable ProteinHydrolyzed ProteinHydrolyzed Plant ProteinPlant Protein ExtractSodium CaseinateCalcium CaseinateYeast ExtractTextured Protein (Including TVP)Autolyzed YeastHydrolyzed Oat FlourCorn Oil* Food Additives That FREQUENTLY Contain MSG *Malt ExtractMalt FlavoringBouillonBrothStockFlavoringNatural Flavors/FlavoringNatural Beef Or Chicken FlavoringSeasoningSpices* Food Additives That MAY Contain MSG Or Excitotoxins *CarrageenanEnzymesSoy Protein ConcentrateSoy Protein IsolateWhey Protein ConcentrateAlso: Protease Enzymes of various sources can release excitotoxin amino acids from food proteins.Aspartame - An Intense Source Of ExcitotoxinsAspartame is a sweetener made from two amino acids, phenylalanine and the excitotoxin aspartate. It should be avoided at all costs. Aspartame complaints accounts for approximately 70% of ALL complaints to the FDA. It is implicated in everything from blindness to headaches to convulsions. Sold under dozens of brand names such as NutraSweet and Equal, aspartame breaks down within 20 minutes at room temperature into several primary toxic and dangerous ingredients:1. DKP (diketopiperazine) (When ingested, converts to a near duplicate ofa powerful brain tumor causing agent)2. Formic Acid (ant venom)3. Formaldehyde (embalming fluid)4. Methanol (causes blindness...extremely dangerous substance)Common Examples:Diet soft drinks, sugar free gums, sugar free Kool Aid, Crystal Light, childrens' medications, and thousands of other products claiming to be 'low calorie', 'diet', or 'sugar free'.A Final Note...Dr. Blaylock recounted a meeting with a senior executive in the food additive industry who told him point blank that these excitotoxins are going to be in our food no matter how many name changes are necessary...
I wondered if there could be an actual chemical causing the massive obesity epidemic, so did a friend of mine, John Erb. He was a research assistant at the University of Waterloo, and spent years working for the government.He made an amazing discovery while going through scientific journals for a book he was writing called The Slow Poisoning of America. In hundreds of studies around the world, scientists were creating obese mice and rats to use in diet or diabetes test studies.No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so the scientists have to create them. They make these morbidly obese creatures by injecting them with a chemical when they are first born. The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates, causing rats (and humans?) to become obese They even have a title for the race of fat rodents they create: "MSG-Treated Rats" .MSG?I was shocked too. I went to my kitchen, checking the cupboards and the fridge.MSG was in everything! The Campbell's soups, the Hostess Doritos, the Lays flavored potato chips, Top Ramen, Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper, Heinz canned gravy, Swanson frozen prepared meals, Kraft salad dressings, especially the 'healthy low fat' ones. The items that didn't have MSG had something called Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein, which is just another name for Monosodium Glutamate. It was shocking to see just how many of the foods we feed our children everyday are filled with this stuff. They hide MSG under many different names in order to fool those who catch on.But it didn't stop there. When our family went out to eat, we started asking at the restaurants what menu items had MSG. Many employees, even the managers, swore they didn't use MSG. But when we ask for the ingredient list, which they grudgingly provided, sure enough MSG and Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein were everywhere. Burger King, McDonalds, Wendy's, Taco Bell, every restaurant, even the sit down ones like TGIF, Chilis', Applebees and Denny's use MSG in abundance. Kentucky Fried Chicken seemed to be the WORST offender: MSG was in every chicken dish, salad dressing and gravy. No wonder I loved to eat that coating on the skin, their secret spice was MSG!So why is MSG in so may of the foods we eat? Is it a preservative or a vitamin?Not according to my friend John. In the book he wrote, an expose of the food additive industry called The Slow Poisoning of America, (www.spofamerica.com ), he said that MSG is added to food for the addictive effect it has on the human body.Even the propaganda website sponsored by the food manufacturers lobby group supporting MSG at http://www.msgfacts.com/facts/msgfact12.html explains that the reason they add it to food is to make people eat more. A study of elderly people showed that people eat more of the foods that it is added to. The Glutamate Association lobby group says eating more benefits the elderly, but what does it do to the rest of us?'Betcha can't eat just one', takes on a whole new meaning where MSG is concerned!And we wonder why the nation is overweight? The MSG manufacturers themselves admit that it addicts people to their products. It makes people choose their product over others, and makes people eat more of it than they would if MSG wasn't added.Not only is MSG scientifically proven to cause obesity, it is an addictive substance: NICOTINE for FOOD!Since its introduction into the American food supply fifty years ago, MSG has been added in larger and larger doses to the prepackaged meals, soups, snacks and fast foods we are tempted to eat everyday.The FDA has set no limits on how much of it can be added to food. They claim it's safe to eat in any amount.How can they claim it is safe when there are hundreds of scientific studies with titles like these?The monosodium glutamate (MSG) obese rat as a model for the study of exercise in obesity. Gobatto CA, Mello MA, Souza CT, Ribeiro IA. Res Commun Mol Pathol Pharmacol. 2002Adrenalectomy abolishes the food-induced hypothalamic serotonin release in both normal and monosodium glutamate-obese rats. Guimaraes RB, Telles MM, Coelho VB, Mori RC, Nascimento CM, Ribeiro Brain Res Bull. 2002 AugObesity induced by neonatal monosodium glutamate treatment in spontaneously hypertensive rats: an animal model of multiple risk factors. Iwase M, Yamamoto M, Iino K, Ichikawa K, Shinohara N, Yoshinari FujishimaHypertens Res. 1998 MarHypothalamic lesion induced by injection of monosodium glutamate in suckling period and subsequent development of obesity. Tanaka K, Shimada M, Nakao K, Kusunoki Exp Neurol. 1978 OctYes, that last study was not a typo, it WAS written in 1978. Both the medical research community and food "manufaturers" have known MSG's side effects for decades!Many more studies mentioned in John Erb's book link MSG to Diabetes,Migraines and headaches, Autism, ADHD and even Alzheimer's.But what can we do to stop the food manufactures from dumping fattening and addictive MSG into our food supply and causing the obesity epidemic we now see?Even as you read this, George W. Bush and his corporate supporters are pushing a Bill through Congress. Called the "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act" also known as the "Cheeseburger Bill", this sweeping law bans anyone from suing food manufacturers, sellers and distributors. Even if it comes out that they purposely added an addictive chemical to their foods. Read about it for yourself at: http://www.yahoo.com.http://story.news.yahoo.com/news? tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040311/ap_on_go_co/obesity_lawsuits_4The Bill has already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and is due for the same rubber stamp at Senate level. It is important that Bush and his corporate supporters get it through before the media lets everyone know about MSG, the intentional Nicotine for food.Several months ago, John Erb took his book and his concerns to one of the highest government health officials in Canada. While sitting in the Government office, the official told him "Sure I know how bad MSG is, I wouldn't touch the stuff!" But this top level government official refused to tell the public what he knew.The big media doesn't want to tell the public either, fearing legal issues with their advertisers. It seems that the fallout on the fast food industry may hurt their profit margin.So what do we do?The food producers and restaurants have been addicting us to their products for years, and now we are paying the price for it.Our children should not be cursed with obesity caused by an addictive food additive.But what can I do about it? I'm just one voice, what can I do to stop the poisoning of our children, while guys like Bush are insuring financial protection for the industry that is poisoning us.I for one am doing something about it.I am sending this email out to everyone I know in an attempt to show you the truth that the corporate owned politicians and media won't tell you.The best way you can help save yourself and your children from this drug-induced epidemic, is to forward this email to everyone. With any luck, it will circle the globe before Bush can pass the Bill protecting those who poisoned us.The food industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry. Imagine if big tobacco had a bill like this in place before someone blew the whistle on Nicotine?Blow the whistle on MSG.If you are one of the few who can still believe that MSG is good for us, and you don't believe what John Erb has to say, see for yourself. Go to the National Library of Medicine, at www.pubmed.comhttp://www.pubmed.com . Type in the words "MSG Obese", and read a few of the 115 medical studies that appear.We do not want to be rats in one giant experiment, and we do not approve of food that makes us into a nation of obese, lethargic, addicted sheep, waiting for the slaughter.With your help we can put an end to this, and stop the Slow Poisoning of America. Let's save our childrenhttp://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/FluoridePoisoning/message/1908Hidden Sources Of MSG In FoodsFrom the book 'Excitotoxins - The Taste That Kills'By Dr. Russell Blaylock, MD3-6-3What if someone were to tell you that a chemical (MSG) added to food could cause brain damage in your children, and that this chemical could effect how your children's nervous systems formed during development so that in later years they may have learning or emotional difficulties?What if there was scientific evidence that these chemicals could permanently damage a critical part of the brain known to control hormones so that later in life your child might have endocrine problems? How would you feel?Suppose evidence was presented to you strongly suggesting that the artificial sweetener in your diet soft drink may cause brain tumors to develop, and that the number of brain tumors reported since the introduction of this widespread introduction of this artificial sweetener has risen dramatically? Would that affect your decision to drink these products and especially to allow your children to drink them? What if you could be shown overwhelming evidence that one of the main ingredients in this sweetener (aspartate) could cause the same brain lesions as MSG? Would that affect your buying decisions?And finally, what if it could be demonstrated that all of these types of chemicals, called excitotoxins, could possibly aggravate or even precipitate many of today's epidemic neurodegenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, ALS, and Alzheimer's disease? Would you be concerned if you knew that these excitotoxin food additives are a particular risk if you have diabetes, or have ever had a stroke, brain injury, brain tumor, seizure, or have suffered from hypertension, meningitis, or viral encephalitis?Would you also be upset to learn that many of the brain lesions caused by these products in your children are irreversible and can result from a SINGLE exposure of these products in sufficient concentration?How would you feel when you learn the food industry hides and disguises these excitotoxin additives (MSG and Aspartate) so they can't be recognized? Incredulous? Enraged? The fact is many foods are labeled as having "No MSG" but in fact not only contain MSG but also are laced with other excitotoxins of equal potency and danger.All of the above are true. And all of these well known brain toxins are poured into our food and drink by the thousands of tons to boost sales. These additives have NO OTHER purpose other than to enhance to TASTE of food and the SWEETNESS of various diet products.Hidden Sources Of MSGAs discussed previously, the glutamate (MSG) manufacturers and the processed food industries are always on a quest to disguise the MSG added to food. Below is a partial list of the most common names for disguised MSG. Remember also that the powerful excitotoxins, aspartate and L-cystine, are frequently added to foods and according to FDA rules require NO LABELING AT ALL.