Wednesday, November 02, 2005
The Ombudsmen's Annual Report has lashed the Government for its suppression of official information, with the Dominion Post labelling it as subverting democracy. The report says: "We feel that holders of official information need to be reminded that by denying citizens access to information they are in fact denying those same citizens their right to participate in democratic processes."
Further to the item about some of the oddball "spokesmanships" the various political parties have come up with, Lyndon Hood has some ideas for other creative ministerial posts.
Catholic bishops say that while the Church is suffering from a worldwide shortage of priests, allowing marriage is not the answer. Instead, the 250 prelates meeting in the Vatican, reaffirmed the principle of celibacy within the clergy. They also called on lawmakers to protect marriage and the family, and outlaw abortion and euthanasia. Their three-week gathering or synod, which closed with 50 proposals, was the first since Pope Benedict's election.
Nearly a year after local Muslims first asked that an Islamic holiday be recognized by the school district - just like Yom Kippur for Jews and Good Friday for Christians - Hillsborough School (Florida) board members have voted to end vacation days for all religious holidays. The board approved a 2006-07 calendar that substitutes three secular vacation days for three Christian and Jewish holidays.
Religious belief may not only be good for our spiritual health, it may also bring positive effects for the body. "With certain regularity, studies appear on the scene indicating that prayer or regular participation in religious services can assist believers' health. Not everyone agrees with such studies. Some researchers point to methodological failures in various studies that purport to show a correlation between religion and health benefits. Even the studies themselves warn that it is hard to pinpoint the precise relationship between the two. Still, the number of reports showing positive effects is substantial.
The queen of occult writing has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding God — and writing her most daring book yet, a life of the young Jesus.
Ray Kurzweil the developing integration of human and computer will create a "Human 2.0". "We are making exponential progress in every type of information technology. Moreover, virtually all technologies are becoming information technologies. We can reliably predict that in the not too distant future we will reach what is known as "The Singularity". This is a time when the pace of technological change will be so rapid and its impact so deep that human life will be irreversibly transformed. We will be able to reprogram our biology, and ultimately transcend it. The result will be an intimate merger between ourselves and the technology we create."
Further to the item about some of the oddball "spokesmanships" the various political parties have come up with, Lyndon Hood has some ideas for other creative ministerial posts.
Catholic bishops say that while the Church is suffering from a worldwide shortage of priests, allowing marriage is not the answer. Instead, the 250 prelates meeting in the Vatican, reaffirmed the principle of celibacy within the clergy. They also called on lawmakers to protect marriage and the family, and outlaw abortion and euthanasia. Their three-week gathering or synod, which closed with 50 proposals, was the first since Pope Benedict's election.
Nearly a year after local Muslims first asked that an Islamic holiday be recognized by the school district - just like Yom Kippur for Jews and Good Friday for Christians - Hillsborough School (Florida) board members have voted to end vacation days for all religious holidays. The board approved a 2006-07 calendar that substitutes three secular vacation days for three Christian and Jewish holidays.
Religious belief may not only be good for our spiritual health, it may also bring positive effects for the body. "With certain regularity, studies appear on the scene indicating that prayer or regular participation in religious services can assist believers' health. Not everyone agrees with such studies. Some researchers point to methodological failures in various studies that purport to show a correlation between religion and health benefits. Even the studies themselves warn that it is hard to pinpoint the precise relationship between the two. Still, the number of reports showing positive effects is substantial.
The queen of occult writing has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding God — and writing her most daring book yet, a life of the young Jesus.
Ray Kurzweil the developing integration of human and computer will create a "Human 2.0". "We are making exponential progress in every type of information technology. Moreover, virtually all technologies are becoming information technologies. We can reliably predict that in the not too distant future we will reach what is known as "The Singularity". This is a time when the pace of technological change will be so rapid and its impact so deep that human life will be irreversibly transformed. We will be able to reprogram our biology, and ultimately transcend it. The result will be an intimate merger between ourselves and the technology we create."
Monday, October 31, 2005
A larger than usual briefing today, because of several days away last week. Apologies if some is a bit passe now.
Proposed new Australian laws to punish sedition are raising a storm across the Tasman. The proposals appear to go further than either the USA or UK. For instance, it is suggested that anyone speaking against Australia from overseas is liable to prosecution. The legislation's final draft states authors of any published material which incites hatred against society will face seven years' jail, which means authors of websites will be liable.
