Rotundus.com

The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder

According to a scientist involved in this particular study: "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years ... So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871." And, as the article notes, cold or the failure to prepare for it does cause a number of deaths.

But it Works on TV! - Forensic 'science' often isn't

The article notes a 2009 National Academy of Science report that, unlike for DNA, "for many other forensic disciplines—such as fingerprint and toolmark analysis—no studies have been conducted" to determine the probability that an element of evidence matches an individual, and that half of those latter found innocent by the Innocence Project were convicted based in part on this evidence. With the varying estimates of DNA matching I'm not quite sure how much to trust that either.

Woman 'who wanted to be a grandmother hired man to rape her daughter'

Some people may be desperate to have grandkids but this is going way overboard. If this had resulted in any offspring, I somehow suspect that they'd never be seen by the one so desperate in any case.

Reproductive scientists create mice from 2 fathers

A little strange. Requires a whole lot of intervention for this to occur of course.

Here's what Bell had to say about this issue:

There is a copper loop that goes from our Central Office to the home and all data travels on that pipe so it's Internet traffic, it's television traffic, it's actually voice traffic, long distance traffic, but that's not where there are general congestion issues. The real issue is when you get to the Central Office and you go behind that to the general Internet, FIBE TV is completely different.

In short, according to the telco itself admits that congestion is not a last-mile issue. However, Bell has previously argued against giving third party ISPs access to the traffic at the bottleneck point:

with ADSL-CO, once the independent ISP gets subsidized access to the full speed and capacity over that fibre, and the ability to fully differentiate their service from ours -- and there goes usage-based billing -- there is nothing more for the ISP to build. If they get a customer, they pay us. If they don't get a customer, they don't pay us. Their cost structure is success-based, as I mentioned yesterday, with no upfront risk capital required.

Essentially what makes sense to me is allowing the third parties in earlier as they've requested and allowing Bell to make a reasonable profit on that last mile list for which congestion isn't a problem. The current overage rates don't strike me as particularly reasonable.

(Quotes taken from a post by Michael Geist)

I've mentioned before how reports like the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report seem to assume that measures in which men appear to fare better than women are due to discrimination whereas any in which women appear to fair better than men are due to intrinsic factors. For example, if 60% of those in educational institutions are male then that's a problem whereas if 60% are female that's simply the natural course of things.

Now it seems that there's been some other research done in recent years suggesting that life expectancy may be another of those areas in which lifestyle plays a much larger role than biology. This blog post summarizes data regarding the lifespans of 20th century German monks and nuns relative to the general population, finding that for these cloistered groups the difference between men and women in life expectancy drops by somewhere between 66%-85%. (The raw data is here, and a few gated publications from this data may be found here and here).

Working through Korean unification blues

Discusses the unease in both North and South Korea over the reunification that's officially the goal of both states. Also discusses some plans to move forward. There did seem to be one place in there in which the word million was accidentally used in place of billion.

One-legged Afghan Red Cross worker set to be hanged after converting to Christianity

"He was arrested in May last year as he attempted to seek asylum at the German embassy following a crackdown on Christians within Afghanistan." What exactly is Canada achieving in Afghanistan?

Joel Osteen Issues Apology

He's been the typical target of criticism from as being more focused on self-help than Christ in books like Christless Christianity... This is one reason why I wonder if that's gradually beginning to change.

How Introverts and Extroverts Can Benefit from One Another

I found this series of statements rather intersting: "Most people assume that I am an extrovert, because I am a CEO of a large company and do a lot of public speaking. But things are not always what they seem. Many leaders I know are introverts. They can “turn it on” when they need to, but are much more comfortable away from the crowds and the lights."