* Food Additives that ALWAYS contain MSG *Monosodium GlutamateHydrolyzed Vegetable ProteinHydrolyzed ProteinHydrolyzed Plant ProteinPlant Protein ExtractSodium CaseinateCalcium CaseinateYeast ExtractTextured Protein (Including TVP)Autolyzed YeastHydrolyzed Oat FlourCorn Oil* Food Additives That FREQUENTLY Contain MSG *Malt ExtractMalt FlavoringBouillonBrothStockFlavoringNatural Flavors/FlavoringNatural Beef Or Chicken FlavoringSeasoningSpices* Food Additives That MAY Contain MSG Or Excitotoxins *CarrageenanEnzymesSoy Protein ConcentrateSoy Protein IsolateWhey Protein ConcentrateAlso: Protease Enzymes of various sources can release excitotoxin amino acids from food proteins.Aspartame - An Intense Source Of ExcitotoxinsAspartame is a sweetener made from two amino acids, phenylalanine and the excitotoxin aspartate. It should be avoided at all costs. Aspartame complaints accounts for approximately 70% of ALL complaints to the FDA. It is implicated in everything from blindness to headaches to convulsions. Sold under dozens of brand names such as NutraSweet and Equal, aspartame breaks down within 20 minutes at room temperature into several primary toxic and dangerous ingredients:1. DKP (diketopiperazine) (When ingested, converts to a near duplicate ofa powerful brain tumor causing agent)2. Formic Acid (ant venom)3. Formaldehyde (embalming fluid)4. Methanol (causes blindness...extremely dangerous substance)Common Examples:Diet soft drinks, sugar free gums, sugar free Kool Aid, Crystal Light, childrens' medications, and thousands of other products claiming to be 'low calorie', 'diet', or 'sugar free'.A Final Note...Dr. Blaylock recounted a meeting with a senior executive in the food additive industry who told him point blank that these excitotoxins are going to be in our food no matter how many name changes are necessary...
Toddlers to get lessons in talking as TV kills conversation
original link http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-453863/
Toddlers-lessons-talking-as TV-kills-conversation
Talk to me:
Toddlers at nursery are to be given speech lessons Toddlers will be taught how to talk in an attempt to arrest the shocking decline in children's communication skills. A recent study revealed that half of them are unable to string a sentence together at age five. As a result, ministers are encouraging the use of the special "early talk" programme, targeted at infants from their earliest months to age five, which uses signing, gestures and symbols to expand vocabulary.Research from the children's charity I CAN revealed last year that half of youngsters - rising to 84 per cent in some areas - begin formal education with "impoverished speech and language".They are unable to utter a whole sentence and can understand only simple instructions.Further research by the charity found that parents spend more time watching TV and cleaning around the house than talking to their children.The charity has developed the teaching kits for staff in nurseries to help counter the problem and encourage babies and toddlers to "talk" to each other and adults.It will also be used to target children with learning difficulties.Children's Minister Beverley Hughes endorsed the scheme and said it will be used in 200 Government-backed Sure Start children's centres, benefiting 160,000 toddlers.The charity is already working with local councils to extend the scheme to voluntary and private nurseries, potentially capturing tens of thousands more infants.As well providing training and classroom materials for staff, the programme includes an advice service for parents, who will be given tips on how to interact with their children.The charity's spokesman, Clare Geldard, said: "We know from nursery teachers and reception class teachers that children are coming in with fewer speech and language skills, for example they only use short sentences and their vocabulary is not as enriched."The environment and society in which we live at the moment is less supportive of developing children's language."She said she knew of one speech therapist who found that none of the three-year-olds she was assessing could say more than one word at a time.Mrs Geldard went on: "The parents think, 'Oh it will be all right when they get to school - the school will bring them up to the right level'. But if a child is not talking before they go to school, they won't be able to springboard into academic learning."Half of them will become frustrated at not being able to understand instructions and express themselves. They will be labelled naughty children."The remainder, the ones I really worry about, will withdraw and nobody will notice they have a problem until much later."THE AGES AT WHICH SPEAKING MILESTONES SHOULD BE REACHED0-1 years Recognise parents' voices, make basic sounds and copy facial expressions1-2 years Understand basic words and use hand gestures2-3 years Put basic sentences together3-4 years Ask lots of questions and socialise with friends4-5 years Speak confidently in conversations with occasional mistakesTIPS FOR PARENTS...• Take turns to talk. Speak to your child and give them plenty of time to respond.• Encourage talking - ask open-ended questions, not simple yes or no questions.• Try talking about what's going on in their world.• Speak in sentences one word longer than theirs to help build up their vocabulary.• Read to your child to develop good listening skills.
Toddlers-lessons-talking-as TV-kills-conversation
Talk to me:
Toddlers at nursery are to be given speech lessons Toddlers will be taught how to talk in an attempt to arrest the shocking decline in children's communication skills. A recent study revealed that half of them are unable to string a sentence together at age five. As a result, ministers are encouraging the use of the special "early talk" programme, targeted at infants from their earliest months to age five, which uses signing, gestures and symbols to expand vocabulary.Research from the children's charity I CAN revealed last year that half of youngsters - rising to 84 per cent in some areas - begin formal education with "impoverished speech and language".They are unable to utter a whole sentence and can understand only simple instructions.Further research by the charity found that parents spend more time watching TV and cleaning around the house than talking to their children.The charity has developed the teaching kits for staff in nurseries to help counter the problem and encourage babies and toddlers to "talk" to each other and adults.It will also be used to target children with learning difficulties.Children's Minister Beverley Hughes endorsed the scheme and said it will be used in 200 Government-backed Sure Start children's centres, benefiting 160,000 toddlers.The charity is already working with local councils to extend the scheme to voluntary and private nurseries, potentially capturing tens of thousands more infants.As well providing training and classroom materials for staff, the programme includes an advice service for parents, who will be given tips on how to interact with their children.The charity's spokesman, Clare Geldard, said: "We know from nursery teachers and reception class teachers that children are coming in with fewer speech and language skills, for example they only use short sentences and their vocabulary is not as enriched."The environment and society in which we live at the moment is less supportive of developing children's language."She said she knew of one speech therapist who found that none of the three-year-olds she was assessing could say more than one word at a time.Mrs Geldard went on: "The parents think, 'Oh it will be all right when they get to school - the school will bring them up to the right level'. But if a child is not talking before they go to school, they won't be able to springboard into academic learning."Half of them will become frustrated at not being able to understand instructions and express themselves. They will be labelled naughty children."The remainder, the ones I really worry about, will withdraw and nobody will notice they have a problem until much later."THE AGES AT WHICH SPEAKING MILESTONES SHOULD BE REACHED0-1 years Recognise parents' voices, make basic sounds and copy facial expressions1-2 years Understand basic words and use hand gestures2-3 years Put basic sentences together3-4 years Ask lots of questions and socialise with friends4-5 years Speak confidently in conversations with occasional mistakesTIPS FOR PARENTS...• Take turns to talk. Speak to your child and give them plenty of time to respond.• Encourage talking - ask open-ended questions, not simple yes or no questions.• Try talking about what's going on in their world.• Speak in sentences one word longer than theirs to help build up their vocabulary.• Read to your child to develop good listening skills.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Cell Phones Are More Dangerous Than Smoking
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/mobile-phones-more-dangerous-than-smoking-or-asbestos-802602.html
Independent.co.uk
Mobile phones 'more dangerous than smoking'
Brain expert warns of huge rise in tumours and calls on industry to take immediate steps to reduce radiation
By Geoffrey LeanSunday, 30 March 2008
Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take "immediate steps" to reduce exposure to their radiation.The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that "there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours". He believes this will be "definitively proven" in the next decade.Noting that malignant brain tumours represent "a life-ending diagnosis", he adds: "We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation." He fears that "unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps", the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically."It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking," says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.Late last week, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed Khurana's study as "a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual". It believes he "does not present a balanced analysis" of the published science, and "reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews".
