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Katie Holmes has filed for divorce from Tom Cruise after five years of marriage. Hollywood A-lister Tom Cruise will soon be a single man according to People.com who broke the story that Katie Holmes is divorcing the actor. I would like to say that I am shocked by this but I am not really. According to the magazine Katie is the one who initiated the divorce proceedings and Tom is very sad. A rep for the Rock of Ages star released this statement. “Kate has filed for divorce and Tom is deeply saddened and is concentrating on his three children. Please allow them their privacy.” The former Dawson?s Creek actress has already hired a lawyer who had this to say on his clients behalf. “This is a personal and private matter for Katie and her family. Katie’s primary concern remains, as it always has been, her daughter’s best interest.” Speaking of 6-year old Suri Cruise, will she be living with her mom or dad? That remains to be seen but considering what an interesting arrangement Tom has with Nicole Kidman regarding their two children I am going to say Katie is probably in for one heck of a fight.?I of [...]
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Nancy Todd alerted me that the group pushing a casino amendment initiative had filed a batch of papers with the state Ethics Commission today. I've been writing about the absence of reports on her group's effort to gather signatures for an amendment to permit four unregulated casinos operated under her name.
The filings included organizational papers for two new ballot question organizations and they report the money supporting the campaign flows primarily from two investment companies in Missouri ($195,000):
* The Nancy Todd Poker Palace and Entertainment Venues LLC. It shows three people with Little Rock office addresses as leaders ? Bob Womack, director; Larry Weis, officer, and Dianne Dalton as treasurer. Todd and Jim Thompson are also members of the committee, whose mission is to qualify and pass the amendment.
The commitee reported raising $27,600 ? $20,000 from SKAP Investments of Branson, Mo., and $7,500 from Arkansas Development I LLC ? in May. It spent about $3,700 on advertising and signature gathering.
* Also filed was paperwork for Arkansas Development I LLC. It has the same officers and purpose as the Nancy Todd Poker Palace filing.
This group reported (in a belated report on activities in March) raising $175,000 and spending about $45,000. All the money came from Evergreen Investments of Lebanon, Mo. In March, it spent more than $23,000 with the Williams and Anderson law firm in Little Rock and more than $21,000 paying Todd for consulting and expenses.
For April, the group reported spending another $58,753 ? primarily for more Williams and Anderson fees and more payments to Todd.
In May, the group spent another $49,130, leaving about $29,000 of the original money on hand. More than $40,000 went to Todd.
The filings don't show recent expenditures for canvassers, except those on the Poker Palace May report, though the canvassers continue to work, according to multiple reports. I've also heard reports of robocalls and and radio advertising. The batch of late filings would seem tacitly to concede the obvious, that reports didn't begin as law requires with spending of $500.
Registered agent for SKAP Investments is Marc Williams of Branson. He, Todd confirms, is also CFO of HCW LLC, a development firm whose projects have included Branson Landing and hotels in that area. He was out of the office this afternoon. Evergreen Investments is headed by Stephen Plaster, and the firm is also an investor in Branson Landing. Todd said they are partners in the casino effort. Evergreen's holdings were amassed by Plaster's father, the late Robert Plaster, a former utility company chief (Empire Gas) who became well-known for philanthropy in the region, including, perhaps ironically in this context, in support of a Baptist college. I've left a message for him.
Todd also filed a report showing no activity in either fund-raising or expenditures by the organization for which she'd originally filed papers, Arkansas Counts.
The casino amendment would allow casinos in Pulaski, Miller, Crittenden and Franklin counties and prohibit legislative oversight. Amendments require more signatures than initiated act. The group must obtain 78,133 signatures of registered voters by July 6. Initiated acts need 62,507.
UPDATE FOLLOWS AFTER A LATE-AFTERNOON PHONE INTERVIEW WITH TODD:
Todd confirms that the Branson investors are the major backers and have hired her to run the campaign. She said she's been involved in dozens of political and casino campaigns over the years, including successful casino developments from Mississippi to Pennsylvania.
The Branson investors are willing to make a "high-risk" investment on winning approval of a casino amendment in hopes of having a part of the development of the properties with not just casinos, but hotels, other entertainment venues, parking decks and the like. She said the group has had no contact, much less deals, with major casino operators and would not until the amendment passes. But she concedes readily the idea for the group to win licenses that would then become very valuable to someone with expertise in the business. Her only equity interest is to retain the naming rights to a poker room in the Pulaski County casino, which presumably would operate under the name of a major casino operator. She is a professional poker player herself.