However, the UK's Religious Hatred Bill that has been fiercely opposed by some sections of the church and mission groups has received a “crushing defeat” in the Lords. Peers voted by 260 to 111 to replace the Bill with text that tightens its scope severely and adds safeguards for freedom of speech. The scale of the defeat was lessened by the Government’s last-minute offer to review “difficult” areas of the Bill, The Times reports. Amendments presented by a cross-party coalition including former Lord Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, restricted offences to behaviour that was considered threatening and carried out with criminal intent. The rights to ridicule and criticise religion, as well as to proselytise would be upheld by the amendments.
Projections released by Statistics New Zealand show that one- parent families with children will number over 250,000 by 2021, according to Lindsay Mitchell, petitioner for a Parliamentary review of the DPB. "This represents 37 percent of all families with children, compared to 31 percent in 2001. One-parent families have, on average, the lowest weekly incomes in New Zealand. These projections confirm that more children are going to grow up in relative poverty and without fathers."
Two-parent families with children:
2001 445,800
2021 426,600
One-parent families with children:
2001 198,400
2021 254,000
Meanwhile, a series of studies on family structure and poverty just published in the journal The Future of Children reveal the social advantages of marriage. In its introduction to the issue, the journal, published by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, noted that roughly half of all US children born today are expected to live apart from a parent before they reach age 18. The numbers are even higher among African-American children. The decline in two-parent families has been closely linked with a rise in child poverty, the journal said. Moreover, the changes in marriage and the family "appear to be depriving children of such documented benefits of marriage as better physical and emotional health and greater socioeconomic attainment." Moreover, children in cohabiting households, although they tend to fare better economically than those in lone-parent households, are worse off than those in married-parent households. The economic advantages of marriage could be even greater if it were not for a fiscal system that in many cases penalizes married couples. Debate over the differing results of studies on the wellbeing of children abounds, but a recent meta-analysis, based on 67 studies conducted during the 1990s, found that children with divorced parents, on average, scored significantly lower on various measures of well-being than did youngsters with continuously married parents.
"While suggestions on what should be done to improve the [South Auckland street gangs] situation have been free flowing, little has been said about the underlying causes of the problem. The reason is that it is no longer considered to be politically correct to discuss issues relating to personal responsibility, the home and the family. Yet the reality is that these are at the heart of the problem: children raised in stable, loving families, are more likely to join sports teams, rather than gangs. Any discussion with police or those who work with troubled youth will quickly identify that the largest proportion of them come from homes where their biological father is absent: children raised in families without a father, where there is inadequate supervision and a lack of socialisation, are far more likely to become involved in anti-social behaviour and crime, than those raised with a dad." ~ Muriel Newman
Goodness knows what silliness led National to appoint a spokesperson for Political Correctness Eradication. However, they are not the only ones to have strange portfolios. The Greens lead the way by far with spokespeople on: Animal Welfare; Energy Efficiency; Organics; and Sustainable Economics. Even better, they conned the government to having Rod Donald as a government spokesperson on Trade Waste!! The Government is doing its bit, with Ministers or spokespeople for Buy Kiwi Made; Disarmament and Arms Control (just who is NZ planning to Disarm or Control??); and Food Safety. There are some other oddities in the lists. NZ First has no spokesperson for Welfare or Social Development. National has appointed 3 people to focus on the Resource Management Act. (Are they planning a heavy attack on the RMA this term? It seems overkill otherwise.) And United Future, even with only 3 MPs, finds room for a spokesperson on Heritage, but not one on Police. The Maori Party have not released a list yet, while I presume ACT's two MPs will just box on to tackle anything in sight.
Prime Minister Helen Clark has told transsexual MP Georgina Beyer that her bill to protect transgender people from discrimination is "history", and Beyer blames a "climate of intolerance" for its demise.
More than two-thirds of countries in a recent survey showed serious levels of corruption. The Berlin-based organization Transparency International's latest annual report, the Corruption Perceptions Index 2005, ranks countries on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being clean, in terms how corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians. The score is awarded after studying data from surveys and reflects the views of businesspeople and analysts, including local experts in the countries evaluated. Of the 159 countries surveyed, no fewer than 113 scored less than 5 out of 10, and 70 scored less than 3. "It is noteworthy that many of the lowest scoring countries on the index are also among the poorest," commented Transparency International Chairman Peter Eigen during the report's launch.
There are grounds to believe some babies are being aborted unnecessarily because their parents are given misleading information about abnormalities in the foetus. According to papers presented at a Montreal conference of US and Canadian fertility doctors, a technique for detecting abnormalities in embryos may have been giving misleading results. In pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), one cell from an eight-cell embryo is extracted and examined for abnormalities. If an embryo appears to be healthy, it is implanted in the mother's womb. If not, it is usually discarded. However, it now appears that defective embryos are able to correct defects as they mature. One American experiment discovered that about half of the cells in "defective" embryos were normal by the blastocyst stage. This suggested to the fertility specialists that many embryos discarded as defective could have developed into healthy babies.
~ Nature, Oct 20 (not yet available online
Astonishing new polling data shows what Americans really think about science. For example, only 14 percent believe that embryonic stem-cell research "holds the greatest promise for discovering new treatments for disease, compared to other types of stem cell research?" When it comes to cloning, the results are even stronger.According to the poll, 81 percent oppose cloning as such. If cloning is done for research on disease treatments, 51 percent are still opposed, with 43 percent in favor. But the strangest result is this: If it is specified that the goal of the cloning research is to get embryonic stem cells, support for research cloning goes down and opposition goes up. Support drops from 43 to 34 percent, and opposition goes up from 51 to 59 percent... The poll also asked people about evolution and intelligent design. Just for the record, only 15 percent believed that only evolution should be taught in public schools, while 73 percent thought that either intelligent design, creationism, or a combination of them and evolution should be offered.
While 85 percent believe that developments in science have helped to make society better (I wonder why that was not 100 percent; how can anyone disagree?), as many as 56 percent (versus 37 percent) agree that "scientific research doesn't pay enough attention to the moral values of society," and 52 percent (versus 41 percent) actually agree with the statement that "scientific research has created as many problems for society as solutions."
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/143/32.0.html
The poll itself is at:
http://www.vcu.edu/uns/Releases/2005/oct/102405a.html
"Wearing a headset, Associated Press business writer Yuri Kageyama leans to her left as she is remote-controlled by a technology that Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., Japan's top phone company, is developing during a demonstration near Tokyo. Called galvanic vestibular stimulation in scientific jargon, it means electricity is messing with the delicate nerve tissues inside the ear to maintain balance and make people move to the left or right against their will."
Proposed new Australian laws to punish sedition are raising a storm across the Tasman. The proposals appear to go further than either the USA or UK. For instance, it is suggested that anyone speaking against Australia from overseas is liable to prosecution. The legislation's final draft states authors of any published material which incites hatred against society will face seven years' jail, which means authors of websites will be liable.
However, the UK's Religious Hatred Bill that has been fiercely opposed by some sections of the church and mission groups has received a “crushing defeat” in the Lords. Peers voted by 260 to 111 to replace the Bill with text that tightens its scope severely and adds safeguards for freedom of speech. The scale of the defeat was lessened by the Government’s last-minute offer to review “difficult” areas of the Bill, The Times reports. Amendments presented by a cross-party coalition including former Lord Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, restricted offences to behaviour that was considered threatening and carried out with criminal intent. The rights to ridicule and criticise religion, as well as to proselytise would be upheld by the amendments.
Projections released by Statistics New Zealand show that one- parent families with children will number over 250,000 by 2021, according to Lindsay Mitchell, petitioner for a Parliamentary review of the DPB. "This represents 37 percent of all families with children, compared to 31 percent in 2001. One-parent families have, on average, the lowest weekly incomes in New Zealand. These projections confirm that more children are going to grow up in relative poverty and without fathers."
Two-parent families with children:
2001 445,800
2021 426,600
One-parent families with children:
2001 198,400
2021 254,000
Meanwhile, a series of studies on family structure and poverty just published in the journal The Future of Children reveal the social advantages of marriage. In its introduction to the issue, the journal, published by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, noted that roughly half of all US children born today are expected to live apart from a parent before they reach age 18. The numbers are even higher among African-American children. The decline in two-parent families has been closely linked with a rise in child poverty, the journal said. Moreover, the changes in marriage and the family "appear to be depriving children of such documented benefits of marriage as better physical and emotional health and greater socioeconomic attainment." Moreover, children in cohabiting households, although they tend to fare better economically than those in lone-parent households, are worse off than those in married-parent households. The economic advantages of marriage could be even greater if it were not for a fiscal system that in many cases penalizes married couples. Debate over the differing results of studies on the wellbeing of children abounds, but a recent meta-analysis, based on 67 studies conducted during the 1990s, found that children with divorced parents, on average, scored significantly lower on various measures of well-being than did youngsters with continuously married parents.
"While suggestions on what should be done to improve the [South Auckland street gangs] situation have been free flowing, little has been said about the underlying causes of the problem. The reason is that it is no longer considered to be politically correct to discuss issues relating to personal responsibility, the home and the family. Yet the reality is that these are at the heart of the problem: children raised in stable, loving families, are more likely to join sports teams, rather than gangs. Any discussion with police or those who work with troubled youth will quickly identify that the largest proportion of them come from homes where their biological father is absent: children raised in families without a father, where there is inadequate supervision and a lack of socialisation, are far more likely to become involved in anti-social behaviour and crime, than those raised with a dad." ~ Muriel Newman
Goodness knows what silliness led National to appoint a spokesperson for Political Correctness Eradication. However, they are not the only ones to have strange portfolios. The Greens lead the way by far with spokespeople on: Animal Welfare; Energy Efficiency; Organics; and Sustainable Economics. Even better, they conned the government to having Rod Donald as a government spokesperson on Trade Waste!! The Government is doing its bit, with Ministers or spokespeople for Buy Kiwi Made; Disarmament and Arms Control (just who is NZ planning to Disarm or Control??); and Food Safety. There are some other oddities in the lists. NZ First has no spokesperson for Welfare or Social Development. National has appointed 3 people to focus on the Resource Management Act. (Are they planning a heavy attack on the RMA this term? It seems overkill otherwise.) And United Future, even with only 3 MPs, finds room for a spokesperson on Heritage, but not one on Police. The Maori Party have not released a list yet, while I presume ACT's two MPs will just box on to tackle anything in sight.
Prime Minister Helen Clark has told transsexual MP Georgina Beyer that her bill to protect transgender people from discrimination is "history", and Beyer blames a "climate of intolerance" for its demise.
More than two-thirds of countries in a recent survey showed serious levels of corruption. The Berlin-based organization Transparency International's latest annual report, the Corruption Perceptions Index 2005, ranks countries on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being clean, in terms how corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians. The score is awarded after studying data from surveys and reflects the views of businesspeople and analysts, including local experts in the countries evaluated. Of the 159 countries surveyed, no fewer than 113 scored less than 5 out of 10, and 70 scored less than 3. "It is noteworthy that many of the lowest scoring countries on the index are also among the poorest," commented Transparency International Chairman Peter Eigen during the report's launch.
There are grounds to believe some babies are being aborted unnecessarily because their parents are given misleading information about abnormalities in the foetus. According to papers presented at a Montreal conference of US and Canadian fertility doctors, a technique for detecting abnormalities in embryos may have been giving misleading results. In pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), one cell from an eight-cell embryo is extracted and examined for abnormalities. If an embryo appears to be healthy, it is implanted in the mother's womb. If not, it is usually discarded. However, it now appears that defective embryos are able to correct defects as they mature. One American experiment discovered that about half of the cells in "defective" embryos were normal by the blastocyst stage. This suggested to the fertility specialists that many embryos discarded as defective could have developed into healthy babies.
~ Nature, Oct 20 (not yet available online
Astonishing new polling data shows what Americans really think about science. For example, only 14 percent believe that embryonic stem-cell research "holds the greatest promise for discovering new treatments for disease, compared to other types of stem cell research?" When it comes to cloning, the results are even stronger.According to the poll, 81 percent oppose cloning as such. If cloning is done for research on disease treatments, 51 percent are still opposed, with 43 percent in favor. But the strangest result is this: If it is specified that the goal of the cloning research is to get embryonic stem cells, support for research cloning goes down and opposition goes up. Support drops from 43 to 34 percent, and opposition goes up from 51 to 59 percent... The poll also asked people about evolution and intelligent design. Just for the record, only 15 percent believed that only evolution should be taught in public schools, while 73 percent thought that either intelligent design, creationism, or a combination of them and evolution should be offered.
While 85 percent believe that developments in science have helped to make society better (I wonder why that was not 100 percent; how can anyone disagree?), as many as 56 percent (versus 37 percent) agree that "scientific research doesn't pay enough attention to the moral values of society," and 52 percent (versus 41 percent) actually agree with the statement that "scientific research has created as many problems for society as solutions."
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/143/32.0.html
The poll itself is at:
http://www.vcu.edu/uns/Releases/2005/oct/102405a.html
"Wearing a headset, Associated Press business writer Yuri Kageyama leans to her left as she is remote-controlled by a technology that Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., Japan's top phone company, is developing during a demonstration near Tokyo. Called galvanic vestibular stimulation in scientific jargon, it means electricity is messing with the delicate nerve tissues inside the ear to maintain balance and make people move to the left or right against their will."