Independent.co.uk
Mobile phones 'more dangerous than smoking'
Brain expert warns of huge rise in tumours and calls on industry to take immediate steps to reduce radiation
By Geoffrey LeanSunday, 30 March 2008
Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take "immediate steps" to reduce exposure to their radiation.The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that "there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours". He believes this will be "definitively proven" in the next decade.Noting that malignant brain tumours represent "a life-ending diagnosis", he adds: "We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation." He fears that "unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps", the incidence of malignant brain tumours and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically."It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking," says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. Smoking kills some five million worldwide each year, and exposure to asbestos is responsible for as many deaths in Britain as road accidents.Late last week, the Mobile Operators Association dismissed Khurana's study as "a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual". It believes he "does not present a balanced analysis" of the published science, and "reaches opposite conclusions to the WHO and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews".
The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2004/07/19/ecnsun18.xml
The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame
By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah
Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.
A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.
Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.
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"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."
Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.
Average global temperatures have increased by about 0.2 deg Celsius over the past 20 years and are widely believed to be responsible for new extremes in weather patterns. After pressure from environmentalists, politicians agreed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, promising to limit greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012. Britain ratified the protocol in 2002 and said it would cut emissions by 12.5 per cent from 1990 levels.
Globally, 1997, 1998 and 2002 were the hottest years since worldwide weather records were first collated in 1860.
Most scientists agree that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have contributed to the warming of the planet in the past few decades but have questioned whether a brighter Sun is also responsible for rising temperatures.
To determine the Sun's role in global warming, Dr Solanki's research team measured magnetic zones on the Sun's surface known as sunspots, which are believed to intensify the Sun's energy output.
The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could last up to 50 years - but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer. The scientists also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to Greenland in 1991. The most recent samples contained the lowest recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years. Beryllium 10 is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases. Scientists can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years.
Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last.
He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.
Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki's research. "While the established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is certainly significant," he said.
"It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor."
Dr David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming.
He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase.
This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate "the natural factors involved in climate change", he said.
Dr Gareth Jones, a climate researcher at the Met Office, said that Dr Solanki's findings were inconclusive because the study had not incorporated other potential climate change factors.
"The Sun's radiance may well have an impact on climate change but it needs to be looked at in conjunction with other factors such as greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols and volcano activity," he said. The research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist. "Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth," he said. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy-makers are not.
"Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock."
The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame
By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah
Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.
A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.
Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.
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"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."
Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.
Average global temperatures have increased by about 0.2 deg Celsius over the past 20 years and are widely believed to be responsible for new extremes in weather patterns. After pressure from environmentalists, politicians agreed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, promising to limit greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012. Britain ratified the protocol in 2002 and said it would cut emissions by 12.5 per cent from 1990 levels.
Globally, 1997, 1998 and 2002 were the hottest years since worldwide weather records were first collated in 1860.
Most scientists agree that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have contributed to the warming of the planet in the past few decades but have questioned whether a brighter Sun is also responsible for rising temperatures.
To determine the Sun's role in global warming, Dr Solanki's research team measured magnetic zones on the Sun's surface known as sunspots, which are believed to intensify the Sun's energy output.
The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could last up to 50 years - but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer. The scientists also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to Greenland in 1991. The most recent samples contained the lowest recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years. Beryllium 10 is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases. Scientists can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years.
Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last.
He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.
Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki's research. "While the established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is certainly significant," he said.
"It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor."
Dr David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming.
He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase.
This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate "the natural factors involved in climate change", he said.
Dr Gareth Jones, a climate researcher at the Met Office, said that Dr Solanki's findings were inconclusive because the study had not incorporated other potential climate change factors.
"The Sun's radiance may well have an impact on climate change but it needs to be looked at in conjunction with other factors such as greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols and volcano activity," he said. The research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist. "Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth," he said. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy-makers are not.
"Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock."
The Sun is Getting Hotter
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE5D9133AF933A0575AC0A961958260
September 30, 1997
Sun Is Getting Hotter, Satellite Data Indicate
The Sun is getting hotter, adding heat to the global warming that has been linked to greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.
Solar radiation reaching the Earth is 0.036 percent warmer than it was in 1986, when the current solar cycle was beginning, said a study published on Friday in the journal Science. The finding is based on an analysis of data from satellites that measure the temperature of sunlight.
The increase is only a small fraction of the Sun's total heat, but over a century, it would be enough to seriously aggravate problems of global warming, said Dr. Richard C. Willson of Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research.
Dr. Willson said most researchers expected greenhouse gases to warm the planet by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years. Solar irradiance could add another 0.72 degrees, he said.
Other experts agreed, although some argued that the satellite data used by Dr. Willson may be suspect.
''This is a significant increase,'' said Dr. John Firor of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. ''It would increase the rate at which we go into warming.'' He said that based on current estimates, the solar heat increase found by Dr. Willson would increase that warming trend by about 20 percent.
But whether the Earth is being heated by an increase in greenhouse gases, which are produced by the burning of fossil fuels, is still not universally accepted by scientists. Although studies show that the Earth has warmed about one degree in the last century and that the trend is continuing, some scientists say it is part of a natural cycle for the planet.
Dr. Willson said his finding supported the idea that a variable Sun could play a powerful and natural role in the Earth's climate.
September 30, 1997
Sun Is Getting Hotter, Satellite Data Indicate
The Sun is getting hotter, adding heat to the global warming that has been linked to greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.
Solar radiation reaching the Earth is 0.036 percent warmer than it was in 1986, when the current solar cycle was beginning, said a study published on Friday in the journal Science. The finding is based on an analysis of data from satellites that measure the temperature of sunlight.
The increase is only a small fraction of the Sun's total heat, but over a century, it would be enough to seriously aggravate problems of global warming, said Dr. Richard C. Willson of Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research.
Dr. Willson said most researchers expected greenhouse gases to warm the planet by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years. Solar irradiance could add another 0.72 degrees, he said.
Other experts agreed, although some argued that the satellite data used by Dr. Willson may be suspect.
''This is a significant increase,'' said Dr. John Firor of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. ''It would increase the rate at which we go into warming.'' He said that based on current estimates, the solar heat increase found by Dr. Willson would increase that warming trend by about 20 percent.
But whether the Earth is being heated by an increase in greenhouse gases, which are produced by the burning of fossil fuels, is still not universally accepted by scientists. Although studies show that the Earth has warmed about one degree in the last century and that the trend is continuing, some scientists say it is part of a natural cycle for the planet.
Dr. Willson said his finding supported the idea that a variable Sun could play a powerful and natural role in the Earth's climate.
Global Warming Detected on Triton
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980526052143data_trunc_sys.shtml
Global Warming Detected on Triton
There may not be much industrial pollution on Neptune's largest moon, but things are hotting up nonetheless...
The Earth is not alone in suffering global warming. According to observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and several ground-based instruments, temperatures on Neptune's largest moon have increased dramatically since the Voyager space probe swung by in 1989. So much so, in fact, that Triton's surface of frozen nitrogen is turning into gas, making its thin atmosphere denser by the day.
"At least since 1989, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming," confirms astronomer James Elliot, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Percentage-wise, it's a very large increase."
Elliot and colleagues from the Lowell Observatory and Williams College report their findings in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature. Triton's 5 percent increase on the absolute temperature scale from about -392 to -389 degrees Fahrenheit would be like the Earth experiencing a jump of some 22 degrees Fahrenheit in just nine years.
There are two possible explanations for the moon's warmer weather. One is that the frost pattern on Triton's surface may have changed over the years, absorbing more and more of the sun's warmth. The other is that changes in reflectivity of Triton's ice may have caused it to absorb more heat.