Todd takes exception strenuously to my characterization that the amendment would produce an unregulated group of casinos. She contends that case law gives the legislature the power to enact anything not strictly prohibited by the amendment. She said that means it could set up a regulatory commission for casino licensing. She has some high-priced legal talent as advisers, so we'll just have to see. The amendment ballot title says, however: "PROHIBITING THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY AND ANY POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THE STATE FROM ENACTING ANY LEGISLATION, RULES OR REGULATIONS REGARDING CASINO GAMING." That's a fairly broad prohibition.
In her view, this pertains only to the games offered at casinos. The amendment also sets the tax rate and prohibits the legislature from appropriating the money, instead designating percentage allotments to a variety of education, health and other programs.
Todd said future reports were to be consolidated under the Arkansas Counts organization. She said she'd had a misunderstanding about required filing and said she now understood that reports should have been filed earlier. She blamed this on miscommunication among various parties. She said she expected to be called down by the Ethics Commission on the late filings and said she was prepared to pay any fine that might be assessed.
"I'm not big on the blame game," she said. "It bears my name and I take responsibility."
She said she'd known her Branson partners since the late 1990s, but hadn't thought the time was right to try a campaign in Arkansas until this year. She said she understood she faced tough opposition from Oaklawn Park and Southland Park, both of which operate casinos. "That's politics," she said. She said even if she's successful another petitioner could come in two years with new competition or even a proposal to overturn the whole thing.
She said she doesn't believe the theory of an aversion to casino gambling among Arkansas voters. She said difficulties here are more about the "arduous" petition process, "designed for failure."
She said she's confident she'll get the needed signatures, with more than 13,000 gathered in Pulaski County.
By the way: Jim Thompson is a Branson service station owner, not the Jim Thompson who was once a political consultant here. Dianne Dalton is a former phone company executive, not Diane Bray, the former beer wholesale who joined a casino push some years ago and married former City Manager Tom Dalton.
"We are, effectively, looking back 2 million years and watching our ancestors chew their food," says Lee Berger.
A palaeontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, he shot to scientific stardom in 2010 when he discovered Australopithecus sediba, one of the most remarkable fossils of the hominin lineage known to date.
Now he, Amanda Henry of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a team of collaborators have discovered what A. sediba ate. On the menu: bark.
A. sediba is known from two skeletons uncovered in South Africa. The species shares a mix of features seen in earlier australopithecines, modern humans and chimpanzees. It turns out that they had poor dental hygiene. From plaque on the fossils' teeth, the team extracted "phytoliths" ? mineral traces of A. sediba's food. They found signs of fruit, bark and woody tissues.
"That blew me away," says Berger. "I had never heard bark associated with what we ate before."
Primatologists were less surprised. "Bark represents a considerable fraction of orang-utan diets," says Madeleine Hardus of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Other primates also chew on the hard stuff ? species from the golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana) to chimpanzees eat bark when times are tough.
"It is really exciting that they were able to extract phytoliths from the dental calculus [plaque]," says Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in New York. "This is important information about detailed plant consumption in the hominins ? something that has been invisible to us."
Hard evidence
Greater dietary surprises were in store for Berger and his colleagues though. The team looked at sediment samples and fossilised animal faeces ? coprolites ? to get an idea of what the environment in which A. sediba lived was like. They found remnants of savannah grasses in the sediment, and pollen and woody fragments in the coprolites suggested that there might have been some woodlands in the vicinity.
The team then looked at the carbon isotopes in A. sediba teeth to see what types of plants they ate. A "C4" signature is typical of savannah plants like grasses and the grains they carry. These plants fix carbon in a four-carbon molecule. "C3" indicates fruits and leaves foraged from a more forested environment.
The team expected a C4 signature ? it's what most hominins have and fits the evidence that A. sediba lived in an open savannah. They found the exact opposite. The results are fascinating, says Aiello. "The most important thing is that the diet of A. sediba was different from the diet of other early hominins."
Why A. sediba had such an unusual diet is still a mystery.
Henry suggests that A. sediba may have lived in small woodlands that lined bodies of water in the savannah. Its lifestyle may have been similar to savannah chimps, which travel long distances to forage the limited woodlands available to them.
"They may have been trying new things. We're getting an idea of what comes later when modern humans became so flexible that they could exploit almost any environment," she says.
To Berger one thing is clear: A. sediba was a picky eater ? and picky eaters are clever. "They had to be smart enough to select specific foods from their environment," he says.
