/ Social Commentary

Links to Make You a Smarter, Better Person

That’s a lot of gas:

If traffic-timing systems were updated using conventional methods, the US could cut fuel consumption by up to 10 percent – about 17 billion gallons a year, the National Transportation Operations Coalition found in its 2007 traffic-signal report card. (Emissions also would be by cut more by than 20 percent.) If Park’s hyper-efficient micro-model traffic-timing method were widely applied, another 1 billion to 2.5 billion gallons could be saved. (Link)

Women & Math, two great tastes that taste great together:

The researchers, noted, however, that the math gap wasn’t consistent between countries. For example, it was nearly twice as large as the average in Turkey, while Icelandic girls outscored males by roughly 2 percent. The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females. Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Sweden score very high on gender equality measures; in these nations, the gender gap on math performance is extremely small. In contrast, nations at the other end of the spectrum, such as Turkey and Korea, had the largest gender gap. The correlations between gender equality and math scores held up under a statistical test designed to catch spurious associations. The authors even checked out the possibility of genetic effects not linked to the Y chromosome by examining whether genetic similarity between various European populations could account for these differences, but they found that it could not. (Link)

Sell you? We’re not trying to sell you anything! Really. Truly.

The current issue of Advertising Age profiles Bridge Worldwide, a Cincinnati-based online advertising firm that specializes in what it calls “marketing with meaning.”For ConAgra, Bridge designed the “Start Making Choices” website, which “conveys nutrition, exercise and other well-being tips from cardiologist James Rippe … as it weaves in messages and sponsorship from the company’s Healthy Choice, Eggbeaters, Hunt’s Orville Redenbacher and Pam brands.” To promote Abbott Laboratories‘ Glucerna brand products for diabetics, the firm created a “Diabetes Control for Life” program that offers food and health tips. Bridge says the program helps “participants lose weight and have better blood-sugar management,” while their “Glucerna product consumption increases ninefold.” (Link)

Watch as governments lick the boots of the Entertainment Industry! Marvel at the Destruction of Personal Rights!! Gasp at the Idiocy of Those in Power!!!

The U.S. is exporting to the rest of the world a level of naked, sweaty terror about piracy that goes beyond legitimate concerns about, say, massive counterfeiting operations or phony prescription drugs, and truly does threaten the individual rights of consumers and their media. And they’ve now convinced other countries to plot some secret worldwide agreement that will potentially judge all of us as criminals without any sort of trial and without our input at all. That’s unacceptable. (Link)

See, you’re a better person already! I like you so much more than when you first started reading this post. In fact, don’t tell the other readers, but the truth is, I like you the best.

On this day..