About the same size and density as Pluto, Triton is thirty times as far from the sun as the Earth. It is known to be extremely cold and gusty, with wind speeds close to the speed of sound. Its atmosphere is composed mostly of molecular nitrogen, and its terrain varies between icy regions and bare spots. Quips Elliot: "When you're so cold, global warming is a welcome trend."
Global Warming Detected on Triton
There may not be much industrial pollution on Neptune's largest moon, but things are hotting up nonetheless...
The Earth is not alone in suffering global warming. According to observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and several ground-based instruments, temperatures on Neptune's largest moon have increased dramatically since the Voyager space probe swung by in 1989. So much so, in fact, that Triton's surface of frozen nitrogen is turning into gas, making its thin atmosphere denser by the day.
"At least since 1989, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming," confirms astronomer James Elliot, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Percentage-wise, it's a very large increase."
Elliot and colleagues from the Lowell Observatory and Williams College report their findings in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature. Triton's 5 percent increase on the absolute temperature scale from about -392 to -389 degrees Fahrenheit would be like the Earth experiencing a jump of some 22 degrees Fahrenheit in just nine years.
There are two possible explanations for the moon's warmer weather. One is that the frost pattern on Triton's surface may have changed over the years, absorbing more and more of the sun's warmth. The other is that changes in reflectivity of Triton's ice may have caused it to absorb more heat.
About the same size and density as Pluto, Triton is thirty times as far from the sun as the Earth. It is known to be extremely cold and gusty, with wind speeds close to the speed of sound. Its atmosphere is composed mostly of molecular nitrogen, and its terrain varies between icy regions and bare spots. Quips Elliot: "When you're so cold, global warming is a welcome trend."
Global Warming on Pluto Puzzles Scientists
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warming_021009.html
Global Warming on Pluto Puzzles Scientists
In what is largely a reversal of an August announcement, astronomers today said Pluto is undergoing global warming in its thin atmosphere even as it moves farther from the Sun on its long, odd-shaped orbit.
Pluto's atmospheric pressure has tripled over the past 14 years, indicating a stark temperature rise, the researchers said. The change is likely a seasonal event, much as seasons on Earth change as the hemispheres alter their inclination to the Sun during the planet's annual orbit.
They suspect the average surface temperature increased about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, or slightly less than 2 degrees Celsius.
Pluto remains a mysterious world whose secrets are no so easily explained, however. The warming could be fueled by some sort of eruptive activity on the small planet, one astronomer speculated.
The increasing temperatures are more likely explained by two simple facts: Pluto's highly elliptical orbit significantly changes the planet's distance from the Sun during its long "year," which lasts 248 Earth years; and unlike most of the planets, Pluto's axis is nearly in line with the orbital plane, tipped 122 degrees. Earth's axis is tilted 23.5 degrees.
Though Pluto was closest to the Sun in 1989, a warming trend 13 years later does not surprise David Tholen, a University of Hawaii astronomer involved in the discovery.
"It takes time for materials to warm up and cool off, which is why the hottest part of the day on Earth is usually around 2 or 3 p.m. rather than local noon," Tholen said. "This warming trend on Pluto could easily last for another 13 years."
Stellar observations
The conclusion is based on data gathered during a chance passage of Pluto in front of a distant star as seen from Earth. Such events, called occultations, are rare, but two of them occurred this summer.
In the occultations, which are like eclipses, astronomers examined starlight as it passed through Pluto's tenuous atmosphere just before the planet blotted out the light.
The first occultation, in July, yielded limited data because of terrestrial cloud cover above key telescopes. Marc Buie, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory, scrambled to observe the event from northern Chile using portable 14-inch (0.35-meter) telescope. Afterward, Buie said he was baffled by what seemed to be global cooling of Pluto's atmosphere punctuated by some surface warming.
Then on Aug. 20, Pluto passed in front of a different star. The latter event provided much better data captured by eight large telescopes and seems to clarify and mostly reverse the earlier findings.
The results were compared to studies from 1988, the last time Pluto was observed eclipsing a star.
James Elliot of MIT led a team of astronomers who coordinated their observations and presented the findings today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) Division for Planetary Sciences in Birmingham, Ala.
Elliot said the Aug. 20 occultation was the first that allowed such a deep probing of the composition, pressure and the always-frigid temperature of Pluto's atmosphere, which ranges from -391 to -274 degrees Fahrenheit (-235 to -170 degrees Celsius).
Volcanoes on Pluto?
Elliot hinted at the possibility of another factor fueling Pluto's warming trend.
He compared Pluto to Triton, a moon of Neptune. Both have atmospheres made mostly of nitrogen. In 1997, Triton occulted a star and astronomers found that its atmosphere had warmed since the last observations were made in 1989 during the Voyager mission. Back then, Voyager found dark material rising above Triton, indicating possible eruptive activity.
"There could be more massive activity on Pluto, since the changes observed in Pluto's atmosphere are much more severe," Elliot said. "The change observed on Triton was subtle. Pluto's changes are not subtle."
There is no firm evidence that Pluto is volcanically active, but neither is there evidence to rule out that possibility. Even the Hubble Space Telescope can barely make out Pluto's surface.
Elliot added that the process affecting Pluto's temperature is complex. "We just don't know what is causing these effects," he said.
Let's go there
Elliot and others believe this poor understanding of our solar system's tiniest planet is grounds for sending a robot to investigate. Pluto is the only planet not visited by a spacecraft.
NASA has shelved a mission that would explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt of frozen objects in which it resides.
Congress, however, appears to view the mission as worthy of some funds. A House budget panel this week followed the lead of the Senate in approving $105 million for the mission. If final approval comes, NASA would be compelled to undertake the project.
Interestingly, while Pluto's atmosphere has been growing warmer in recent years, astronomers have argued that a Pluto mission must launch by 2006, lest it miss the opportunity to study Pluto's atmosphere before it completely freezes out for the winter.
Tentative mission plans call for a robotic probe that would not reach Pluto for several years, making a flyby sometime prior to 2020 prior to investigating other objects deeper in the solar system.
Meanwhile, astronomers are looking forward to a space telescope called SOFIA, slated to begin operations in 2004. SOFIA will carry an instrument designed specifically to observe occultations and is expected to be employed when Pluto passes in front of other stars in coming years.
The Pluto observations this summer were funded by NASA, the Research Corporation and the National Science Foundation. Observations were made using the telescopes at the Mauna Kea Observatory, Haleakala, Lick Observatory, Lowell Observatory and the Palomar Observatory.
Global Warming on Pluto Puzzles Scientists
In what is largely a reversal of an August announcement, astronomers today said Pluto is undergoing global warming in its thin atmosphere even as it moves farther from the Sun on its long, odd-shaped orbit.
Pluto's atmospheric pressure has tripled over the past 14 years, indicating a stark temperature rise, the researchers said. The change is likely a seasonal event, much as seasons on Earth change as the hemispheres alter their inclination to the Sun during the planet's annual orbit.
They suspect the average surface temperature increased about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, or slightly less than 2 degrees Celsius.
Pluto remains a mysterious world whose secrets are no so easily explained, however. The warming could be fueled by some sort of eruptive activity on the small planet, one astronomer speculated.
The increasing temperatures are more likely explained by two simple facts: Pluto's highly elliptical orbit significantly changes the planet's distance from the Sun during its long "year," which lasts 248 Earth years; and unlike most of the planets, Pluto's axis is nearly in line with the orbital plane, tipped 122 degrees. Earth's axis is tilted 23.5 degrees.
Though Pluto was closest to the Sun in 1989, a warming trend 13 years later does not surprise David Tholen, a University of Hawaii astronomer involved in the discovery.
"It takes time for materials to warm up and cool off, which is why the hottest part of the day on Earth is usually around 2 or 3 p.m. rather than local noon," Tholen said. "This warming trend on Pluto could easily last for another 13 years."
Stellar observations
The conclusion is based on data gathered during a chance passage of Pluto in front of a distant star as seen from Earth. Such events, called occultations, are rare, but two of them occurred this summer.
In the occultations, which are like eclipses, astronomers examined starlight as it passed through Pluto's tenuous atmosphere just before the planet blotted out the light.
The first occultation, in July, yielded limited data because of terrestrial cloud cover above key telescopes. Marc Buie, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory, scrambled to observe the event from northern Chile using portable 14-inch (0.35-meter) telescope. Afterward, Buie said he was baffled by what seemed to be global cooling of Pluto's atmosphere punctuated by some surface warming.
Then on Aug. 20, Pluto passed in front of a different star. The latter event provided much better data captured by eight large telescopes and seems to clarify and mostly reverse the earlier findings.
The results were compared to studies from 1988, the last time Pluto was observed eclipsing a star.