Could there be other explanations for why early humans consumed bark? Was it an early form of tooth-brushing, for instance? Or were they getting some kind of medicinal advantage from the barks they chose? Many animals are known to self-medicate. So we put these questions to the experts.
A. sediba's teeth are covered in plaque, says Berger. If it brushed, it was really bad at it.
"A. sediba would have to play with its toothpick for several hours a day" for the traces of wood found by Berger's colleagues to accumulate, says Hardus. "The same applies to medication, which is supposedly only consumed sporadically ? unless A. sediba chewed on leaves or bark very much like tobacco leaves today."
It looks as if our ancestors were just after a meal then.
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On the day that the company?s board of directors OK?ed the move to divide it into two units, Chairman Rupert Murdoch tells CBNC?s David Faber in an exclusive interview? that he?ll be an active Chairman in the new companies. He also says it remains to be seen if his children will want to fully take the reins of the businesses after he steps down.
'; div.innerHTML = summary; } //]]> Debt Negotiation or Debt Consolidation?Debt Negotiation or Debt Consolidation?
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One appeal of debt negotiation programs is that you'll be able to stop making payments to your creditors. The debt negotiation company will take monthly payments from you and store them in an account.
While you're making monthly payments to the debt negotiation company, they negotiate with the creditors for a lower pay rate of as little as 40% of the total debt. When the settlement is reached with your creditors, the company makes a one-time payment.
The drawback here is that debt negotiation programs will lower your credit score for as long as you're enrolled in the program. Most negotiation companies obligate the creditor to compile a credit report noting that the debt was fully paid so as not to appear as a negative credit mark after the account is settled.
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An obvious attraction of a debt consolidation payment plan is that it'll prevent you from being harassed by creditors as long as you continue to make the new payments on schedule.
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Imagine if doctors could perform surgery without ever having to cut through your skin. Or if they could diagnose cancer by seeing tumors inside the body with a procedure that is as simple as an ultrasound. Thanks to a technique developed by engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), all of that may be possible in the not-so-distant future.
The new method enables researchers to focus light efficiently inside biological tissue. While the previous limit for how deep light could be focused was only about one millimeter, the Caltech team is now able to reach two and a half millimeters. And, in principle, their technique could focus light as much as a few inches into tissue. The technique is used much like a flashlight shining on the body's interior, and may eventually provide researchers and doctors with a host of possible biomedical applications, such as a less invasive way of diagnosing and treating diseases.
If you crank up the power of light, you might even be able to do away with a traditional scalpel. "It enables the possibilities of doing incision-less surgery," says Changhuei Yang, a professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at Caltech and a senior author on the new study. "By generating a tight laser-focus spot deep in tissue, we can potentially use that as a laser scalpel that leaves the skin unharmed."
Ying Min Wang, a graduate student in electrical engineering, and Benjamin Judkewitz, a postdoctoral scholar, are the lead authors on the paper, which was published in the June 26 issue of the journalNature Communications.
The new work builds on a previous technique that Yang and his colleagues developed to see through a layer of biological tissue, which is opaque because it scatters light. In the previous work, the researchers shined light through the tissue and then recorded the resulting scattered light on a holographic plate. The recording contained all the information about how the light beam scattered, zigzagging through the tissue. By playing the recording in reverse, the researchers were able to essentially send the light back through to the other side of the tissue, retracing its path to the original source. In this way, they could send light through a layer of tissue without the blurring effect of scattering.
But to make images of what is inside tissue?to get a picture of cells or molecules that are embedded inside, say, a muscle?the researchers would have to be able to focus a light beam into the tissue. "For biologists, it's most important to know what's happening inside the tissue," Wang says.
To focus light into tissue, the researchers expanded on the recent work of Lihong Wang's group at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL); they had developed a method to focus light using the high-frequency vibrations of ultrasound. The WUSTL group took advantage of two properties of ultrasound. First, the high-frequency sound waves are not scattered by tissue, which is why it is great for taking images of fetuses in utero. Second, ultrasonic vibrations interact with light in such a way that they shift the light's frequency ever so slightly. As a result of this so-called acousto-optic effect, any light that has interacted with ultrasound changes into a slightly different color.
