"Living under drones"

That's the title of a recently released report on the use of drones in warfare by researchers and Stanford and NYU.

The key points from the report's executive summary:

  1. While civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.
  2. US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accountedfor harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.
  3. Publicly available evidence that the strikes have made the US safer overall is ambiguous at best.
  4. Current US targeted killings and drone strike practices undermine respect for the rule of law and international legal protections and may set dangerous precedents.

On the subject of civilian casualties, it's previously been revealed that men killed by drones are presumed to be combantants (which might explain why a high percentage of collateral deaths are amongst women and children), but I think that this is something that this report attempts to correct for. (It does at least note this issue in a footnote, but I haven't had a chance to read much more than the executive summary in any detail and my keyword searching suggested that I might have to dig into some of the report's sources in some detail to try to find this out). The issue of psychological harm to bystanders also seems quite living given drones hovering over areas of Pakistan basically 24/7.

See also the NYT debate piece Do Drone Attacks Do More Harm Than Good?.

Random links

The Science of Pomato Plants and Fruit Salad Trees
The crazy things you can accomplish with grafting: "In Australia, James and Kerry West grow and sell four types of fruit salad trees, each of which bears several different kinds of fruit. Stone fruit salad trees grow peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots and peachcots. Citrus salad trees offer a winter and summer orange, mandarins, lemons, limes, grapefruits, tangelos and pomelos. Multi-apple trees boast between two and four different kinds of apples and multi-nashi trees produce between two and four different kinds of Asian pears."
Pirate Party takes Mayor's chair in Swiss city
"A Pirate Party branch founded last November has scored a win in regional elections in Switzerland, with the city of Eichberg to fly the pirate flag under new mayor, Alex Arnold ... [who] defeated two candidates from the Swiss Peoples Party to take the part-time mayoralty and took 60 percent of the vote."
Fossil Forest May Sprout Again as the Arctic Warms
"climate forecasts suggest that, by 2100, the now-uninhabited Bylot Island where the fossilized forest was discovered will support temperatures similar to those prevalent when the forest thrived."
Firms tell employees: Avoid after-hours e-mail
"No after-hours e-mail is part of a growing effort by some employers to rebuild the boundaries between work and home that have crumbled amid the do-more-with-less ethos of the economic downturn."

Gender reversals

From the WSJ piece Isn't It Romantic? Feminism's latest triumph: Boys are afraid of girls.:

Schalet's most interesting assertion is that "the American boys I interviewed seemed more nervous about the consequences of sex than American girls." … The 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than one-third of teenage boys, but only one-quarter of teenage girls, cited wanting to avoid pregnancy or disease as the main reason they had not yet had sex

The piece also gets into some of the consequences of this - largely parallel to those of Japan's so-called "herbivores". Basically they're not having children, resulting in the sort of problems associated with aging societies, and they're not particularly economically productive either. As a related article, Teenage Boy: Broken Condom Means ‘I could be screwed for the rest of my life’, outlines, this shift is more or less the logical result of the shift in policy over the last fifty years or so.

What else do you find? Here's a bit of an NYT Economix post entitled Young Women Are More Career-Driven Than Men:

Using poll data collected in 2010 and 2011, Pew found that 66 percent of women 18 to 34 years old said that being successful in a high-paying career or profession was “one of the most important things” or “very important” in their lives. Among their male counterparts, the share was 59 percent. This is a reversal from the last time Pew looked at this question, in 1997. Then, young men were more likely to say they prioritized careers than young women were.
... In 1997, 41 percent of men 35 to 64 years old said success in a high-paying career was important to them, compared with just 26 percent of women their age. Today, middle-age women’s professional ambitions have caught up to men’s, with 42 percent of women and 43 percent of men emphasizing their jobs.

So men are more scared of making a woman pregnant than the women themselves are and women say are more likely to speak of placing a higher priority on their careers than men are. It's a strange world.

Random links

Ig Nobel prizes check out monkeys' behinds, spill their coffee: Prizes once again tap a rich vein of science's weird side.
Amongst this year's winners include analysis of how to walk carrying a cup of coffee, demonstrations of the ability of chimpanzees to recognize their companions from pictures of their posteriors (a study which I'm guessing won't be repeated in human populations), and the physics of ponytails.
Are Hospitals Less Safe Than We Think?
"Harvey Fineberg, M.D., president of the Institute of Medicine and former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, has said that between 30 percent and 40 percent of our entire health-care expenditure is paying for fraud and unnecessary treatment. ... A 2010 New England Journal of Medicine study concluded that as many as 25 percent of all hospitalized patients will experience a preventable medical error of some kind, and 100,000 will die annually because of errors. If medical error were a disease, it would be the sixth-leading cause of death in the country."
Globalization, Brain Drain and Development
"This paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain ... brain drain (or high-skill) migration is becoming the dominant pattern of international migration and a major aspect of globalization. ... The recent empirical literature shows that high-skill emigration need not deplete a country’s human capital stock and can generate positive network externalities. Three case studies are also considered: the African medical brain drain, the recent exodus of European scientists to the United States, and the role of the Indian diaspora in the development of India’s IT sector."
Let My Love Open the Door: The Importance of Raising Chivalrous Boys and Feminist Girls
"The second part of my dream is that as my daughters are enjoying their equal pay, equal opportunity, equal treatment lives they are also having gentleman open doors for them, pay for dinner on their first date and even, wait for it, have a chair pulled out for them in a dining room." Given the word "feminist" in the title, think of something slightly different than equal when you read the word "equal." "Chivalry" and "equal treatment" seem contradictory. One of the comments that "she wants to raise selfish, double-standard bearing hypocrites as daughters" seems to sum up this article quite well.

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