James Elliot of MIT led a team of astronomers who coordinated their observations and presented the findings today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's (AAS) Division for Planetary Sciences in Birmingham, Ala.
Elliot said the Aug. 20 occultation was the first that allowed such a deep probing of the composition, pressure and the always-frigid temperature of Pluto's atmosphere, which ranges from -391 to -274 degrees Fahrenheit (-235 to -170 degrees Celsius).
Volcanoes on Pluto?
Elliot hinted at the possibility of another factor fueling Pluto's warming trend.
He compared Pluto to Triton, a moon of Neptune. Both have atmospheres made mostly of nitrogen. In 1997, Triton occulted a star and astronomers found that its atmosphere had warmed since the last observations were made in 1989 during the Voyager mission. Back then, Voyager found dark material rising above Triton, indicating possible eruptive activity.
"There could be more massive activity on Pluto, since the changes observed in Pluto's atmosphere are much more severe," Elliot said. "The change observed on Triton was subtle. Pluto's changes are not subtle."
There is no firm evidence that Pluto is volcanically active, but neither is there evidence to rule out that possibility. Even the Hubble Space Telescope can barely make out Pluto's surface.
Elliot added that the process affecting Pluto's temperature is complex. "We just don't know what is causing these effects," he said.
Let's go there
Elliot and others believe this poor understanding of our solar system's tiniest planet is grounds for sending a robot to investigate. Pluto is the only planet not visited by a spacecraft.
NASA has shelved a mission that would explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt of frozen objects in which it resides.
Congress, however, appears to view the mission as worthy of some funds. A House budget panel this week followed the lead of the Senate in approving $105 million for the mission. If final approval comes, NASA would be compelled to undertake the project.
Interestingly, while Pluto's atmosphere has been growing warmer in recent years, astronomers have argued that a Pluto mission must launch by 2006, lest it miss the opportunity to study Pluto's atmosphere before it completely freezes out for the winter.
Tentative mission plans call for a robotic probe that would not reach Pluto for several years, making a flyby sometime prior to 2020 prior to investigating other objects deeper in the solar system.
Meanwhile, astronomers are looking forward to a space telescope called SOFIA, slated to begin operations in 2004. SOFIA will carry an instrument designed specifically to observe occultations and is expected to be employed when Pluto passes in front of other stars in coming years.
The Pluto observations this summer were funded by NASA, the Research Corporation and the National Science Foundation. Observations were made using the telescopes at the Mauna Kea Observatory, Haleakala, Lick Observatory, Lowell Observatory and the Palomar Observatory.
It's the Sun Stupid!
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s_518411.html
It's the sun, stupid!
By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Go outside at noon on a cloudless day.
Hold up your arm with your palm perpendicular to the blinding bright spot high in the sky.
Feel the heat on your hand? It's coming from 93 million miles away. Yet it's so powerful it'll eventually burn your flesh.
Even filtered by our atmosphere, even after traveling eight minutes at the speed of light, sunshine is so full of energy it can create life on Earth, turn water to gas and melt polar ice.
story continues below
But the sun can't cause global warming.
The sun is so distant and so small in our sky we forget how enormous it is -- and what a speck of space dust Earth is. Our home star composes 99.82 percent of the mass of the solar system. The sun's mass is 330,000 times the Earth's mass. About 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun.
The sun is a furnace of nuclear fusion beyond human comprehension. Although just an ordinary star, it produces an incomprehensible 386 billion-billion megawatts of energy per second.
Its also real hot. Its core is a hellish 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Its surface is 11,000 degrees. Its corona, which extends millions of miles into space, has temperatures of 1.8 million degrees.
But the sun doesn't just bathe our tender planet in light and heat. It also blasts us with an invisible hurricane of high-energy electrons and protons that travel at 1.6 million miles per hour.
This solar wind, which extends past Pluto and constantly changes speed, density, direction and magnetic power, can produce auroras like our Northern Lights and knock out electric power grids on Earth's surface.
But the sun can't be causing global warming.
In fact, if you believe the global warming hysterics, the sun's mighty powers to affect our climate have been eclipsed by man's accelerating greenhouse gas output.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been saying the sun is responsible for about 10 percent of the roughly 1 degree-Fahrenheit rise in Earth's average temperature over the last century.
But now a new European study of solar activity concludes the sun's effect on global warming is "negligible." Since 1985, the study shows, such factors as sunspots and solar irradiance are trending away from heating the Earth.
The Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national science academy, pronounced that this new study "comprehensively" disproves claims that the cause of recent global warming is increased solar activity. Humans are to blame. Natch.
Lots of other studies have come to the opposite conclusion, of course.
Going back 10,000 years, a 1998 study found that past periods of global warming coincided nicely with increased sunspot activity, which occur during increases in the sun's brightness and energy output. In 2004, a study by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said Earth was getting hotter because the sun was burning brighter than it had in 1,000 years.
We don't want to get into an ugly debate about the prime cause of global warming. But maybe all those sun-worshipping ancestors of ours were not such dummies after all.
Sure, they lived in caves, thought gods controlled the weather and couldn't even spell SUV. But eons ago they figured out what should still be obvious to every creature on Earth today.
The mighty sun is in charge of what happens on puny Earth -- not humans or their fires.
It's the sun, stupid!
By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Go outside at noon on a cloudless day.
Hold up your arm with your palm perpendicular to the blinding bright spot high in the sky.
Feel the heat on your hand? It's coming from 93 million miles away. Yet it's so powerful it'll eventually burn your flesh.
Even filtered by our atmosphere, even after traveling eight minutes at the speed of light, sunshine is so full of energy it can create life on Earth, turn water to gas and melt polar ice.
story continues below
But the sun can't cause global warming.
The sun is so distant and so small in our sky we forget how enormous it is -- and what a speck of space dust Earth is. Our home star composes 99.82 percent of the mass of the solar system. The sun's mass is 330,000 times the Earth's mass. About 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun.
The sun is a furnace of nuclear fusion beyond human comprehension. Although just an ordinary star, it produces an incomprehensible 386 billion-billion megawatts of energy per second.
Its also real hot. Its core is a hellish 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Its surface is 11,000 degrees. Its corona, which extends millions of miles into space, has temperatures of 1.8 million degrees.
But the sun doesn't just bathe our tender planet in light and heat. It also blasts us with an invisible hurricane of high-energy electrons and protons that travel at 1.6 million miles per hour.
This solar wind, which extends past Pluto and constantly changes speed, density, direction and magnetic power, can produce auroras like our Northern Lights and knock out electric power grids on Earth's surface.
But the sun can't be causing global warming.
In fact, if you believe the global warming hysterics, the sun's mighty powers to affect our climate have been eclipsed by man's accelerating greenhouse gas output.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been saying the sun is responsible for about 10 percent of the roughly 1 degree-Fahrenheit rise in Earth's average temperature over the last century.
But now a new European study of solar activity concludes the sun's effect on global warming is "negligible." Since 1985, the study shows, such factors as sunspots and solar irradiance are trending away from heating the Earth.
The Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national science academy, pronounced that this new study "comprehensively" disproves claims that the cause of recent global warming is increased solar activity. Humans are to blame. Natch.
Lots of other studies have come to the opposite conclusion, of course.
Going back 10,000 years, a 1998 study found that past periods of global warming coincided nicely with increased sunspot activity, which occur during increases in the sun's brightness and energy output. In 2004, a study by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said Earth was getting hotter because the sun was burning brighter than it had in 1,000 years.
We don't want to get into an ugly debate about the prime cause of global warming. But maybe all those sun-worshipping ancestors of ours were not such dummies after all.
Sure, they lived in caves, thought gods controlled the weather and couldn't even spell SUV. But eons ago they figured out what should still be obvious to every creature on Earth today.
The mighty sun is in charge of what happens on puny Earth -- not humans or their fires.