In both the WUSTL and Caltech experiments, the teams focused ultrasound waves into a small region inside a tissue sample. They then shined light into the sample, which, in turn, scattered the light. Because of the acousto-optic effect, any of the scattered light that passes through the region with the focused ultrasound will change to a slightly different color. The researchers can pick out this color-shifted light and record it. By employing the same playback technique as in the earlier Caltech work, they then send the light back, having only the color-shifted bits retrace their path to the small region where the ultrasound was focused?which means that the light itself is focused on that area, allowing an image to be created. The researchers can control where they want to focus the light simply by moving the ultrasound focus.
The WUSTL experiment was limited, however, because only a very small amount of light could be focused. The Caltech engineers' new method, on the other hand, allows them to fire a beam of light with as much power as they want?which is essential for potential applications.
The team demonstrated how the new method could be used with fluorescence imaging?a powerful technique used in a wide range of biological and biomedical research. The researchers embedded a patch of gel with a fluorescent pattern that spelled out "CIT" inside a tissue sample. Then, they scanned the sample with focused light beams. The focused light hit and excited the fluorescent pattern, resulting in the glowing letters "CIT" emanating from inside the tissue. The team also demonstrated their technique by taking images of tumors tagged with fluorescent dyes.
"This demonstration that we can focus significant optical power deep within tissues opens up significant possibilities in optical imaging," Yang says. By tagging cells or molecules that are markers for disease with fluorescent dyes, doctors can use this technique to make diagnoses noninvasively, much as if they were doing an ultrasound procedure.
Doctors might also use this process to treat cancer with photodynamic therapy. In this procedure, a drug that contains light-sensitive, cancer-killing compounds is injected into a patient. Cancer cells absorb those compounds preferentially, so that the compounds kill the cells when light shines on them. Photodynamic therapy is now only used at tissue surfaces, because of the way light is easily scattered. The new technique should allow doctors to reach cancer cells deeper inside tissue.
The team has been able to more than double the current limit for how far light can be focused into tissue. With future improvements on the optoelectronic hardware used to record and play back light, the engineers say, they may be able to reach 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches)?the depth limit of ultrasound?within a few years.
Still, the researchers say, their demonstration shows they have overcome the main conceptual hurdle for effectively focusing light deep inside tissue. "This is a big breakthrough, and we're excited about the potential," Judkewitz says. Adds Caltech's Wang, "It's a very new way to image into tissue, which could lead to a lot of promising applications."
###
California Institute of Technology: http://www.caltech.edu
Thanks to California Institute of Technology for this article.
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June 25 is Michael Jackson's death anniversary. The King of Pop died three years ago today at the age of 50 after suffering cardiac arrest at his home.
The coroner ruled it a homicide, and Dr. Conrad Murray, who was over-medicating MJ to a dangerous degree, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
Murray obviously did not mean to kill Jackson, but was nonetheless responsible for the fatal combination of sedatives that led to the singer's demise.
Serving a four-year sentence, and complaining that he is wasting away in jail amid horrid conditions, Murray has been behind bars since November.
Michael may be gone, but three years later, his legacy lives on.
In a way, MJ passing away shifted the focus back to his musical greatness and away from the personal problems and eccentricities that dominated news.
Jackson’s mother, Katherine, has permanent custody of his offspring, all three of which have all gone on to become well-adjusted, normal children.
Just what he would have wanted, and worked so hard to achieve.
Musically, his death introduced Jackson to a new generation of fans and invigorated tens of millions of older ones. He hasn't been this popular in 30 years!
WASHINGTON (AP) ? From Cape Hatteras, N.C., to just north of Boston, sea levels are rising much faster than they are around the globe, putting one of the world's most costly coasts in danger of flooding, government researchers report.
U.S. Geological Survey scientists call the 600-mile swath a "hot spot" for climbing sea levels caused by global warming. Along the region, the Atlantic Ocean is rising at an annual rate three times to four times faster than the global average since 1990, according to the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
It's not just a faster rate, but at a faster pace, like a car on a highway "jamming on the accelerator," said the study's lead author, Asbury Sallenger Jr., an oceanographer at the agency. He looked at sea levels starting in 1950, and noticed a change beginning in 1990.
Since then, sea levels have gone up globally about 2 inches. But in Norfolk, Va., where officials are scrambling to fight more frequent flooding, sea level has jumped a total of 4.8 inches, the research showed. For Philadelphia, levels went up 3.7 inches, and in New York City, it was 2.8 inches.
Climate change pushes up sea levels by melting ice sheets in Greenland and west Antarctica, and because warmer water expands.
Computer models long have projected higher levels along parts of the East Coast because of changes in ocean currents from global warming, but this is the first study to show that's already happened.
