A thirty-year-old book reported that “of all the cities that had been flooded, burned, sacked, leveled by earthquake, buried in lava, or in some way or another destroyed worldwide between 1100 and 1800, only a few dozen had been permanently abandoned. Cities, in other words, tend to get rebuilt no matter what.We’ve been assured that New Orleans will, too. But, after what promises to be a Herculean clean-up operation, what will the new New Orleans look like? How much will it resemble its antediluvian self?”
Category: ideas
A Way For The Arts To Help Hurricane Relief
I am writing from Swine Palace, the professional theatre company affiliated with the Louisiana State University Department of Theatre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I am hoping you can pass on to your readers information regarding an arts-related unified disaster relief effort. As the reports from New Orleans continue to come in, it is clear that South Louisiana faces a dire situation as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Here in Baton Rouge, we are expecting our population to double in the next few days as more evacuees and displaced citizens are relocated here.
Currently, Swine Palace is working on a number of ways to service the many evacuees in Baton Rouge and further participate in the disaster relief efforts. As such, we would like to appeal to our fellow arts organizations across the country to participate in what we are calling the Arts United for Hurricane Relief program. We are asking that organizations consider ways to solicit hurricane relief donations. Some of the ways that they might participate is by placing a donation jar in the their lobby, including an insert or ad in the program, including a link on their website or possibly donating the proceeds of a special performance. There are a variety of funds to which the proceeds can be donated including the American Red Cross (www.redcross.org), The Hurricane Katrina Displaced Residents Fund or the Hurricane Katrina New Orleans Recovery Fund both of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation (www.braf.org) or the Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund of the LSU Foundation. We are certainly not asking that any organization jeopardize their own funding efforts, but any assistance would be greatly appreciated. We are currently setting-up a link on our website (www.swinepalace.org) which will provide additional information, links and downloads as well as a list of all the organizations that participate. In the meantime, organizations who would like to participate can contact me at 225-578-9274 or ksosno1@lsu.edu
Thank you for your assistance.
Kristin Sosnowsky
Managing Director
Swine Palace Productions
Reilly Theatre
Tower Dr. – LSU
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Study: Those Scientific Studies? Half Of ‘Em Are Wrong
A new study says that “problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.” It found that “small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.”
A Statistical Analysis Of Every US Supreme Court Decision
A researcher plugged in 26,000 opinions issued by the Supreme Court between the early 19th century and the present day into his computer. “He treated each of these cases as a node and each citation from one case to another as a link. The result was a complicated web resembling a map of cities linked by dozens of airlines. He found the most important opinions, at least judged by how many times they were cited, by working out which nodes were likeliest to fall on the shortest paths between two other nodes. Intriguingly, the cases mostly come from an advanced and esoteric subject…
US Cities Say: Wi-Fi For All
Hundreds of US cities are working on offering wi-fi internet service as basic city service. “A number of factors have come together to create this marriage of civic activism and a hot technology. First, there’s the decreased cost of key wireless hardware and software components. Jupiter Research estimates that citywide systems will cost $150,000 per square mile for five years of operation. Neff puts it lower, though, saying her costs in Philadelphia were closer to $70,000-100,000 per square mile. Second, broadband penetration in the United States rose above 50 percent in fall 2004, for the first time, which introduced the concept of broadband as a critical service.”
A Placebo That Causes Physical Change
The placebo effect has long fascinated researchers. A new study says that the placebo effect might not be all in your head. “The mere belief that they had received a pain killer was enough to release the brain’s natural painkilling endorphins in the patients tested, scientists say.”
Sleep Deprived – What We Lose
“Most of us now sleep less than people did a century ago, or even 50 years ago. The National Sleep Foundation’s 2005 poll showed adult Americans averaging 6.8 hours of sleep on weeknights — more than an hour less than they need. Not only how much sleep, but when people sleep has changed. In the United States, six to eight million shift workers toil regularly at night, disrupting sleep patterns in ways that are not necessarily amenable to adaptation.” The question is: What are we losing by sleeping less?
Camille Paglia Unloads On Culture
“We are getting worse writing, worse art. Part of the reason for the much worse writing is that young people have so many other distractions in terms of their time—so many things to do, that reading books has just shriveled. They are assigned books, but few kids read books for pleasure. Too much else is going on. Now I’m a champion of the web—I began writing for Salon in 1995 from the first issue on. But the style of the web, not only the surfing skimming style that you learn—dash, dash—you absorb information not by reading whole sentences. It’s flash, flash, flash. Email, blog, everything is going fast, fast, fast. So the quality of language has obviously degenerated. It’s obvious.”
A Law That Allows Second-Guessing Science
“The five-year-old Data Quality Act is a below-the-radar legislative device that defenders of industry have increasingly relied upon to attack all range of scientific studies whose results or implications they disagree with, from government global warming reports to cancer research using animal subjects. On its face, the act merely seeks to ensure the ‘quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity’ of government information. In practice, as interpreted by the Bush administration, it creates an unprecedented and cumbersome process that saddles agencies with a new workload while empowering businesses to challenge not just government regulations–something they could do anyway–but scientific information that could potentially lead to regulation somewhere down the road.”
IQ And The Sexes
“A major new study reports that, up to the age of 14, there was no difference between the IQs of boys and girls. But beyond that age and into adulthood there is a difference of five points, which is small but it can have important implications. As intelligence scores among the study group rose, the academics say they found a widening gap between the sexes. There were twice as many men with IQ scores of 125, for example, a level said to correspond with people getting first-class degrees. At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.”