Gary Glitter=carbon footprint

A warning…

Right before he was shot

This is what happens to Winnie the Pooh in real life- a sad end with a jar on his head.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7534325.stm

The Stokie rebellion

On the eve of the drinking ban on the London underground, it seems not everyone is a fan of BoJo…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Balloon rides

News from the National Air Traffic Control Company that Britain’s biggest airspace shake-up will not see any reduction in carbon dioxide emissions will disappoint environmentalists.

 

The company also propose to accommodate 100m more airline passengers a year by 2014- an increase which strengthens the environmental case for airship technology.

 

On the plus side, airships give off very little noise and have no need for landing strips- a versatility which could also assist in aid delivery to remote places. They are much less polluting – using helium to give lift and electricity to power thrust. There’s potential for solar power in the future.

 

Gordon Taylor, marketing director for Hybrid Air Vehicles, which designs airships and operates out of aircraft hangar in Bedfordshire, thinks we could get to zero emission within 10 years. “There is commercial viability but we would need someone like Richard Branson to stamp his feet and start a commercial operation. Or Zac Goldsmith.” He says.

 

At the moment the company is focusing on heavy lift airships. There’s big interest from Canada, which is concerned about global warming issues and also has a large resource base- oil, wood- which it exports. It’s perhaps testament to commercial potential that the company is currently in a legal dispute with the US-based company Lockheed-Martin over design rights.

 

On the downside, airships remain overshadowed by the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, in which a German-built LZ 129 zeppelin went up in flames after a transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Lakehurst in the US. Thirty-six people died and the idea of airships dropped like a lead balloon.

 

They haven’t captured the popular imagination since, and with speeds of up to around 100mph you might need to allow a bit more time for your journey.

 

But airship technology has come a long way in 70 years. Helium, an inert gas, has replaced the hydrogen that many blame for setting the Hindenburg zeppelin alight.

 

Current commercial passenger flights are reserved for sightseeing tours. With a growing need and desire for green travel and with more people willing to sacrifice time for less footprint, airships could prove valuable.

Your fault?

The consolation that you did your best may not come as much comfort when faced with the prospect of failure. Especially when it comes toexams, promotion at work and sporting prowess.
But it may not be your fault, according to a report by psychologists from Exeter and St Andrews Universities, which says that unconsciously at least, your best may never have been good enough.

Poor performance may have as much to do with believing and fulfilling negative preconceptions about the social group you consider yourselfto be in, as it is a lack of natural ability or incompetence and, say the authors, may go some way to explaining why England has a particularly bad track record in World Cup penalty shoot-outs. Understanding the social impact of stereotyping will also help us to understand and deal with the consequences of sexism, racism and homophobia.

Writing in the latest edition of Scientific American Mind, the authors draw on studies to show that so-called ’stereotype threat’ is a common cause of under-performance. In one example, women taking part in maths tests and told that women were less capable at doing sums than men, tended to perform less well than those who weren’t.

Likewise, a study in Arizona found that when white golfers were told their golfing performance would be compared to black golfers, they performed worse if they thought it was a test of ‘natural athletic ability’, playing on a stereotype that black people are better at sport, but better if they believed the test was one based on ’strategic intelligence’.

Alexander Haslam, professor of psychology at Exeter University and one of the report’s authors, says “although some have jumped to the highlycontroversial conclusion that differences in attainment reflect natural differences between groups, the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes, or preconceptions, that others hold about the groups to which we belong.”

Defining yourself as a group member and accepting any negative associations with that group can give rise to side effects includinganxiety, self-consciousness and self-doubt, or what Haslam calls ‘identity-related psychological conflict’. Intrusive, negative thoughts use up mental resources needed for the task in hand, and subsequent bad performance is then wrongly equated with an inability to do the job.

If stereotypes can impact negatively, then they can also create success or ’stereotype lift’. Stephen Reicher, another of the report’sauthors, said: “If people are exposed to stereotypes about the inferiority of an out-group, then their performance is typically elevated. An ideology of superiority can give members of high-status groups a performance boost.”

In another maths-based experiment from Harvard University, a group ofAsian women performed differently in tasks depending on whether they focused on their sex or their race, producing better results based on the latter criteria based on a stereotype that Asians are better at mathematics than other ethnic groups.

Where we place ourselves as a group is also open to shift. Psychology students, for example, should experience stereotype threat if asked to perform scientific tasks compared to physicists, but stereotype lift when compared to artists.

Luckily, the authors say, we’re masters of our own fate and there area number of ways to avoid the limitations of stereotyping. Personal strategies include adopting ’social mobility’ – operating more as anindividual – and ’social creativity’- employing a mix of positive stereotypes to deflect the impact of belonging to a disadvantaged group. But this, the authors say, doesn’t tackle the underlying cause of stereotype threat.

“Traditionally, people working in this field have worked on the assumption that stereotyping is fixed, that the only way to overcome it is to use individualist strategies such as working harder.
“But actually stereotypes are negotiated and negotiable and only working individually is unlikely to bring about social change and can maintain the status quo.

“We need to challenge them at their root using collective action, precisely what activists such as Steve Biko and Emmeline Pankhurst achieved through black consciousness and feminism. They challenged the legitimacy of those comparisons and stereotypes that defined their groups as inferior,” said Haslam.

Other social behaviour tests:
To explore the notion of prejudice following the death of Martin Luther King Jr, school teacher, Jane Elliott, divided her class into two groups of children- those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. She found that telling one of the groups that they were inferior and withholding privileges had a detrimental effect on academic results and produced feelings of self-loathing and fear. The’superior’ group improved performance. The same results were produced the following day when Elliott reversed the roles.

Following the start of Adolf Eichmann’s Nazi war criminal trial in 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to test people’s willingnessto obey authority figures, even if those instructions conflicted with personal conscience. Test subjects were allowed to ‘punish’ wrong answers given by a recipient to a set of questions, delivering a 45-volt electric shock, which increased each time. Test subjects were also told the recipient had a heart condition. Though most subjects paused when faced with the distress of the recipient, most continued after being told they would not be held responsible, instead exhibiting signs of extreme stress. In fact, the recipient was an actor and not receiving any real shocks at all.

I LOVE BLoW

An American website using explicit references to cocaine to market an energy drink mix called ‘Blow’ caught the attention of the LA District Public Health Service Food and Drug Administration recently.

In a three-page warning letter sent to the manufacturers of the product, who also run the iloveblow.com website, the FDA conclude that ‘Blow’ is marketed as an “alternative to an illicit street drug.” The list of complaints include:

“The product comes packaged in a vial suggestive of street drug paraphernalia, such as the small vials used to store “crack cocaine”.

“The letters in the product name appear to be spelled out in a white granular substance that resembles cocaine powder.

“The name of your product, “Blow” is well known street drug terminology for illicit cocaine… “Blow” may suggest to the ordinary observer that the product may have effects on the body similar to cocaine.”

The FDA also attacks imagery alluding to drug trafficking – a speedboat being chased under the gun of a helicopter – and powder ‘lines’, “suggestive of the practice used to divide cocaine powder into very fine particles to increase the efficency of nasal absoption prior to insufflation, i.e, snorting.”

The makers of ‘Blow’ describe the product as a “Pure uncut energy mix”, a vial of which should be added to your favourite beverage and shared with friends. ‘Blow’ can be bought in a number of different sized packages including ‘The Stash Box Sampler Pack’, The Recreational User Pack and ‘The Fiender’s Hook Up’. The website sells images of semi-naked women, bling and paparazzi.

Among the list of ingredients of ‘Blow’ are taurine, isotol and caffeine- common ingredients of energy drinks such as RedBull. However, ‘Blow’ contains around twice the level of taurine, nearly three times the level of Insotol and three times the level of caffeine (roughly the equivalent of three cups of coffee) than RedBull.

Last year the FDA compelled another energy drink manufacturer, Redux beverages, to stop trading under the name ‘Cocaine’, following a similar warning letter. It has since been relaunced as Cocaine on their drinkcocaine.com website.