By 2100, scientists and computer models estimate that sea levels globally could rise as much as 3.3 feet. The accelerated rate along the East Coast could add about 8 inches to 11 inches more, Sallenger said.
"Where that kind of thing becomes important is during a storm," Sallenger said. That's when it can damage buildings and erode coastlines.
On the West Coast, a National Research Council report released Friday projects an average 3-foot rise in sea level in California by the year 2100, and 2 feet in Oregon and Washington. The land mass north of the San Andreas Fault is expected to rise, offsetting the rising sea level in those two states.
The USGS study suggests the Northeast would get hit harder because of ocean currents. When the Gulf Stream and its northern extension slow down, the slope of the seas changes to balance against the slowing current. That slope then pushes up sea levels in the Northeast. It is like a see-saw effect, Sallenger theorizes.
Scientists believe that with global warming, the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents are slowing and will slow further, Sallenger said.
Jeff Williams, a retired USGS expert who wasn't part of the study, and Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, said the study does a good job of making the case for sea level rise acceleration.
Margaret Davidson, director of the Coastal Services Center for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Charleston, S.C., said the implications of the new research are "huge when you think about it. Somewhere between Maryland and Massachusetts, you've got some bodaciously expensive property at risk."
Sea level projections matter in coastal states because flood maps based on those predictions can result in restrictions on property development and affect flood insurance rates.
Those estimates became an issue in North Carolina recently when the Legislature proposed using historic figures to calculate future sea levels, rejecting higher rates from a state panel of experts. The USGS study suggests an even higher level than the panel's estimate for 2100.
The North Carolina proposal used data from University of Florida professor Robert Dean, who had found no regional differences in sea level rise. Dean said he can't argue with the results from Sallenger's study showing accelerating sea level rise in the region, but he said it's more likely to be from natural cycles. Sallenger said there is no evidence to support that claim.
___
Associated Press writers Allen Reed in Raleigh, N.C., and Jeff Barnard in Grants Pass, Ore., contributed to this report.
___
Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears
Thinking about choice diminishes concern for wealth inequalityPublic release date: 25-Jun-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Anna Mikulak amikulak@psychologicalscience.org 202-293-9300 Association for Psychological Science
Against the backdrop of a worldwide recession, wealth inequality has become a prominent theme in discussions about politics and the economy. In some ways, Americans seem to advocate a more equal distribution of wealth. In surveys and public opinion polls, for example, the majority of Americans supports having a strong middle class. But, when it comes to specific policies, they often vote against measures that would narrow the gap between those with the highest and lowest incomes.
In a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Krishna Savani of Columbia Business School and Aneeta Rattan of Stanford University investigate the underlying factors that explain Americans' contradictory opinions on wealth.
They surmised that one factor the concept of choice might be particularly influential in discussions about wealth. "Choice is a pervasive and highly valued concept in the U.S.," say the authors. If we assume that people make free choices, they theorized, while at the same time we acknowledge that some people are rich and others are poor, we may be more likely to believe that inequality in life outcomes is justified and reasonable because it must be the result of individual choice.
In a series of six experiments, they put their theory about the effects of a choice mindset to the test.
In the first experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a control or a choice condition. The participants in the control condition were asked to list five things they did in each of four time periods the previous day; in the choice condition, the participants listed five choices instead. All of the participants then rated how disturbed they were by statistics about existing wealth inequalities in the United States.
The results of the experiment confirmed the researchers' hypothesis. After controlling for certain characteristics like political orientation, socioeconomic status, and gender, Savani and Rattan found that participants in the choice condition were less disturbed about wealth inequalities in the U.S. than participants in the control condition. And these findings were supported in a second experiment, in which the researchers used a priming technique to incidentally highlight the concept of choice.
In a third experiment, the researchers found that when the concept of choice is activated, people under-emphasize the role of societal structures in allowing individuals to create and accumulate wealth.
Evidence from the first three experiments convinced Savani and Rattan that choice is indeed an important factor underlying Americans' attitudes toward wealth inequality. "When people think in terms of choice, they become focused on the idea that people gain wealth through their own choices and not because of social protections. This additional emphasis on individual agency leads them to be less disturbed the wealth inequalities that exist," the authors explain.
With these results in hand, they decided to look at how a choice-oriented mindset affects attitudes toward specific policies.
In a fourth experiment, they investigated how thinking about choice might influence support for policies that aim to equalize the distribution of resources in the context of education. In line with their hypotheses, participants in the choice condition were less supportive of redistributive policies than participants in the control condition. The relationship was explained by participants' beliefs about individuals' entitlement to keep their wealth.
In a fifth experiment, the researchers confirmed that the effects of choice are specific to redistributive policies and not to some more general reluctance to support government spending on public goods.
In July 2011, Savani and Rattan were in the midst of conducting their research when current events intervened. The federal government was faced with a decision: raise the debt ceiling or default on the national debt. The researchers decided to seize the moment: "We wanted to see if the concept of choice could shift people's attitudes even with the nation's economic future hanging in the balance."
In the week prior to the resolution of the debt crisis, they surveyed participants, asking them how supportive they would be of different policies that might help to resolve the federal debt crisis, all of which involved increasing taxes on the wealthy. As in the previous studies, participants who were not thinking about choice were relatively supportive of increasing taxes given the stakes at hand. By comparison, the participants who were made to think about choice were significantly less supportive of such policies, even when faced directly with the consequences of maintaining the status quo.
Overall, Savani and Rattan believe their research offers critical insights into how people think about wealth inequality. "When the U.S. faces hard economic challenges, people often talk about needing to make difficult choices. But our findings suggest that when Americans are prompted to think about making choices, they might act in ways that are inconsistent with their own attitudes."
Given how important the issue of wealth inequality is in American society, Savani and Rattan hope to continue research in this area. "Issues of income inequality affect so many aspects of people's lives how happy they are, what they strive for, what opportunities their kids have and also influence governmental decisions what public services to provide, how to tax individuals, and how to allocate benefits," they say. "Investigating additional factors that influence people's attitudes toward income and wealth inequality will be a fascinating and important question for future research to explore."
###
For more information about this study, please contact: Krishna Savani at ks2884@columbia.edu.
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "A Choice Mind-Set Increases the Acceptance and Maintenance of Wealth Inequality" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Thinking about choice diminishes concern for wealth inequalityPublic release date: 25-Jun-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Anna Mikulak amikulak@psychologicalscience.org 202-293-9300 Association for Psychological Science
Against the backdrop of a worldwide recession, wealth inequality has become a prominent theme in discussions about politics and the economy. In some ways, Americans seem to advocate a more equal distribution of wealth. In surveys and public opinion polls, for example, the majority of Americans supports having a strong middle class. But, when it comes to specific policies, they often vote against measures that would narrow the gap between those with the highest and lowest incomes.
In a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Krishna Savani of Columbia Business School and Aneeta Rattan of Stanford University investigate the underlying factors that explain Americans' contradictory opinions on wealth.
They surmised that one factor the concept of choice might be particularly influential in discussions about wealth. "Choice is a pervasive and highly valued concept in the U.S.," say the authors. If we assume that people make free choices, they theorized, while at the same time we acknowledge that some people are rich and others are poor, we may be more likely to believe that inequality in life outcomes is justified and reasonable because it must be the result of individual choice.
In a series of six experiments, they put their theory about the effects of a choice mindset to the test.
In the first experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a control or a choice condition. The participants in the control condition were asked to list five things they did in each of four time periods the previous day; in the choice condition, the participants listed five choices instead. All of the participants then rated how disturbed they were by statistics about existing wealth inequalities in the United States.
The results of the experiment confirmed the researchers' hypothesis. After controlling for certain characteristics like political orientation, socioeconomic status, and gender, Savani and Rattan found that participants in the choice condition were less disturbed about wealth inequalities in the U.S. than participants in the control condition. And these findings were supported in a second experiment, in which the researchers used a priming technique to incidentally highlight the concept of choice.
In a third experiment, the researchers found that when the concept of choice is activated, people under-emphasize the role of societal structures in allowing individuals to create and accumulate wealth.
Evidence from the first three experiments convinced Savani and Rattan that choice is indeed an important factor underlying Americans' attitudes toward wealth inequality. "When people think in terms of choice, they become focused on the idea that people gain wealth through their own choices and not because of social protections. This additional emphasis on individual agency leads them to be less disturbed the wealth inequalities that exist," the authors explain.
With these results in hand, they decided to look at how a choice-oriented mindset affects attitudes toward specific policies.
In a fourth experiment, they investigated how thinking about choice might influence support for policies that aim to equalize the distribution of resources in the context of education. In line with their hypotheses, participants in the choice condition were less supportive of redistributive policies than participants in the control condition. The relationship was explained by participants' beliefs about individuals' entitlement to keep their wealth.
