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Costa Rica is world's greenest, happiest country

Costa Rica is the greenest and happiest country in the world, according to a new list that ranks nations by combining measures of their ecological footprint with the happiness of their citizens.

Britain is only halfway up the Happy Planet Index (HPI), calculated by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), in 74th place of 143 nations surveyed. The United States features in the 114th slot in the table. The top 10 is dominated by countries from Latin America, while African countries bulk out the bottom of the table.

The HPI measures how much of the Earth’s resources nations use and how long and happy a life their citizens enjoy as a result. First calculated in 2006, the second edition adds data on almost all the world’s countries and now covers 99% of the world’s population.

NEF says the HPI is a much better way of looking the success of countries than through standard measures of economic growth. The HPI shows, for example, that fast-growing economies such as the US, China and India were all greener and happier 20 years ago than they are today.

“The HPI suggests that the path we have been following is, without exception, unable to deliver all three goals: high life satisfaction, high life expectancy and ‘one-planet living’,” says Saamah Abdallah, NEF researcher and the report’s lead author. “Instead we need a new development model that delivers good lives that don’t cost the Earth for all.”

Costa Ricans top the list because they report the highest life satisfaction in the world, they live slightly longer than Americans, yet have an ecological footprint that is less than a quarter the size. The country only narrowly fails to achieve the goal of what NEF calls “one-planet living”: consuming its fair share of the Earth’s natural resources.

The report says the differences between nations show that it is possible to live long, happy lives with much smaller ecological footprints than the highest-consuming nations.

The new HPI also provides the first ever analysis of trends over time for what are supposedly the world’s most developed nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

OECD nations’ HPI scores plummeted between 1960 and the late 1970s. Although there have been some gains since then, HPI scores were still higher in 1961 than in 2005.

Life satisfaction and life expectancy combined have increased 15% over the 45-year period for those living in the rich nations, but it has come at the cost of a 72% rise in their ecological footprint. And the three largest countries in the world – China, India and the US, which are aggressively pursuing growth-based development models – have all seen their HPI scores drop in that time.

The highest placed western nation is the Netherlands. People there live on average over a year longer than people in the US, and have similar levels of life satisfaction – yet their per capita ecological footprint is less than half the size. The Netherlands is therefore over twice as environmentally efficient at achieving good lives as the US, Nef says.

The report sets out a “Happy Planet Charter” calling for an unprecedented collective global effort to develop a “new narrative” of human progress, encourage good lives that don’t cost the earth, and to reduce consumption in the highest-consuming nations – which it says is the biggest barrier to sustainable well being.

Are Cell Phone Numbers Going Public next month?

You may get a chain letter with the following entry in it:

——

“REMINDER…. all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sale calls..

YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS, even if the message is saved on your phone, you will be charged for the minutes to listen to it.

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222
It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number.”

——

This is speculation and has not been proven so far. There are no reports of any cell phone numbers going public anytime soon. However, it wouldn’t hurt to call the National DO NOT CALL registry anyway and add your number to it if you haven’t already.

Hackintosh maker rises from the dead

Okay. First off, who here thinks this is a real market phenomenon? I believe Apple wants this to occur. What better way to test the trendy waters of desktop computing! Anyway, this is entirely speculative unless there’s a huge demand for cheaper Mac desktops, a concept Apple does not dismiss so freely and is actively exploring.

___

Psystar, the Florida-based Hackintosher that’s been giving Apple fits for over a year, refuses to die.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (better known amongst fanbois as TUAW), published a copy of the upstart clonemaker’s latest newsletter, which announces to its customers that not only is the company preparing to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, but is also offering a new tower based on Intel’s quad-core, 2.66GHz Xeon W3520 at the bargain-basement price of $1,499.99.

We won’t recount all the twists and turns in the on-again, off-again legal battle between Psystar and Apple - after all, we did that just last week when Apple convinced a Florida bankruptcy court to allow Cupertino to continue its copyright-infringement case against the pesky Hackintosher.

But today’s news brings to mind the wisdom of ballpark sage Yogi Berra, who famously said: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

And it most certainly ain’t over - at least from Psystar’s point of view.

Psystar’s Open(7): $1,499.99 - display not included

The company’s newsletter, referring to their May filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, says that Psystar is “now ready to emerge and again battle Goliath.”

The Hackintosher’s latest weapon in this battle, dubbed the Open(7), is available on the company’s website (“In stock”) with either 6GB or 12GB of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM, and either 7,200rpm or 10,000rpm SATA2 drives. Apple’s Xeon 3500-series entry-level Mac Pro configuration, by comparison, tops out at 8GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM with 7,200 rpm drives, and starts at $2,499.

The Open(7), according to the newsletter, also benefits from “our innovative three-layer sound-deadening side panels and front door” which make the tower the company’s “most quiet computing configuration available.”

“Quiet,” though, is not a word easily used to describe Psystar’s attitude in this ongoing battle, as evidenced by the newsletter’s closing line. “When life gives you apples,” it reads, “make applesauce.”

Declare YOUR Independence

Quote of the Day: “It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God, it shall be my dying sentiment. Independence now, and independence forever.” - Daniel Webster, in an August 2, 1826 eulogy to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; both had died on July 4th.

Subject: Does the government have your consent on this July 4th?

Every Election Day tens of millions of Americans consent to be governed, at least in theory. The politicians constantly point back to the election as justification for the things they do. But is this really valid? What about all the people who now feel betrayed by the office-holder? What about all the people who…

* voted for the lesser evil or
* voted for candidates that lost or
* would have voted for “none of the above” if the option had been available or
* didn’t vote at all because they didn’t want to endorse or encourage any of the candidates?

Do elections really confer consent? We don’t think so.

What does confer consent? Silence.

If we don’t inform our elected representatives that we object to their policies, then we shouldn’t be surprised if they assume their election to high office implies consent to their actions.

Those who mostly favor what our government is doing can celebrate July 4th content in the knowledge that they’re getting what they want. But what about the rest of us?

A case can be made that the transgressions of our government today are vastly greater than those against which the Founders rebelled on July 4, 1776. If we applaud what they did then, we should be willing to emulate at least to a certain, peaceful extent. 

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence…

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Jefferson and the other Founders withdrew their consent and listed their reasons for doing so. Shouldn’t we do the same on this July 4th, and on every July 4th for as long as our government violates our inalienable rights?

You can peacefully state your discontent using a special, temporary campaign on DownsizeDC.org’s Educate the Powerful System. That campaign is titled, “Does the government have your consent on this July 4th?” 

Please use your personal comments to tell your Representatives in Congress that you don’t approve of the job they’re doing. Let them know that you’re tired of them expanding the government’s size, power, and expense far, far beyond what the Constitution provides.

Then, please encourage others to join you in making their Declaration. We’ll be pulling this campaign down in a few days, and getting back to the grind of fighting legislation.

And if you’re moved by this campaign, please Digg it on our blog.

If you’ve never used Digg before, registration is easy and free. Each Digg helps spread the word about DownsizeDC.org. That means a bigger army. And a bigger army means YOUR voice is better heard. You can join Digg here.

Thank you for being a part of the rapidly growing Downsize DC Army,

Jim Babka, President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

Israel 'wantonly destroyed Gaza'

Israel inflicted “wanton destruction” in the Gaza Strip during its 22-day war on the coastal enclave in December and January, Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group has said.

In a 117-page report released on Thursday, Amnesty cited evidence that Israeli troops put children and other civilians in harm’s way “by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions”.

Accusing Israel of “breaching laws of war”, Amnesty said: “Much of the destruction was wanton and deliberate, and was carried out in a manner and circumstances which indicated that it could not be justified on grounds of military necessity.”

The organisation also criticised Hamas, the movement in control of the territory, for rocket attacks on Israel, which it called “war crimes”.

Widney Brown, the senior director for international law and policy at Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday: “What we have is, in both cases, both sides violating the laws of war.

“These laws of war are intended to protect civilians and in this case neither side showed respect for the importance of protecting those civilians.”

‘Fear and panic’

Amnesty also accused Hamas and other armed groups of endangering the lives of civilians in Gaza by operating near their homes.

Although rockets fired by Palestinian fighters from the Gaza Strip rarely caused casualties, they often sowed fear and panic amongst Israeli citizens and their use was “indiscriminate and hence unlawful under international law,” the report said.

Amnesty said it found no evidence to support Israeli claims that Hamas fighters deliberately used civilians as “human shields” during the conflict.

About 1,400 Palestinians were killed in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, including 300 children and hundreds of innocent civilians, according to the report.

The figure is broadly in line with those from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza and the independent Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

Co-operation refused

The Israeli military put the Palestinian death toll at 1,166 of whom 295 were civilians.

Thirteen Israelis were killed, including three civilians, during the offensive Israel launched with the declared aim of curtailing cross-border rocket attacks.

Israel and Hamas have both rejected accusations of war crimes.