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says
Kate Raviliousfor National Geographic News
February 28, 2007
Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Get an overview: "Global Warming Fast Facts".)Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said.Solar CyclesAbdussamatov believes that changes in the sun's heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets.Mars and Earth, for instance, have experienced periodic ice ages throughout their histories."Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance," Abdussamatov said.By studying fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, Abdussamatov believes he can see a pattern that fits with the ups and downs in climate we see on Earth and Mars.Abdussamatov's work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists."His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University."And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report." (Related: "Global Warming 'Very Likely' Caused by Humans, World Climate Experts Say" [February 2, 2007].)Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."Planets' WobblesThe conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet's orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun."Wobbles in the orbit of Mars are the main cause of its climate change in the current era," Oxford's Wilson explained. (Related: "Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says" [September 13, 2006].)All planets experience a few wobbles as they make their journey around the sun. Earth's wobbles are known as Milankovitch cycles and occur on time scales of between 20,000 and 100,000 years.These fluctuations change the tilt of Earth's axis and its distance from the sun and are thought to be responsible for the waxing and waning of ice ages on Earth.Mars and Earth wobble in different ways, and most scientists think it is pure coincidence that both planets are between ice ages right now."Mars has no [large] moon, which makes its wobbles much larger, and hence the swings in climate are greater too," Wilson said.No GreenhousePerhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.Most scientists now fear that the massive amount of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the air will lead to a catastrophic rise in Earth's temperatures, dramatically raising sea levels as glaciers melt and leading to extreme weather worldwide.Abdussamatov remains contrarian, however, suggesting that the sun holds something quite different in store."The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says
Kate Raviliousfor National Geographic News
February 28, 2007
Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Get an overview: "Global Warming Fast Facts".)Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said.Solar CyclesAbdussamatov believes that changes in the sun's heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets.Mars and Earth, for instance, have experienced periodic ice ages throughout their histories."Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance," Abdussamatov said.By studying fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, Abdussamatov believes he can see a pattern that fits with the ups and downs in climate we see on Earth and Mars.Abdussamatov's work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists."His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University."And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report." (Related: "Global Warming 'Very Likely' Caused by Humans, World Climate Experts Say" [February 2, 2007].)Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."Planets' WobblesThe conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet's orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun."Wobbles in the orbit of Mars are the main cause of its climate change in the current era," Oxford's Wilson explained. (Related: "Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says" [September 13, 2006].)All planets experience a few wobbles as they make their journey around the sun. Earth's wobbles are known as Milankovitch cycles and occur on time scales of between 20,000 and 100,000 years.These fluctuations change the tilt of Earth's axis and its distance from the sun and are thought to be responsible for the waxing and waning of ice ages on Earth.Mars and Earth wobble in different ways, and most scientists think it is pure coincidence that both planets are between ice ages right now."Mars has no [large] moon, which makes its wobbles much larger, and hence the swings in climate are greater too," Wilson said.No GreenhousePerhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.Most scientists now fear that the massive amount of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the air will lead to a catastrophic rise in Earth's temperatures, dramatically raising sea levels as glaciers melt and leading to extreme weather worldwide.Abdussamatov remains contrarian, however, suggesting that the sun holds something quite different in store."The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years
Hypocrate Al Gore's Carbon Footprint is bigger than ever!
original link http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/2153179/
Al Gore's electricity bill goes through the (insulated) roof
By Tom Leonard in New YorkEnvironment campaigner
Al Gore is using more electricity than ever despite pledging to cut consumption more than a year ago, a libertarian research group claims.According to the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research, the annual electricity usage at the former US Vice President's large home in Nashville has risen by 10 per cent.Mr Gore's environmental activism inspired the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.But the TCPR branded him a "hypocrite" in February 2007 after discovering that his eight-bathroom house in the Tennessee city consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity in the previous year – more than 20 times the national average.Mr Gore responded by saying that he was in the process of giving the house a major energy-efficient makeover, fitting solar panels, low energy lightbulbs, and a geothermal heating and cooling system.However, the TPCR has got hold of his electricity bill again, this time comparing electricity consumption between the 12 months before June 2007, when it says he installed his new technology, and the year since then.It says the figures show the Gore residence uses an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations.By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.Drew Johnson, the TCPR's president, said: "A man's commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home."A spokesman for Mr Gore disputed the claims, saying his total utility bills had gone down by 40 per cent since the "green" refit, much of that down to the new heating system.Explaining the electricity consumption, she said the three-year renovation of the house wasn't finished until November so it was too early to draw a before-and-after comparison.She also stressed that the Gores participate in a local "green power switch" programme which allows them to buy electricity from renewable resources such as wind power and methane gas.
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Al Gore's electricity bill goes through the (insulated) roof
By Tom Leonard in New YorkEnvironment campaigner
Al Gore is using more electricity than ever despite pledging to cut consumption more than a year ago, a libertarian research group claims.According to the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research, the annual electricity usage at the former US Vice President's large home in Nashville has risen by 10 per cent.Mr Gore's environmental activism inspired the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.But the TCPR branded him a "hypocrite" in February 2007 after discovering that his eight-bathroom house in the Tennessee city consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity in the previous year – more than 20 times the national average.Mr Gore responded by saying that he was in the process of giving the house a major energy-efficient makeover, fitting solar panels, low energy lightbulbs, and a geothermal heating and cooling system.However, the TPCR has got hold of his electricity bill again, this time comparing electricity consumption between the 12 months before June 2007, when it says he installed his new technology, and the year since then.It says the figures show the Gore residence uses an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations.By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.Drew Johnson, the TCPR's president, said: "A man's commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home."A spokesman for Mr Gore disputed the claims, saying his total utility bills had gone down by 40 per cent since the "green" refit, much of that down to the new heating system.Explaining the electricity consumption, she said the three-year renovation of the house wasn't finished until November so it was too early to draw a before-and-after comparison.She also stressed that the Gores participate in a local "green power switch" programme which allows them to buy electricity from renewable resources such as wind power and methane gas.
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Stop asking OTHERS for the answers!
Due to the wealth of information we have available to us and the multitude of arrogant admissions I am very reluctant to post blogs about my opinion, however this issue of criticizing people responsible for bringing us alot of this information because they don't offer SOLUTIONS has troubled me significantly. We live in this drive through tv dinner society in which we think we pay people and they arrive as our heroes and this is flawed logic to say the least. None of us are incompotent, in fact most of us suffer from severe overeducation at the expense of wisdom and practical social skills in my opinion and this also the reason why most of us have never met people we chat with everyday and who we pour our hearts out to on these forums. The answers are within us and we have to utilize those answers to form functional communities instead of waiting for some radio show heroe to rally us all and expecting the mainstream media to cover it all. The wiser minds within this movement like Alan Watt know this and is demonized for his restraint. We know these forums are watched and infiltrated so why do we niavely post all our "solutions" for all to see we know that the radio shows are listened to and that the intelligence agencies take notes every step of the way so why do we scream all of our solutions and demand others do the same. Is it that we are such a critical state of denial that we are still have one foot in the fantasy we claim to have been awakened from? Or is something very sinister at work. I would advise everyone to exercise caution when someone they do not know asks them to post their solutions because these people could very well be taking notes and be waiting for you when you arrive with your protest signs the only catch being that they will be undercover and holding a similar sign as we have seen in the Ontario protest where spooks were discovers throwing rocks. They might even look and talk like you and chant the same slogans. Reserve your solutions for word of mouth dissemination and use these forums and radio shows as tools for information and most importantly to find potentially lifelong friends but don't for a second believe that these tools were given to us by the government because they love us!