In a fifth experiment, the researchers confirmed that the effects of choice are specific to redistributive policies and not to some more general reluctance to support government spending on public goods.
In July 2011, Savani and Rattan were in the midst of conducting their research when current events intervened. The federal government was faced with a decision: raise the debt ceiling or default on the national debt. The researchers decided to seize the moment: "We wanted to see if the concept of choice could shift people's attitudes even with the nation's economic future hanging in the balance."
In the week prior to the resolution of the debt crisis, they surveyed participants, asking them how supportive they would be of different policies that might help to resolve the federal debt crisis, all of which involved increasing taxes on the wealthy. As in the previous studies, participants who were not thinking about choice were relatively supportive of increasing taxes given the stakes at hand. By comparison, the participants who were made to think about choice were significantly less supportive of such policies, even when faced directly with the consequences of maintaining the status quo.
Overall, Savani and Rattan believe their research offers critical insights into how people think about wealth inequality. "When the U.S. faces hard economic challenges, people often talk about needing to make difficult choices. But our findings suggest that when Americans are prompted to think about making choices, they might act in ways that are inconsistent with their own attitudes."
Given how important the issue of wealth inequality is in American society, Savani and Rattan hope to continue research in this area. "Issues of income inequality affect so many aspects of people's lives how happy they are, what they strive for, what opportunities their kids have and also influence governmental decisions what public services to provide, how to tax individuals, and how to allocate benefits," they say. "Investigating additional factors that influence people's attitudes toward income and wealth inequality will be a fascinating and important question for future research to explore."
###
For more information about this study, please contact: Krishna Savani at ks2884@columbia.edu.
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "A Choice Mind-Set Increases the Acceptance and Maintenance of Wealth Inequality" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
One billion people eat too little. One billion others eat too much. One-third of all food harvested around the world is lost or wasted. Our global food production systems need a drastic overhaul.
Need more evidence? Agriculture today contributes one-third of global greenhouse gases emitted. Farming today is depleting soil and water, destroying forests, and hurting the planet?s biodiversity. The more food we grow, the more we destabilize the climate, and the more food we therefore must grow to compensate for crop losses due to droughts, floods, pests and disease.
The world is descending on Rio de Janeiro to map out a vision for a more sustainable and equitable future. The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20, is the best place to start figuring out how we feed our world as well. What we grow, how we grow it, and who gets to eat it are issues with profound implications, not just for our global food supply, but for our collective quality of life and the sustainability of the earth?s system. .
Numerous efforts, from the G8, the Obama administration, and the private sector, have committed tens of billions of dollars to bolstering food security and developing sustainable agriculture. Yet, a disconnect remains between these initiatives and the immediate need to scale up innovations that can produce healthy food, feed hungry people, and still protect the environment.
Rio+20 should ensure support for key approaches and innovations, not just the general principles of sustainable development.
In the span of a generation, Brazil transformed itself from a net importer of food to the world?s second-biggest agricultural exporter. Global partnerships and robust government support for agricultural research and development were key. Scientists at Brazil?s national agricultural research institute, EMBRAPA, developed soybean varieties and farming practices suited to the dry and acidic plains of Brazil, making the region a breadbasket for the world.
But innovation has not stopped there. State-of-the-art research looks at everything from preventing food waste to developing nutritionally enriched crop varieties. Now Brazil and other rapidly-emerging economies like China are partnering with developing nations in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere to extend the benefits of agricultural R&D.
But it?s not just about overall investments and approaches. It?s also about financing to scale up solutions that work.
In Punjab, India, hundreds of thousands of farmers produce a nearly continuous supply of rice and wheat for up to 500 million people. In a rush to clear the land for wheat planting after the rice is harvested, farmers set their fields of rice stubble ablaze. Climate change is stoking this rush, as rising temperatures are reducing wheat yields by up to 15 percent, increasing the impetus to plant more crops during the winter months. But this burn depletes soil, causes human health problems, and emits about 12 megatons of carbon dioxide.
Two badly needed alternatives to burning are in early stages of use. The locally manufactured tractor-drawn ?Happy Seeder? machine cuts and lifts the rice straw, sows wheat seeds, and deposits the straw as mulch. Also in the Punjab, a new biomass-based power plant will use paddy stubble as fuel. It will collect farm residue and sell power to the private sector. Brought to scale, these solutions would improve soil fertility and human health, mitigate climate change, and create local jobs as part of a green economy.