An inquiry conducted by the Israeli military found no evidence of crimes.

Israel has refused to co-operate with a United Nations inquiry currently gathering evidence into the war.

Israeli government officials said investigators were prejudiced against Israel from the outset.

Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain

Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality”. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These “sand avalanches” occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising. Earthquakes, avalanches and wildfires are also thought to behave like this, with periods of stability followed by catastrophic periods of instability that rearrange the system into a new, temporarily stable state.

Self-organised criticality has another defining feature: even though individual sand avalanches are impossible to predict, their overall distribution is regular. The avalanches are “scale invariant”, which means that avalanches of all possible sizes occur. They also follow a “power law” distribution, which means bigger avalanches happen less often than smaller avalanches, according to a strict mathematical ratio. Earthquakes offer the best real-world example. Quakes of magnitude 5.0 on the Richter scale happen 10 times as often as quakes of magnitude 6.0, and 100 times as often as quakes of magnitude 7.0.

These are purely physical systems, but the brain has much in common with them. Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - “avalanches” of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable.

It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain’s ability to transmit information and solve problems. “Lying at the critical point allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

The idea that the brain might be fundamentally disordered in some way first emerged in the late 1980s, when physicists working on chaos theory - then a relatively new branch of science - suggested it might help explain how the brain works.

The focus at that time was something called deterministic chaos, in which a small perturbation can lead to a huge change in the system - the famous “butterfly effect”. That would make the brain unpredictable but not actually random, because the butterfly effect is a phenomenon of physical laws that do not depend on chance. Researchers built elaborate computational models to test the idea, but unfortunately they did not behave like real brains. “Although the results were beautiful and elegant, models based on deterministic chaos just didn’t seem applicable when looking at the human brain,” says Karl Friston, a neuroscientist at University College London.

In the 1990s, it emerged that the brain generates random noise, and hence cannot be described by deterministic chaos. When neuroscientists incorporated this randomness into their models, they found that it created systems on the border between order and disorder - self-organised criticality.

More recently, experiments have confirmed that these models accurately describe what real brain tissue does. They build on the observation that when a single neuron fires, it can trigger its neighbours to fire too, causing a cascade or avalanche of activity that can propagate across small networks of brain cells. This results in alternating periods of quiescence and activity - remarkably like the build-up and collapse of a sand pile.

Neural avalanches

In 2003, John Beggs of Indiana University in Bloomington began investigating spontaneous electrical activity in thin slices of rat brain tissue. He found that these neural avalanches are scale invariant and that their size obeys a power law. Importantly, the ratio of large to small avalanches fit the predictions of the computational models that had first suggested that the brain might be in a state of self-organised criticality (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 23, p 11167).

To investigate further, Beggs’s team measured how many other neurons a single cell in a slice of rat brain activates, on average, when it fires. They followed this line of enquiry because another property of self-organised criticality is that each event, on average, triggers only one other. In forest fires, for example, each burning tree sets alight one other tree on average - that’s why fires keep going, but also why whole forests don’t catch fire all at once.

Sure enough, the team found that each neuron triggered on average only one other. A value much greater than one would lead to a chaotic system, because any small perturbations in the electrical activity would soon be amplified, as in the butterfly effect. “It would be the equivalent of an epileptic seizure,” says Beggs. If the value was much lower than one, on the other hand, the avalanche would soon die out.

Beggs’s work provides good evidence that self-organised criticality is important on the level of small networks of neurons. But what about on a larger scale? More recently, it has become clear that brain activity also shows signs of self-organised criticality on a larger scale.

As it processes information, the brain often synchronises large groups of neurons to fire at the same frequency, a process called “phase-locking”. Like broadcasting different radio stations at different frequencies, this allows different “task forces” of neurons to communicate among themselves without interference from others.

The brain also constantly reorganises its task forces, so the stable periods of phase-locking are interspersed with unstable periods in which the neurons fire out of sync in a blizzard of activity. This, again, is reminiscent of a sand pile. Could it be another example of self-organised criticality in the brain?

In 2006, Meyer-Lindenberg and his team made the first stab at answering that question. They used brain scans to map the connections between regions of the human brain and discovered that they form a “small-world network” - exactly the right architecture to support self-organised criticality.

Small-world networks lie somewhere between regular networks, where each node is connected to its nearest neighbours, and random networks, which have no regular structure but many long-distance connections between nodes at opposite sides of the network (see diagram). Small-world networks take the most useful aspects of both systems. In places, the nodes have many connections with their neighbours, but the network also contains random and often long links between nodes that are very far away from one another.

For the brain, it’s the perfect compromise. One of the characteristics of small-world networks is that you can communicate to any other part of the network through just a few nodes - the “six degrees of separation” reputed to link any two people in the world. In the brain, the number is 13.

Meyer-Lindenberg created a computer simulation of a small-world network with 13 degrees of separation. Each node was represented by an electrical oscillator that approximated a neuron’s activity. The results confirmed that the brain has just the right architecture for its activity to sit on the tipping point between order and disorder, although the team didn’t measure neural activity itself (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 19518).

That clinching evidence arrived earlier this year, when Ed Bullmore of the University of Cambridge and his team used brain scanners to record neural activity in 19 human volunteers. They looked at the entire range of brainwave frequencies, from 0.05 hertz all the way up to 125 hertz, across 200 different regions of the brain.

Power laws again

The team found that the duration both of phase-locking and unstable resynchronisation periods followed a power-law distribution. Crucially, this was true at all frequencies, which means the phenomenon is scale invariant - the other key criterion for self-organised criticality.

What’s more, when the team tried to reproduce the activity they saw in the volunteers’ brains in computer models, they found that they could only do so if the models were in a state of self-organised criticality (PLoS Computational Biology, vol 5, p e1000314). “The models only showed similar patterns of synchronisation to the brain when they were in the critical state,” says Bullmore.

The work of Bullmore’s team is compelling evidence that self-organised criticality is an essential property of brain activity, says neuroscientist David Liley at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, who has worked on computational models of chaos in the brain.

But why should that be? Perhaps because self-organised criticality is the perfect starting point for many of the brain’s functions.

The neuronal avalanches that Beggs investigated, for example, are perfect for transmitting information across the brain. If the brain was in a more stable state, these avalanches would die out before the message had been transmitted. If it was chaotic, each avalanche could swamp the brain.

At the critical point, however, you get maximum transmission with minimum risk of descending into chaos. “One of the advantages of self-organised criticality is that the avalanches can propagate over many links,” says Beggs. “You can have very long chains that won’t blow up on you.”

Self-organised criticality also appears to allow the brain to adapt to new situations, by quickly rearranging which neurons are synchronised to a particular frequency. “The closer we get to the boundary of instability, the more quickly a particular stimulus will send the brain into a new state,” says Liley.

It may also play a role in memory. Beggs’s team noticed that certain chains of neurons would fire repeatedly in avalanches, sometimes over several hours (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 24, p 5216). Because an entire chain can be triggered by the firing of one neuron, these chains could be the stuff of memory, argues Beggs: memories may come to mind unexpectedly because a neuron fires randomly or could be triggered unpredictably by a neuronal avalanche.

The balance between phase-locking and instability within the brain has also been linked to intelligence - at least, to IQ. Last year, Robert Thatcher from the University of South Florida in Tampa made EEG measurements of 17 children, aged between 5 and 17 years, who also performed an IQ test.

He found that the length of time the children’s brains spent in both the stable phase-locked states and the unstable phase-shifting states correlated with their IQ scores. For example, phase shifts typically last 55 milliseconds, but an additional 1 millisecond seemed to add as many as 20 points to the child’s IQ. A shorter time in the stable phase-locked state also corresponded with greater intelligence - with a difference of 1 millisecond adding 4.6 IQ points to a child’s score (NeuroImage, vol 42, p 1639).

Thatcher says this is because a longer phase shift allows the brain to recruit many more neurons for the problem at hand. “It’s like casting a net and capturing as many neurons as possible at any one time,” he says. The result is a greater overall processing power that contributes to higher intelligence.

Hovering on the edge of chaos provides brains with their amazing capacity to process information and rapidly adapt to our ever-changing environment, but what happens if we stray either side of the boundary? The most obvious assumption would be that all of us are a short step away from mental illness. Meyer-Lindenberg suggests that schizophrenia may be caused by parts of the brain straying away from the critical point. However, for now that is purely speculative.

Thatcher, meanwhile, has found that certain regions in the brains of people with autism spend less time than average in the unstable, phase-shifting states. These abnormalities reduce the capacity to process information and, suggestively, are found only in the regions associated with social behaviour. “These regions have shifted from chaos to more stable activity,” he says. The work might also help us understand epilepsy better: in an epileptic fit, the brain has a tendency to suddenly fire synchronously, and deviation from the critical point could explain this.

“They say it’s a fine line between genius and madness,” says Liley. “Maybe we’re finally beginning to understand the wisdom of this statement.”

by David Robson