The FDA says ‘Blow’ is a new drug and not recognised as safe and effective for its labelled uses and it is aware of the proliferation of products being manufactured, marketed, or distributed as alternatives to illicit street drugs and being marketed as dietary supplements.
The manufacturers of ‘Blow’ had 15 days to correct violations under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.

Dicky Ticker

As hospital traumas go, anaesthetic awareness is pretty much up there- a veritable nightmare in fact. Picture the scene: you’re on the operating table, you’ve been given a muscle relaxant and, unable to move, the surgeon’s ready to make a first incision. Problem is the anaesthetic hasn’t worked and you’re still awake.

The risk of being affected is one in 600, according to professor Michael Wang, a clinical psychologist and leading expert on the phenomenon, rising to around one in 100 for certain procedures such as cardiac surgery, where less anaesthetic is used.

It’s the basis on which the film Awake, which opened in cinemas over the weekend, hangs. Actor Hayden Christensen plays a wealthy youth with a dicky ticker who becomes conscious during heart surgery. If that really isn’t bad enough, he overhears a plot for his murder- a lucky-unlucky happenstance.

Hollywood twist aside, how realistic is the portrayal of anaesthetic awareness in the film – awake throughout, excruciating pain, full lucidity? About a third of patients suffer pain, over half experience sound and conversation and a quarter are aware of breathing tubes, according to the Royal College of Anaesthetists.

What usually happens, says Wang, is people wake after the early part of the operation once it’s well advanced and often for only short periods. Some people don’t always recall they were awake until a few days later. Longer lasting psychological effects can be devastating- post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias, chronic anxiety and flashbacks. Though strangely, many people who suffer severe psychological problems after experiencing awareness have had no pain, says Wang.

The most reliable way of avoiding awareness is the Isolated Forearm Technique, which involves tying a tourniquet around the patient’s arm, stopping the effect of muscle-relaxing drugs and allowing the patient to signal if there’s a problem.
Dreaming is very common under anaesthesia. Overhearing a murder plot- more a sign of a very active imagination.

Violent Women

Battered men aren’t taken very seriously. The week before the Ross Kemp/ Rebekah Wade story broke in 2005 – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4403026.stm – I was on a bus headed for Elephant and Castle in South London.

A couple talking in Greek were arguing, and understandably it was both uncomfortable and intriguing to nearby passengers.

While we stood waiting for a connecting bus the arguing continued. The man had some success in placating her but moments later she was hitting him several times about the head.

He looked around, deeply embarrassed, and after some hesitation walked off with his luggage in tow. She waited a few moments and then calmly followed.

Considering that I don’t speak Greek, I have no idea what the story was behind this particular incident. Of course I made a few unfounded guesses: perhaps he’d cheated, maybe he’d taunted her one too many times. It seemed all too easy to assume that he was responsible for the situation that caused such ire. One thing I am absolutely sure of was that there was no excuse for her behaviour.

The most telling part about reactions to this kind of violence was the response of the people standing around. In another incident, also on a bus, I found myself standing between and defending a drunken woman from her male partner who kept telling her to ‘shut up’, raising his fist and tightening her scarf so she couldn’t breathe.

In Elephant and Castle I wondered whether to say something. Others around me, mainly men, tutted and shook their heads; I couldn’t entirely tell if this was disapproval of her behaviour or that they couldn’t believe a man would allow a woman to do that to him, especially in public.

Everyone seemed to be happy to pretend it wasn’t happening. No one stepped in or said anything. I’m sure this wouldn’t have been the case had the roles been reversed and she had been a man attacking his female partner. It wouldn’t have passed as just another deeply uncomfortable incident on a London bus.

The general tone of the stories following the Kemp/Wade story and that of his fellow co-star, Steve McFadden, were of disapproving amusement. Given the actors’ roles as hard men on the BBC soap Eastenders this seemed inevitable. However, as a woman, I found it deeply hypocritical. If domestic violence is to be taken seriously against women it has to be a two-way street. I hope we will begin to take a more equal stance in our discussions of, and attitudes towards violence, against either sex.