In sub-Saharan Africa about 500 million people eat cassava every day, making it the region?s second most important source of carbohydrates. Cassava is also the prime money-making crop for hundreds of thousands of small farmers in Southeast Asia. The hotter the climate, the better it grows, making it a safety net for millions of people as temperatures rise.
But climate change is also bringing increased pest and disease outbreaks that threaten the crop. To fulfill its promise as a failsafe crop in a changing climate, new varieties are needed that further improve drought and cold tolerance, as well as pest and disease resistance. Accelerated improvement of this crop could go a long way to ensuring food security for millions of people in a changing climate.
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About Stephanie Faris
Stephanie is a freelance writer and young adult/middle grade novelist, who also works in information systems. Her first book, 30 Days of No Gossip, will be released by Simon and Schuster in spring 2014. She lives in Nashville with her husband.
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STOCKHOLM (AP) ? A Norwegian man has received terrorist training from al-Qaida's offshoot in Yemen and is awaiting orders to carry out an attack on the West, officials from three European security agencies told The Associated Press on Monday.
Western intelligence officials have long feared such a scenario ? a convert to Islam who is trained in terrorist methods and can blend in easily in Europe and the United States, traveling without visa restrictions.
Officials from three European security agencies confirmed Monday the man is "operational," meaning he has completed his training and is about to receive a target. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly. They declined to name the man, who has not been accused of a crime.
"We believe he is operational and he is probably about to get his target," one security official said. "And that target is probably in the West."
A security official in a second European country confirmed the information, adding: "From what I understand, a specific target has not been established."
European security services, including in Norway, have warned in recent years of homegrown, radicalized Muslims traveling to terror training camps in conflict zones. Many of the known cases involve young men with family roots in Muslim countries.
But the latest case involves a man in his 30s with no immigrant background, the officials said. After converting to Islam in 2008, he quickly became radicalized and traveled to Yemen to receive terror training, one of the officials said. The man spent "some months" in Yemen and is still believed to be there, he said.
The official said the man has no criminal record, which would also make him an ideal recruit for al-Qaida.
"Not even a parking ticket," he said. "He's completely clean and he can travel anywhere."
The official would not specify what preventive measures were being taken but said "there is a well-established relationship between Western security services, and they share the information needed to prevent terrorism."
The officials declined to specify what makes them think the man is operational.
Signs that a would-be jihadist is ready for an attack could include the creation of so-called martyrdom videos for release online in conjunction with an attack, or an abrupt cutoff of communication and contacts with peers to avoid detection.
The man has not been accused of a crime in Norway, where traveling abroad to attend terror training camps is not a crime per se. In many European countries, suspects are not named unless they have been formally charged with a crime.
Yemeni military officials said they had information on Europeans training with al-Qaida in the southern part of the country but that they weren't aware of a Norwegian being among them. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
CIA and FBI officials in the U.S. declined to comment on the AP report.
Trond Hugubakken, a spokesman for Norway's PST security service, also declined to comment on the case. He referred to a PST security assessment in February, which highlighted that "several" Islamic extremists have traveled from Norway to conflict zones to attend training camps.
Hugubakken acknowledged that converts who turn to violent extremism pose a particular challenge.
"Converts will have a different level of cover, especially if they have no criminal record," he said, adding that most Muslim converts do not turn to extremism.
There are several examples in Europe and the U.S. of converts linked to terror plots, from failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid, a British convert, to a Pennsylvania woman dubbed "Jihad Jane," who pleaded guilty last year to charges that she plotted to kill a Swedish cartoonist who caricatured Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
Norway saw the first convictions under its anti-terror laws this year when two men were given prison terms in January for plotting to attack a Danish newspaper that also had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad.
In March, Mullah Krekar, a radical Iraqi-born cleric who came to Norway as a refugee, was sentenced to five years in prison for making death threats against Norwegian officials and three Kurdish men he claimed had insulted Islam.
But Norway's most serious attacks happened last year at the hands of a right-wing, anti-Muslim extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, who admitted to killing 77 people in a bombing-and-shooting massacre on July 22. The self-styled militant's trial ended last week with conflicting claims about whether he is criminally insane. A verdict has been set for Aug. 24.
____
Associated Press writer Paisley Dodds in London, Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier and AP writer Eileen Sullivan in Washington and Ahmed al-Haj in Sanaa, Yemen, contributed to this report.
, one of the most remarkable fossils of the hominin lineage known to date.
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