Why it's a crime to take a phone call in the Quiet Coach on a train

I've noticed a few times now. I often travel on the quiet carriage on the trains I use regularly. I think it tends to mean I have a better place to get on with work or reading. I don't mind people having quiet conversations. I do find the leakage of tinny music from people who are likely to end up deaf by their mid-forties irritating, but I can often tune it out. However, I have been surprised at how difficult it is to tune out the person who forgets that it's the quiet coach and goes on to have a moby conversation. Now this article actually gives evidence that it really is harder not to listen to a one-sided conversation than to tune out a real two-hander. Overheard cell-phone conversations are not only annoying but reduce our attention: The researcher says: "'It's definitely changed my own etiquette,' says Emberson. 'I'm a lot more sensitive about talking on the phone in public. It has a really profound effect on the cognition of the people around you, and it's not because they're eavesdropping or they're bad people. Their cognitive mechanism basically means that they're forced to listen.'"
So I feel that I might be a bit more emboldened to ask people to do what the signs ask: take that phone call in the vestibule.

So long Bloglines, and thank for all the RSS

It is with sadness I pass onto you the news that Bloglines is ceasing to be:

As you may have heard, we are sorry to share that Bloglines will officially shut down on October 1, 2010.
More detail can be found on the Ask.com blog - http://blog.ask.com.
We want to make it as easy as possible to transport your feeds to another RSS aggregator,

I'm sad because it is/was a really helpful RSS feed aggregator. Over the last half-dozen years or so I have used Bloglines to track websites, news, breaking developments which show up in search-terms. It has enabled me to hear about certain ideas or developments that I had not come across otherwise and to come across interesting ideasfrom emerging church and theologians. So useful in fact that I have felt the need to find a replacement. Google have an aggregator, I tried it about a year back. BUT it's not as good; it doesn't organise the info and the possibilities in a way that I fund helpful. So Idid a bit of seartching around and found a couple of possibilities and looked them over and tried them out for a bit. And now I'm pleased to announce that I think that I have found my replacement.

Drum roll ... ta da ....
Netvibes, using the 'reader view'. It also has possibilities that I will be exploring in odd moments in the next few months and does a very passable rough equivalent to the service I got from Bloglines.
Bloglines | My Feeds (289) (3)

Brazil's huge new port highlights China's drive into South America

Not this about the way that China is pressing an agenda to fashion a multi-polar geopolitics (read: counterweighting the USA).

They seek to fashion a multipolar world in which no single power – read the United States – plays an overwhelmingly dominant role. To this end, they seek to bolster ties with rising regional powers like Brazil and South Africa.

Of course, the USA signs up in theory to human rights (and appears to be selective in applying or promoting them). China, on the other hand, doesn't really sign up to them ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/15/brazil-port-china-drive

A licence for chauvinism

 This sounds, oh so plausible:

testosterone has been shown to be most effective as an excuse for social aggression rather than a cause of it. In another recent study participants performed more aggressively in a financial simulation game if they believed they had been given a shot of testosterone – even when they had been given a placebo – whereas those who had received testosterone unwittingly were in fact more likely to "play fair". "It's possible that people who are inclined towards selfish, aggressive or dominant behaviour would find it easier to rationalise their actions if they felt that they were under the spell of testosterone," says science writer Ed Yong, noting that the study suggests that "testosterone's negative stereotype" can give people a "licence to misbehave".

 Just as the myths about alcohol use legitimise all sorts of 'abandoned' behaviour which really have practically nothing to do with alcohol's effects (remember those studies with 'placebo' alcohol) and nearly everything to do with the desires and inhibitions of the drinker. In both of these cases we need to do an exposure job and not let people get away with it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/17/goldman-sachs-sexism-case

Oxford scientist calls for research on brain change

This seems to be a further chapter opening in the debate about what the internet etc might be doing to our minds, brains and culture. I have blogged about this before (and here) and my big concern continues to be that much of what is reported is of the alarmist, moral panic sort of thing which assumes that any change in this respect is by definition a bad thing. Missing, of course, that all technology changes us in various ways. The thing to recall is that the changes are normally for good and ill, and what is good and ill may vary and the issue is not to stop the change but to understand the effects and work to optimise the effects for human welfare (yes we need to question that 'meme' that demonises technological change and places it in the Frankenstein mold). Examples of tech changing us? Fire enabling cooking of food which was probably responsible at least in part for freeing up metabolic resources to enable social and brain development and my perennial favourite: moveable type and rag-paper enabling cheap books and which Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents)) would argue has a profound effect on the way we think (and a bit later in the article we read this: "Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of Proust and the Squid, said that brain circuits honed by reading books and thinking about their content could be lost as people spend more time on computers.")...
So ...

Lady Greenfield has coined the term "mind change" to describe differences that arise in the brain as a result of spending long periods of time on a computer.

