BOARD MEETING Yvon Chouinard (seated), Patagonia’s founder, at his home in Ventura, California. When the waves are rolling, his staff goes surfing, thanks to the company’s flex-time policy.
A couple of years ago, Yvon Chouinard—founder of the outdoor-clothing brand Patagonia—gave a talk at a sustainable-fisheries conference in Vancouver. He’d been invited to speak in recognition of Patagonia’s longtime commitment to environmental issues and its reputation as a company that manages to churn out profit while minimizing ecological impact. Chouinard delivered his spiel, but he came away frustrated by the surprising ignorance of his audience. “They didn’t know what they were doing,” he says of the seafood merchants. “They had no idea about toxins, about incidental catch. Their customers are all going to want to know this stuff soon. Restaurants will want to know.”
So, despite having zero background in the food business, Chouinard decided to launch his own salmon fishery. Patagonia Provisions, which debuted at the beginning of April, sells packets of salmon jerky ($12.50 for two ounces) next to rain jackets, hiking pants and organic cotton shirts. The salmon is caught in British Columbia’s Skeena River, using traditional equipment that the company describes as “First Nations fish wheels and dip nets.” Chouinard has so far poured $1.3 million into this curious experiment. He isn’t sure when he’ll make it back. “I can’t help myself,” he says. “I just want to show the fishing industry how it can be done.”
The idealism, ambition, self-assurance and total hubris at the heart of this salmon escapade are all hallmarks of the Chouinard executive style. His approach to leading a company is perhaps best understood as a sort of performance art—less about the bottom line than about providing a road map for future entrepreneurs. “I never even wanted to be in business,” he says. “But I hang onto Patagonia because it’s my resource to do something good. It’s a way to demonstrate that corporations can lead examined lives.”
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GasBuddy: National Gas Price Map “GasBuddy lets you search for Gas Prices by city, state, zip code, with listings for all cities in the USA and Canada. Updated in real-time, with national average price for gasoline, current trends, and mapping tools.”
The greatest verified age for any living organism is from a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine tree in Nevada called Prometheus that was measured by a ring count to be about 4,900 years old when it was cut down in 1964. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Coffee Lovers Could Live Longer
Drinking coffee may help you live longer. Adults between the ages of 50 and 71 who reported having a few cups of coffee a day were less likely to die over the next 14 years than people who said they rarely drink it. Women appeared to derive the most benefit, having a 16 percent reduced risk of death, compared to 10 percent in men. However, the study also found that coffee drinkers were more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors like smoking, abusing alcohol, and eating large quantities of red meat, and those who did had a higher risk of death.
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Researchers Crack Codes for Lithium, Electroshock
How two long-time therapies for brain disorders work are finally being understood by the medical community, creating a path to safer alternatives.
While they have been widely used for decades, no one knew exactly why two mainstays of psychiatric treatment–lithium chloride for bipolar disorder and electroconvulsive (or electroshock) therapy for major depression–worked.
But new discoveries are illuminating how these treatments affect brain function, answering old questions and opening the door to new, more effective therapies that may have fewer side effects.
Research fellow Qing-Jun Meng and a team at the University of Manchester found that lithium blocks the activity of an enzyme that affects the brain’s master clock—the part in charge of our circadian rhythms. They reported their results in the journal PLoS One.
Scientists already knew that people with bipolar disorder suffer disruptions of circadian rhythms. “The most obvious [effects] are the sleep disorders, because that’s controlled by our body clock,” Meng says. “During a depressive episode they will experience insomnia, and during the very high moods they will feel a lot of energy, and they don’t feel a need to sleep.”
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Barbara McClintock
McClintock was an American geneticist. In the 1940s and 50s, her experiments with variations in the coloration of kernels of maize revealed that genes are not stationary, but can “jump” on the chromosome. She isolated two control elements in genetic material and found not only that they moved, but also that their transposition affected the behavior of neighboring genes. In 1983, she was belatedly awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology. Why did she stop publishing her findings in the 50s?
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Chinese man crushed to death by truck for protesting
Questions now surround a village chief’s death in China as netizens allege that he was held down by five men while a truck drove over his neck. Qian Yunhui, head of Zhaiqiao Village in Yueqing City, was crushed to death by a construction truck that delivered materials for a nearby industrial zone reclamation project. Netizens say that this was no mere accident as he had been seeking redress for his village’s pilfered land. Chinese website ChinaSmack reported that government officials had misappropriated 146 hectares of land from his village.>Others questioned the manner of his death, claiming that Qian was pressed down to the ground by five people along the public road. Coincidentally, surveillance cameras along the entire stretch of road were dismantled. When the Yueqing City party office was contacted, a spokesperson said that it was merely an accident and that people with ulterior motives were trying to link it to Qian’s petitioning.Forum comments posted by netizens noted that the accident seemed odd and that the position of the body did not fit the pattern of someone who was hit by a truck.
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The historian prescribes reading on medical practices of the past, from treatments of madness and non-existent disease, to drug use and the origins of hypochondria
How far back does the history of medicine go?
You need to go right back into antiquity. I begin with the Greeks and Romans, because Greek and Roman medicine – the work of [the Greek physicians] Hippocrates and Galen in the main – is the foundation of our western medicine. Those ideas were still current up until the 18th century and what we call the “rise of science”.
What kind of practices did they follow in Greek and Roman times?
It was basically how to live well – not just as an individual but in society. There were various different theories, but it was largely that what you eat is what you are. They would treat illnesses first by diet and as a very last resort by the knife. They also had theories about how you use your body, and the importance of exercise and sleep. So it was all about sensible, moderate living.
Things haven’t changed that much in modern times.
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The Ghost
by Elizabeth Gilbert
I say, “Just speak your mind, Hank-3. Don’t let me stop you.”
Me and the grandson of Hank Williams are sitting in some honky-tonk dive in downtown Nashville, listening to some mediocre band churn through some weepy old set of country-music standards. The grandson of Hank Williams bears the Christian name Shelton Hank Williams, but he is better known around these parts as Hank-3, so that’s why I call him that. Me and everyone else in this bar. Who have all recognized him on sight. Hank-3 is a little hard to miss, mind you. He’s the only six-foot-two-inch, 144-pound, twangy-voiced, heavily tattooed, longhaired skeleton walking around Nashville these days who looks exactly like Hank Williams. And you cannot hide the face of Hank Williams in this town. It would be like if Elvis Presley had a dead-ringer grandson who someday tried to walk around Memphis without getting any attention. Not a chance. Heads would turn, jaws drop.
Tonight the grandson of Hank Williams is perched on barstool, balancing on his bony ass, smoking cigarettes as if there were some kind of contest for it and drinking whiskey just as competitively. And he’s bitching about his recording label, Curb Records.
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Earth’s water cycle intensifying with atmospheric warming
In a paper published in the journal Science, Australian scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, reported changing patterns of salinity in the global ocean during the past 50 years, marking a clear fingerprint of climate change.
Lead author, Dr Paul Durack, said that by looking at observed ocean salinity changes and the relationship between salinity, rainfall and evaporation in climate models, they determined the water cycle has strengthened by four per cent from 1950-2000. This is twice the response projected by current generation global climate models.
“Salinity shifts in the ocean confirm climate and the global water cycle have changed.
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Before the doomsayers hijacked “Planet X” and used it as a phantom (a.k.a. “Nibiru”) to scare people into believing the 2012 doomsday hype, the hunt for Planet X was an exciting astronomical quest to find a hypothetical world in the outermost reaches of the solar system in the early 20th century.
Although dwarf planet Pluto was discovered during the search for Planet X in 1930, apparently ending the quest, there is enduring evidence for the existence of a substantial planet gravitationally shaping the population of minor bodies in the Kuiper belt and beyond. The only problem is, we can’t see it.
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I decided to go back to school because I was underemployed and mind-achingly bored. I decided to study computer science because I was tired of not knowing how the Internet worked. And I decided to go to Udacity because I was broke.
Udacity is a free university (of sorts) that offers “massive open online courses”—or, MOOCs—to anyone with a decent Internet connection and a little self-discipline. Founded by Stanford roboticist Sebastian Thrun—of the self-driving car fame—Udacity’s first class offerings appeared this February. The way Thrun tells it, he resigned his tenure at Stanford and lit out for the MOOC territory after realizing that his same artificial intelligence course could reach 200 students in an ivied lecture hall, or 160,000 online. The technology that makes this possible—like quizzes that can be graded by robots rather than TAs—is fairly rudimentary and has existed for some time. Missing, until now, were MOOC evangelists: professors who were willing to adapt their material for the masses.
In January, Thrun told a crowd at Digital Life Design, in Munich, “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again. It’s impossible. I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to the classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill. And I’ve seen wonderland.”
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Naked Therapy | Sarah White Therapy
Need therapy? Freud too tedious? CBT not your cup of tea? why not try this?
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‘CONFLICTING CREDOS BUT THE SAME VISION OF THE WORLD’
This is a transcript of the first part of the talk I gave last week as part of the Criticise This! seminar in Ulcinj, Montenegro on ‘Rethinking the Question of Difference’. The second part of the talk overlaps with the Milton K Wong lecture that I am giving in Vancouver next week; I will publish that in full. The audience comprised mainly of artists, writers and critics, and the aim was to explore more deeply the philosophical and political underpinnings and consequences of contemporary ideas of social difference.
There is a certain irony in being invited to Montenegro to give a lecture on questions of identity, difference and multiculturalism. Not only has the English language appropriated the NAME of this region of Europe for its description of an intractably fragmented society – ‘balkanized’ – but few events have more shaped our perception of these issues than the conflict that led to the break up of Yugoslavia two decades ago. The messy, bloody, monstrous events that marked that break-up have helped entrench the sense of the contrast between racism and ethnic chauvinism, on the one side, and cultural diversity and multiculturalism, on the other. They have helped entrench the idea that the best, indeed only, antidote to the evils of ethnic nationalism is the embrace of diversity, of multiculturalism. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies. We’re All Multiculturalists Now as the American sociologist Nathan Glazer, and former critic of pluralism, observed, almost wearily, in the title of a book published in 1998. What I want to do is challenge this received wisdom about difference, diversity and multiculturalism. I want to question what we mean by diversity, why we should value it, and how should we value it. I want to dispute what I regard as the lazy conflation of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ and to suggest that to defend diversity is not the same as promoting multiculturalism. Most of all, I want to contest the claim that racism and multiculturalism are concepts at opposite ends of a pole, and show, rather, that they are two sides of the same coin.
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Beautiful girls walk runway for “CEO high-end jobs”
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Two Thousand False Convictions Documented Since 1989
This week has been full of illuminating disclosures concerning the American criminal-justice system. Last Monday, a Columbia Law School project showed convincingly that Carlos DeLuna, executed for homicide by the state of Texas in 1989, was innocent of the crime; the project also showed who actually committed the crime. The revelation was shocking in part because DeLuna’s name had never figured among the dozen or more prisoners executed by Texas whose guilt has been vigorously and publicly contested; even his own lawyers seemed to have assumed his guilt.
Four days later, news broke in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham—executed by Texas in 2004 for murders, dubbed the “Texas witch trials,” that involved bizarre allegations of occultism related to the defendant’s love of heavy-metal music—when a state district-court judge reviewing the case concluded that Texas had wrongfully convicted and executed Willingham. The judge, who cited “overwhelming, credible and reliable evidence” presented at a hearing in October 2010, prepared an order of posthumous exoneration, but its issuance was effectively blocked by a state appellate court, which criticized the continued exploration of the Willingham case.
Now, a joint project by students and faculty at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University law schools has assembled the details (.pdf) of more than 2,000 exonerations since 1989. The ABA Journal article on the report notes:
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Review: ‘Hysteria’ makes the unmentionable approachable (Includes first-hand account)
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Suicide Girls (awesome gallery)
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When the economy tanked last year, China seemed to be weathering the storm better than most industrialized countries. But a look at China’s migrant population tells a different story.
An estimated 23 million Chinese migrant workers—coming from the countryside to the city—were laid off as a result of the drop in exports, representing one of the largest casualties of the crisis globally. Migrants have been particularly vulnerable, says Kam Wing Chan, professor of geography, because of a Maoist-era institution known as hukou that continues to function in China today.
photo of a migrant pedaling a pedicab in south China
A migrant in south China, where Kam Wing Chan lived as a child, looks for a job. Photo by Kam Wing Chan.
Hukou, a system of residency permits, was used by the Communist Party beginning in 1958 to minimize the movement of people between rural and urban areas. Chinese citizens were classified as urban and rural based on their hukou; urban residents received state-allocated jobs and access to an array of social services while rural residents were expected to be more self-reliant.
Not surprisingly, the disparity led many rural Chinese to migrate to cities, which in turn led the government to create more barriers to migration. “By law, anyone seeking to move to a place different from where their household was originally registered had to get approval from the hukou authorities,” says Chan, “but approval was rarely granted. In essence, the hukou system functioned as an internal passport system. While old city walls in China had largely been demolished by the late 1950s, the power of the newly created migration barrier is likened to ‘invisible’ city walls.”
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Wonder how much of this goes on in our libraries?
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