original link http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5180437&page=1
'Disposable Heroes': Veterans Used To Test Suicide-Linked Drugs
An ABC News and Washington Times Investigation Reveals Vets Are Being Recruited for Government Tests on Drugs with Violent Side Effects
By BRIAN ROSS and VIC WALTERJune 17, 2008 —Mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects, an investigation by ABC News and The Washington Times has found.The report will air on Good Morning America and will also appear in The Washington Times on Tuesday. (click here to read the Washington Times coverage of "Disposable Heroes")In one of the human experiments, involving the anti-smoking drug Chantix, Veterans Administration doctors waited more than three months before warning veterans about the possible serious side effects, including suicide and neuropsychiatric behavior."Lab rat, guinea pig, disposable hero," said former US Army sniper James Elliott in describing how he felt he was betrayed by the Veterans Administration.Elliott, 38, of suburban Washington, D.C., was recruited, at $30 a month, for the Chantix anti-smoking study three years after being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He served a 15-month tour of duty in Iraq from 2003-2004.Months after he began taking the drug, Elliott suffered a mental breakdown, experiencing a relapse of Iraq combat nightmares he blames on Chantix."They never told me that I was going to be suicidal, that I would cease sleeping. They never told me anything except this will help me quit smoking," Elliott told ABC News and The Washington Times.On the night of February 5th, after consuming a few beers, Elliott says he "snapped" and left his home with a loaded gun.His fiancee, Tammy, called police and warned, "He's extremely unstable. He has PTSD.""Do you think that he is going to shoot or attack the police?" the 911 dispatcher asked."I can't be certain. I don't know," she said. (click here to hear part of Tammy's 911 call)"He was operating as if he was back in theater, in combat theater," she told ABC News. "And of course, a soldier goes nowhere without a gun."When police arrived, they found Elliott in the street, with the gun in the front pocket of his hooded sweatshirt."Are you going to shoot me? Shoot me," Elliott said, according to the police report. (click here to see the police report)Police used a Taser gun to stun Elliott and placed him under arrest.It wasn't until three weeks later that the Veterans Administration advised the veterans in the Chantix study that the drug may cause serious side effects, including "anxiety, nervousness, tension, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted and completed suicide."The VA's letter to the veterans, on February 29, 2008, followed three warnings from the FDA and Chantix' maker Pfizer, that were issued on November 20, 2007, January 18, 2008 and February 1, 2008. (click here to read the FDA warning and click here to read Pfizer's statement on Chantix)"How this study continued in the face of these difficulties is almost impossible to understand," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.Doctors at the Veterans Administration say they acted as quickly as they could."This didn't justify an emergency warning at that level," said Dr. Miles McFall, co-administrator of the VA study.Dr. McFall said there is no proof that Elliott's breakdown was caused by Chantix and he sees no reason to discontinue the study. Some 140 veterans diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder continue to receive Chantix as part of a smoking cessation study.Dr. McFall says the VA decided to continue the Chantix study because "it would be depriving our veterans of an effective method of treatment to help them stop smoking."Caplan, one of the country's leading medical ethicists, said he was stunned by the VA's decision to continue the Chantix experiment."Why take the group most a risk and keep them going? That doesn't make any sense, once you know the risk is there," he said.Chantix is one of the drugs being used in an estimated 25 clinical studies using veterans by the VA.Pfizer maintains that "the benefits of Chantix outweigh the risks" and that it continues to do further studies on the drug.The FAA has prohibited commercial airline pilots from using Chantix because of its possible side effects
'Disposable Heroes': Veterans Used To Test Suicide-Linked Drugs
An ABC News and Washington Times Investigation Reveals Vets Are Being Recruited for Government Tests on Drugs with Violent Side Effects
By BRIAN ROSS and VIC WALTERJune 17, 2008 —Mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects, an investigation by ABC News and The Washington Times has found.The report will air on Good Morning America and will also appear in The Washington Times on Tuesday. (click here to read the Washington Times coverage of "Disposable Heroes")In one of the human experiments, involving the anti-smoking drug Chantix, Veterans Administration doctors waited more than three months before warning veterans about the possible serious side effects, including suicide and neuropsychiatric behavior."Lab rat, guinea pig, disposable hero," said former US Army sniper James Elliott in describing how he felt he was betrayed by the Veterans Administration.Elliott, 38, of suburban Washington, D.C., was recruited, at $30 a month, for the Chantix anti-smoking study three years after being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He served a 15-month tour of duty in Iraq from 2003-2004.Months after he began taking the drug, Elliott suffered a mental breakdown, experiencing a relapse of Iraq combat nightmares he blames on Chantix."They never told me that I was going to be suicidal, that I would cease sleeping. They never told me anything except this will help me quit smoking," Elliott told ABC News and The Washington Times.On the night of February 5th, after consuming a few beers, Elliott says he "snapped" and left his home with a loaded gun.His fiancee, Tammy, called police and warned, "He's extremely unstable. He has PTSD.""Do you think that he is going to shoot or attack the police?" the 911 dispatcher asked."I can't be certain. I don't know," she said. (click here to hear part of Tammy's 911 call)"He was operating as if he was back in theater, in combat theater," she told ABC News. "And of course, a soldier goes nowhere without a gun."When police arrived, they found Elliott in the street, with the gun in the front pocket of his hooded sweatshirt."Are you going to shoot me? Shoot me," Elliott said, according to the police report. (click here to see the police report)Police used a Taser gun to stun Elliott and placed him under arrest.It wasn't until three weeks later that the Veterans Administration advised the veterans in the Chantix study that the drug may cause serious side effects, including "anxiety, nervousness, tension, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted and completed suicide."The VA's letter to the veterans, on February 29, 2008, followed three warnings from the FDA and Chantix' maker Pfizer, that were issued on November 20, 2007, January 18, 2008 and February 1, 2008. (click here to read the FDA warning and click here to read Pfizer's statement on Chantix)"How this study continued in the face of these difficulties is almost impossible to understand," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.Doctors at the Veterans Administration say they acted as quickly as they could."This didn't justify an emergency warning at that level," said Dr. Miles McFall, co-administrator of the VA study.Dr. McFall said there is no proof that Elliott's breakdown was caused by Chantix and he sees no reason to discontinue the study. Some 140 veterans diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder continue to receive Chantix as part of a smoking cessation study.Dr. McFall says the VA decided to continue the Chantix study because "it would be depriving our veterans of an effective method of treatment to help them stop smoking."Caplan, one of the country's leading medical ethicists, said he was stunned by the VA's decision to continue the Chantix experiment."Why take the group most a risk and keep them going? That doesn't make any sense, once you know the risk is there," he said.Chantix is one of the drugs being used in an estimated 25 clinical studies using veterans by the VA.Pfizer maintains that "the benefits of Chantix outweigh the risks" and that it continues to do further studies on the drug.The FAA has prohibited commercial airline pilots from using Chantix because of its possible side effects
Sleazy Businesses peddle Oxytocin Trust Spray
http://oxytocinspray.homestead.com/http://www.oxycalm.com/t3/index.shtml
http://www.oxycalm.com/t3/index.shtml
http://www.verolabs.com/news.php?UID=2008061818350969.178.110.61
Want Trust in a Bottle? Get Liquid Trust, the World's First Oxytocin Trust Spray! Oxytocin: Nature's Trust Hormone Oxytocin is a chemical that is produced naturally in every human's brain. Its production is triggered by a range of stimuli, including sex and breastfeeding and it is known to be important in the formation of social ties, such as who we choose to mate with and bonding with our children. In fact, Oxytocin has often been referred to as the "love hormone" or "cuddle hormone".On June 1, 2005, researchers from the University of Zurich announced an astonishing discovery: When people inhale oxytocin, they react by becoming more trusting of other people. The oxytocin can easily enter the brain when sniffed, boosting social interactions like trust. In the June 2005 issue of the scientific journal, Nature, the researchers reported:"Oxytocin specifically affects an individual's willingness to accept social risks arising through interpersonal interactions...We find that intranasal administration of oxytocin causes a substantial increase in trusting behaviour."The researchers at Vero Labs have developed a formula that combines the potent human hormone Oxytocin with a odorless body spray. It is called Liquid Trust.Who is Using Liquid Trust?- Salespeople -You can have the world at your fingertips.When people trust you, they want to buy from you.- Singles -It's easy to meet new people when you have the power of Trust.- Managers and Employees -If you have the confidence of the people you work with, you will earn more and get ahead faster.OXYTOCIN TRUST SPRAYThe Oxytocin spray has already been featured in Scientific American, National Geographic, and on NBC, ABC, BBC News and many more.Try it now with a $10 discount (enter promotional code 'tellycritic106')and a 100% Money-Back Guarantee!PagesLiquid Trust***SPECIAL OFFER***Get $10 off any purchase of Liquid Trust, only with this web page! Click any of these banners, and enter the promotional code 'tellycritic106' on the order page to receive your $10 discount!
http://www.oxycalm.com/t3/index.shtml
http://www.verolabs.com/news.php?UID=2008061818350969.178.110.61
Want Trust in a Bottle? Get Liquid Trust, the World's First Oxytocin Trust Spray! Oxytocin: Nature's Trust Hormone Oxytocin is a chemical that is produced naturally in every human's brain. Its production is triggered by a range of stimuli, including sex and breastfeeding and it is known to be important in the formation of social ties, such as who we choose to mate with and bonding with our children. In fact, Oxytocin has often been referred to as the "love hormone" or "cuddle hormone".On June 1, 2005, researchers from the University of Zurich announced an astonishing discovery: When people inhale oxytocin, they react by becoming more trusting of other people. The oxytocin can easily enter the brain when sniffed, boosting social interactions like trust. In the June 2005 issue of the scientific journal, Nature, the researchers reported:"Oxytocin specifically affects an individual's willingness to accept social risks arising through interpersonal interactions...We find that intranasal administration of oxytocin causes a substantial increase in trusting behaviour."The researchers at Vero Labs have developed a formula that combines the potent human hormone Oxytocin with a odorless body spray. It is called Liquid Trust.Who is Using Liquid Trust?- Salespeople -You can have the world at your fingertips.When people trust you, they want to buy from you.- Singles -It's easy to meet new people when you have the power of Trust.- Managers and Employees -If you have the confidence of the people you work with, you will earn more and get ahead faster.OXYTOCIN TRUST SPRAYThe Oxytocin spray has already been featured in Scientific American, National Geographic, and on NBC, ABC, BBC News and many more.Try it now with a $10 discount (enter promotional code 'tellycritic106')and a 100% Money-Back Guarantee!PagesLiquid Trust***SPECIAL OFFER***Get $10 off any purchase of Liquid Trust, only with this web page! Click any of these banners, and enter the promotional code 'tellycritic106' on the order page to receive your $10 discount!