And as we think about this, of course, I agree that research on what the changes might be is therefore a good idea so that we can debate what would be the best way to respond and optimise things. However, I think that it would be really unhelpful just to go into 'woe to us' hand-wringing. So I started to get concerned when I read that Ms Greenfield (incidently, as a republican, I mislike those aristocratic titles) said the following I started to smell the odour of the sweaty fear of a moral panic.

For me, this is almost as important as climate change. Whilst of course it doesn't threaten the existence of the planet like climate change, I think the quality of our existence is threatened and the kind of people we might be in the future

You see, it's that default to seeing it as threat rather than 'threat' and 'opportunity'. Of course some may argue that this is a function of the fact that it was delivered at a Tory party conference, you might say that, I couldn't possibly comment. :p And to be fair she does appear to have mentioned some potential advantages:

She said possible benefits of modern technology included higher IQ and faster processing of information, but using internet search engines to find facts may affect people's ability to learn. Computer games in which characters get multiple lives might even foster recklessness

And so we should support research to find out just what effects are playing out. But we should recall that there are likely to be upsides and downsides and that we may be able to mitigate the latter. Let's recall too that, arguably, the cultural support and background abilities we routinely rely on for scientific advance are the products of the way that reading books has taught and formed us to think. But as Einstein is supposed to have said, solution are rarely produced by the same mentality as created the problem ... it may be no bad thing at that level if we find that our mentalities are being changed; let's face it, there are huge problems facing us and it may be that what happens to our thinking in synergy and symbiosis with the internet and it's postgenitors turns out to offer possibilities for solutions.
So let's be a little cautious of the rhetorical game being played when Greenfield says

Every single parent I have spoken to so far is concerned. I have yet to find a parent who says 'I am really pleased that my kid is spending so much time in front of the computer'

That may be true, but what does it really tell us apart from that a lot of parents have concerns. Does it tell us that they are well founded? No. Remember the scare about MRSA vaccine? Many parents can be mistaken and led into a mistaken alarmist concern. In addition, does it tell us that their concern is the same as Greenfield's? No, again, their concern (as mine would be) is more likely to be that kids spending a lot of time in front of a screen may be storing up physical problems such as ill-health, overweight or eye-strain.

About the only thing I would say may have some initial plausibly validity would be the concern about fostering recklessness, though to be honest, I'm not sure that would pass muster either.

A bit further on in the article comes the sense, in line with what I've been trying to say. Step back from the alarmist hype and do some good research.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London ... agreed that more research was needed ... "We know nothing at all about how the developing brain is being influenced by video games or social networking and so on. We can only really know how seriously to take this issue once the research starts to produce data. So far, most of the research on how video games affect the brain has been done with adult participants and, perhaps surprisingly, has mostly shown positive effects of gaming on many cognitive abilities,"

So, in fact, what evidence we do have would rather indicate potential benefits rather than harms. Funny that.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/14/oxford-scientist-brain-change

The price of happiness? £50,000pa

I've blogged on this topic before (here, here and here, then here, and some other research which gives a much lower figure to the plateau here.)

Happiness rose with income too, but plateaued when people reached an annual salary of $75,000. For those on more, happiness appeared to depend on other factors... the emotional strain of negative experiences, such as getting divorced or being ill, appear to be exacerbated by being poor. "More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain,"

As I mention above there is some evidence to put the figure lower. The other things I blogged about suggest there are nuances, as does the second part of the quote above. Some of that is to do with the wealth that society holds in common: infrastructure, health care, parks, working week, stress and so forth. Some of that has to do with issues of goals and fulfilment. I wonder about the methodologies. The older study was a correlation of a number of studies, and so I'd tend to trust it. I wonder whether the newer study used a different sort of definition. In the older studies a lot seems to depend on things like equality and participation, so maybe the newer study is showing the effects of studying people whol are aware of differentials and feeling disempowered ...? I think that the issues in the Spirit Level are relevant here.
The price of happiness? �50,000pa | Science | guardian.co.uk:

Qur’an burning: “an unnecessary, offensive and dangerous gesture”

On this I definitely agree with Patrick Sookhdeo:
"...the biblical and Christ-like way to [protest Muslim injustices] is by speaking the truth in the power of God’s love, and by extending that love to Muslim people even when they are hostile to us. In that context it can never be justified to destroy a book that Muslims regard as sacred, however firmly and profoundly we may disagree with its contents. The effect of the proposed action on Christians in Muslim-majority contexts is likely to be extremely serious. Already Muslim militants in Indonesia have promised to kill Indonesian Christians if Qur’ans are burned in Florida, and the history of anti-Christian violence in the country suggests that this is not an idle threat. Barnabas partners in Iraq have expressed concern at the probable Muslim backlash against an already beleaguered Iraqi Church. And Christians in numerous other places who live in daily fear of potentially deadly attacks will at once be placed in much greater danger. It cannot be right to exercise our freedom to protest in a way that puts at risk the lives of our brothers and sisters, for whom Christ died."
See here for the whole open letter to Dove World Outreach Centre and its supporters. Hope and aid for the Persecuted Church | Persecuted Christians : Qur’an burning: “an unnecessary, offensive and dangerous gesture”: