Reviews Archives - Page 4 of 12

Flame retardants or fertility retardants?

If you watched The Story of Stuff, you might have been aware of the example of the tremendous amount of chemicals in many, if not all, of the consumer products we use. Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in pillows were featured as an example of the excessive chemical pollution in our lives. The Economist last month featured an article about flame retardants that twins nicely with what The Story of Stuff has covered.

In the article, polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs), a form of brominated flame retardants, are used to reduce “the risk of ignition” but it is now so widespread that 97% of Americans have traces of it in their bodies. And it is suggested that these chemicals have effects on our health, such as in terms of fertility. In a study done in California, it appears that with each tenfold increase in PBDE concentration in the body one’s probability of becoming pregant decreases.

More studies are now underway to determine their effects, and these studies, once verified, would be important and may be perhaps groundbreaking, just like how DDT transformed overnight from being an ally in fighting pests to being a pest in itself. Will we be able to do away with BFRs? Will BFRs, whose concentrations have been doubling in our bodies every 4-6 years since the 1970s, do irreversible damage to our health? Unfortunately, only time will tell.

Meanwhile, some contrasting arguments coming from the environmentalists and the industrial experts. Greenpeace makes arguments for the phasing out of BFRs from our lives but will it be this easy? On the other hand Bromine Science and Environment Forum (BSEF) claims that BFRs are not as dangerous as the environmentalists make them out to be. So are the industrial experts, consisting of BFR manufacturers, telling the truth or are they themselves unaware of the full impact of their products?

Open Musings

Popular Science featured an article about mind-reading technology; it describes the development of technologies and computing that helps to reconstruct images from purely information extracted from brain scans. That is pretty amazing since it is basically deciphering the code used to contain information in our minds and then trying to build up the information that is stored in the codes.

What I was wondering is if these images reconstructed actually reflects any sort of thoughts by the person. In other words, has the brain processed these images at all? In the Awareness Tests that was part of a campaign by Transport for London to raise awareness of presence of cyclist to other road users, you realise that you do not see some things that you don’t focus on in an image sequence. The question then, is whether the brain really didn’t see the images or it merely didn’t process it. Would these mind-reading technology at this moment be showing those details or parts that we didn’t notice?

Or perhaps they need to improve the technology before they can answer such questions; then the complex ethical problems will set in. Philosophy can’t work on an ethical problem until infringing it becomes a real possibility. Even then, they almost never help us get an answer. So meanwhile we’ll just think and wait around.

The Story of Stuff

For something animated but no less thought-provoking for the Chinese New Year, a video clip produced by Annie Leonard about how our “stuff” (i.e. consumer goods) are produced and the dangers that have come associated with the production and consumption of these goods. I was first introduced to this video in Junior College by my Geography teacher, and I found it rather animating, enlightening and inspirational, as well as rather easy to digest yet still sufficiently thought-provoking.

The Story of Stuff is a 20 minute video that can be watched on YouTube as well as downloaded from the website for future broadcasts, as I did. Do watch because it alerts you about the behind-the-scenes situation which you have never really thought about when you do shopping. While her perspective is that of government-bashing and firm-bashing, it is still worthy of considering. It is suitable for the kids though they will probably need to be guided along to fully understand the video considering that she uses quite a bit of jargon that might be slightly inaccessible to the young.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

This video probably comes too late to remind you about what you buy for Chinese New Year, but still, better late than never. Happy Lunar New Year!

Puzzles & Patience

I finally borrowed a copy of William Poundstone’s How Would You Move Mount Fuji from the library the other day and I was doing my little research on logical thinking puzzles and such when I stumbled upon the game of Petals Around the Rose. It is interesting how this puzzle is related to Bill Gates in his young, start-up days and that Bill have eventually gone on to make use of puzzles to decide whether to hire a person as described in Poundstone’s book.

The three little ‘rules’ is that the name of the game is ‘Petals Around the Rose’ (and this is significant), that the answer is always even, and that anyone who gets the logic of the game can only announce and answer and not try to verify his logic. Getting the answer 6 times in a row is a sign that one has become a Potentate of the Rose (the one who knows the solution).

The basics of the game as well as a computer programme to let you try figure out the answer to this little puzzle can be found here.

I initially wanted to work it out myself but then curiosity as to whether anyone would put up an answer online overwhelmed me and after I did a search, it appears that Wikipedia is indeed an amazing all purpose reference source. I shall not provide the link here lest you are like me. Try your best to figure out the answer!

State & Markets

While reading about Bihar’s Recovery, it dawned on me the importance of basic government structures in an economy. This sort of realisation had come to me while I was reading about the Haiti crisis and I really think all students of Economics should remind ourselves of the government structures working in the background implied in what we call a ‘Free Market’.

As observed from the article on Bihar, which interestingly is where the Buddha gained enlightenment (according to historical records), the state’s investment in infrastructure, maintaining order, a culture that respect the rights of all citizens (that can only be created from top down) often influenced very much by the enforcement of laws, as well as giving people freedom to pursue the market activities.

When we argue about the importance of not having government interventions in markets, and that state presence should only emerge in the case of market failures, we often neglect the notion that a government is in place in the background to honour the legal tender and anarchy is not the ruling ideology of the day. Trust in the free market is also important and it is upheld by law and order, which once again, falls on the government. As we’ve seen from the earthquake in Haiti, more room for market and less state is not always a good thing. Yet after acknowledging the need for a state we want to combat its advancement into various aspects of society that are usually governed by culture or self-organizing.

Maybe working on the margins of that would help Bihar discover this balance of state and market spaces.

Life as a Proletariat

Paradise for the Proles

Slightly less than three-quarter of a person’s lifespan nowadays is spent on work and so it is really important to love your work. And while internal motivation is important at sustaining you, the environment that you work in, the boss that you work for and the people you work with are all going to affect the way you see your work.

Of all these factors, your employers can mould quite a substantial portion of your experience. They might not control working culture but they have a great influence over it; they might not be able to dictate your life but they can create circumstances to urge you to do as they see fit. That makes choosing your employers important and the recent ranking published by Fortune Magazine is particularly valuable for that purpose.

SAS top that list of ‘2010 Best Companies To Work For’. You can see from the perks how the employer really ‘cares’ in the real sense (no sarcasm intended). Although the title of this entry is somewhat demeaning, I do believe that treating your worker well makes great business sense. In fact sometimes I think that there should be Human Resource Consultancies that help check companies’ books and then find out how to improve performance through treating workers better – the military around the world are in need of that. Maybe there’s already such firms and they probably borrow tricks from SAS as well.

So if you’re intrigued by Google and want to work for them, maybe you should consider SAS if you treasure job security above remuneration.

Con-nect-working

Social networks have been rising for some time now. And while they initially started out as mere toys for youngsters, there have been talks of higher degrees of commercialization, how these networks will change the lifestyle of people, and so on. Now that the change has taken place somewhat, it makes sense for The Economist to tabulate some of the impacts these networks have brought in.

To begin, these networks have definitely became an important way people communicate; however mundane or skimpy each little piece of content may be, they are viewed by many people within your network and it broadcasts bits of information about you that couldn’t have been captured in the yesteryears. This is true for the comments you cast, the status messages you post, the photos and videos you uploaded and all the social games that you play. Although online social networks remain essentially much like a bulletin board (except viewership ability of contents are more strictly controlled and with richer content) and thus does little to enrich people’s ability to do real networking, it does a wonderful job at augmenting our real relationships.

This strong link with the real world is a great strength for online social networks. Websites are viewed as corporate facades that give little information about the reality of the companies. On the other hand, the pages for these firms on social networking sites are viewed as better avenues for firms to communicates with their customers. Likewise, a corporate site announcement of a promotion the company is offering does less to boost sales compared to a tweet which might have much more followers.

That is the free advertising service that sites like Twitter and Facebook might offer, which brings us to the question of how money is being made on such networks. A peach of an opportunity, an article in The Economist special report on social networks gives us an idea what are the businesses that taps into the plumbing of social network connections and thriving. For all the talk about connecting with friends, being entertained by your online pets, or having a good laugh from the video your friend has shared, businesses might be the greatest benefactor of this trend.

Jobs’ Book

My sister asked me if The Economist would publish an article on Apple whenever they introduce a new product. I told her that they would if they anticipate that the product Apple produces is sufficiently influential or even revolutionizing. And perhaps that should be the case for iPad, where The Economist thinks is an attempt at transforming 3 industries at one time.

Their full article on the iPad propels their point further, discussing how the product would have a profound impact on the way digital content and media is consumed in the market and how this would alter the economics of digitizing newspapers. While there are many limitations to this product, Apple have traditionally been quick to modify their products to suit the way users use them while incorporating more powerful functions. A quick review of the historical revisions of the iPod before it eventually become the current iPod Touch shows how Apple pulls off their innovation along with changes in consumer preferences while upgrading their product.

We know that something big will be happening when the iPad is available on the market but it’s still too early to decide what it is. For now, we wait.

Gardening in School – Education or Distraction?

I chanced upon a very interesting article by Gloria Dawson on The Daily Green. This phenomenon is not so much seen in Singapore than in the United States, where gardening in schools was introduced and encouraged, in particular by US First Lady Michelle Obama, to raise students’ interests in gardening, nurture green thumbs as well as environmentalism and encourage healthy eating.

I thought such initiatives were pretty self-explanatory in terms of benefits, are pretty much non-political and non-debatable. Dawson had however found an article by a Caitlin Flanagan that expressed much disdain for school gardens, with the argument that “schools are taking kids out of the classroom” when they need to spend more time in the classroom to learn and be educated on the basics, and then eventually climb the educational system. It was something I never really thought about given Singapore’s higher-quality educational system, but in America where educational standards are dropping and schools struggle to keep students interested, school gardens may backfire in their intentions as well.

Statistics so far appear to indicate that school gardens have somehow helped boost grades and “understanding of lessons”, probably indirect effects of being involved in a garden. It might perhaps create interest in staying in school, or create opportunities to pick up skills such as organisation, leadership and responsibility which would be useful both in lessons and outside of lessons. Unfortunately, the school gardens initiative has caught on with political posturing and people are lambasting the educational system and those who implement the initiative. At least Flanagan’s arguments were not exactly without merit, but it appears that Dawson is implicitly pointing fingers at politicians who are blaming the school gardens initiative to their advantage.

There’s really plenty to learn from school gardens, in terms of skills and knowledge. Where your food comes from, how to eat healthily; children need to know given that they now live in a very much urban society where food is convenient and global and they do not know where their food comes from, what they should eat, how much they should eat and so on. Again, I am reminded of the book ‘The End of Food’ by Paul Roberts that I am currently reading about and will review in due time. Links to other articles about the school gardens argument are in The Daily Green article.