Hormone Spray Is Found To Increase Trust in Others
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/01/AR2005060101072.html
washingtonpost.com
Hormone Spray Is Found To Bolster Trust in OthersPotential to Ease Relationship Disorders
By Shankar VedantamWashington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Scientists have found the chemical equivalent of the perfect sales pitch: a hormone that makes us more trusting than we normally are.Volunteers in a study were told they were participating in a decision-making experiment. Those who inhaled the hormone, which occurs naturally in the brain, were more likely to entrust others with large sums of money than were volunteers who inhaled no hormone.The experiment has profound implications about the nature of human trust. Researchers said their finding might lead to cures for people with disorders that prompt them to hold others at arm's length, but they acknowledged that the chemical, which is widely used in medicine, could be misused.The experiment, involving 128 participants, was conducted by scientists at the University of Zurich and other academic centers. Researchers had some volunteers inhale oxytocin and then examined how they and those who inhaled a placebo invested money in a mock transaction.The transaction involved taking a risk: handing over money to a "banker" who had the option of returning the investment with a profit or withholding principal and profit, leaving the investor with nothing. The experiment was a measure of the trust that the investors had in the bankers.Volunteers who inhaled oxytocin were more likely to trust the banker with money and risk larger sums, the researchers said in an article published yesterday in the journal Nature.The scientists said they made sure the chemical was not merely enhancing risk-taking behavior by substituting bankers with computers. Without the interaction with a human, the hormone had no effect.Oxytocin did not alter the behavior of the bankers, which strengthened the researchers' belief that the hormone was influencing trust. Bankers did not need to trust investors, because they were taking no risk. A banker's decision to return money was more a question of fairness, which oxytocin did not affect.Trust is central to virtually every positive social relationship, from intimate love and friendships to financial transactions and politics, but little had been learned about its biological correlates in the brain, researchers said. Oxytocin is known to be activated in a range of social relationships in many animals, but this is the first time scientists have shown that it can serve as a switch to enhance trust in human relationships.Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich and one of the scientists who conducted the experiment, said the peak effect of oxytocin was seen after about 50 minutes and it wore off after two hours."Some may worry about the prospect that political operators will generously spray the crowd with oxytocin at rallies of their candidates," said neurologist Antonio R. Damasio of the University of Iowa, who has long studied the neurobiology of human emotions and who wrote a commentary accompanying the study.At the same time, he added in an interview, politicians and marketers were probably already triggering the natural release of oxytocin in the brains of audiences through their campaigns. "I am more alarmed about the manipulations of marketing than the possibility of oxytocin sprays," he said.Ethicists and theologians said manipulating the brain at a neurochemical level was different from ordinary kinds of persuasion. David A. Hogue, a theologian and pastoral psychologist at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, said that "anytime we are working directly on the central nervous system, it feels much more intrusive."Brent Waters, an associate professor of Christian social ethics at the seminary, which is affiliated with Northwestern University, questioned whether trust could be so easily reduced to chemical constructs. "The experiment presupposes a highly diminished and reductionistic understanding of what trust means," he said.Damasio, the neurologist, said it was inevitable that science was going to learn more about the biological correlates of trust and other human emotions. He said he saw no reason such knowledge should affect notions of human dignity and agency."The question is do you want to preclude yourself from understanding, do you want to deny yourself the entire compass of knowledge that can come from science?" he asked.Fehr and the study's other authors acknowledged the potential for misuse of oxytocin, but he argued that it was no different than any other prescription product. Regulation, he said, could limit abuse.Hogue, the theologian and pastoral psychologist, said the research held out the possibility of reconciliation between individuals and the potential of healing rifts between political groups, even nations: "While spraying oxytocin on one's political or religious adversaries may be strategically difficult, comprehending the biological correlates of trust could conceivably offer promising avenues for reassessing and reconciling conflict."
washingtonpost.com
Hormone Spray Is Found To Bolster Trust in OthersPotential to Ease Relationship Disorders
By Shankar VedantamWashington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Scientists have found the chemical equivalent of the perfect sales pitch: a hormone that makes us more trusting than we normally are.Volunteers in a study were told they were participating in a decision-making experiment. Those who inhaled the hormone, which occurs naturally in the brain, were more likely to entrust others with large sums of money than were volunteers who inhaled no hormone.The experiment has profound implications about the nature of human trust. Researchers said their finding might lead to cures for people with disorders that prompt them to hold others at arm's length, but they acknowledged that the chemical, which is widely used in medicine, could be misused.The experiment, involving 128 participants, was conducted by scientists at the University of Zurich and other academic centers. Researchers had some volunteers inhale oxytocin and then examined how they and those who inhaled a placebo invested money in a mock transaction.The transaction involved taking a risk: handing over money to a "banker" who had the option of returning the investment with a profit or withholding principal and profit, leaving the investor with nothing. The experiment was a measure of the trust that the investors had in the bankers.Volunteers who inhaled oxytocin were more likely to trust the banker with money and risk larger sums, the researchers said in an article published yesterday in the journal Nature.The scientists said they made sure the chemical was not merely enhancing risk-taking behavior by substituting bankers with computers. Without the interaction with a human, the hormone had no effect.Oxytocin did not alter the behavior of the bankers, which strengthened the researchers' belief that the hormone was influencing trust. Bankers did not need to trust investors, because they were taking no risk. A banker's decision to return money was more a question of fairness, which oxytocin did not affect.Trust is central to virtually every positive social relationship, from intimate love and friendships to financial transactions and politics, but little had been learned about its biological correlates in the brain, researchers said. Oxytocin is known to be activated in a range of social relationships in many animals, but this is the first time scientists have shown that it can serve as a switch to enhance trust in human relationships.Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich and one of the scientists who conducted the experiment, said the peak effect of oxytocin was seen after about 50 minutes and it wore off after two hours."Some may worry about the prospect that political operators will generously spray the crowd with oxytocin at rallies of their candidates," said neurologist Antonio R. Damasio of the University of Iowa, who has long studied the neurobiology of human emotions and who wrote a commentary accompanying the study.At the same time, he added in an interview, politicians and marketers were probably already triggering the natural release of oxytocin in the brains of audiences through their campaigns. "I am more alarmed about the manipulations of marketing than the possibility of oxytocin sprays," he said.Ethicists and theologians said manipulating the brain at a neurochemical level was different from ordinary kinds of persuasion. David A. Hogue, a theologian and pastoral psychologist at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago, said that "anytime we are working directly on the central nervous system, it feels much more intrusive."Brent Waters, an associate professor of Christian social ethics at the seminary, which is affiliated with Northwestern University, questioned whether trust could be so easily reduced to chemical constructs. "The experiment presupposes a highly diminished and reductionistic understanding of what trust means," he said.Damasio, the neurologist, said it was inevitable that science was going to learn more about the biological correlates of trust and other human emotions. He said he saw no reason such knowledge should affect notions of human dignity and agency."The question is do you want to preclude yourself from understanding, do you want to deny yourself the entire compass of knowledge that can come from science?" he asked.Fehr and the study's other authors acknowledged the potential for misuse of oxytocin, but he argued that it was no different than any other prescription product. Regulation, he said, could limit abuse.Hogue, the theologian and pastoral psychologist, said the research held out the possibility of reconciliation between individuals and the potential of healing rifts between political groups, even nations: "While spraying oxytocin on one's political or religious adversaries may be strategically difficult, comprehending the biological correlates of trust could conceivably offer promising avenues for reassessing and reconciling conflict."
The UN admits population is actually DECLINING not increasing
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration.htm
Replacement Migration:Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?
United Nations projections indicate that over the next 50 years, the populations of virtually all countries of Europe as well as Japan will face population decline and population ageing. The new challenges of declining and ageing populations will require comprehensive reassessments of many established policies and programmes, including those relating to international migration.Focusing on these two striking and critical population trends, the report considers replacement migration for eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States) and two regions (Europe and the European Union). Replacement migration refers to the international migration that a country would need to offset population decline and population ageing resulting from low fertility and mortality rates.The following documents are in PDF format. To be able to view and print pages from these files you will need the Acrobat Reader software. If you do not already have this plug-in installed on your computer, click here to download it free of charge.
Replacement Migration:Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?
United Nations projections indicate that over the next 50 years, the populations of virtually all countries of Europe as well as Japan will face population decline and population ageing. The new challenges of declining and ageing populations will require comprehensive reassessments of many established policies and programmes, including those relating to international migration.Focusing on these two striking and critical population trends, the report considers replacement migration for eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States) and two regions (Europe and the European Union). Replacement migration refers to the international migration that a country would need to offset population decline and population ageing resulting from low fertility and mortality rates.The following documents are in PDF format. To be able to view and print pages from these files you will need the Acrobat Reader software. If you do not already have this plug-in installed on your computer, click here to download it free of charge.
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