More random links
- Analysis: Obama's "green jobs" have been slow to sprout
- "The wind industry, for example, has shed 10,000 jobs since 2009 even as the energy capacity of wind farms has nearly doubled, according to the American Wind Energy Association." A lot of the labour involved in something like this seems to be more of a front-end thing... maintenance isn't as labour heavy as original building and installation it seems. The same I assume applies to hydro dams - lots of money / labour to build but not so much to maintain.
- The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases
- An interesting argument. "Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does."
- Vatican: U.S. Catholic sisters, nuns making serious theological errors
- The Vatican realizes that many declared Roman Catholics ... well ... don't seem to be very Roman Catholic when it comes to their thinking and practice. Can't say that I'm shocked by this revelation. (See another more general article on Irish "Roman Catholics").
- If the food’s in plastic, what’s in the food?
- After an experiment with families eating only foods that hadn't come into contact with plastic for just three days: "The participants’ levels of bisphenol A (BPA), which is used to harden polycarbonate plastic, plunged — by two-thirds, on average — while those of the phthalate DEHP, which imparts flexibility to plastics, dropped by more than half." On DEHP, for example, the article later noted that "Studies have associated low-dose exposure to the chemical with male reproductive disorders, thyroid dysfunction and subtle behavioral changes."
- Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity
- "[P]oor urban neighborhoods ... not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents."