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Monday, January 19, 2004
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 Denise Breton and Christoher Largent write: Ever since we’ve worked on The Paradigm Conspiracy, we’ve been digesting Alfie Kohn’s work on rewards and punishments. It’s revolutionary. Rewards and punishments—as every parent, teacher, employer, minister, and politician knows—are our culture’s most common mechanisms for social control. Whoever has the power to punish or reward has the power to control others—to assert power-over status. B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist psychology (reducing all behavior to stimulus-response dynamics) was only an academic formulation of the culture’s embrace of this device. Everywhere in our society and on most of the planet, the carrot-and-stick approach is accepted as an appropriate method for getting people to do what we want, birth to death. Not long ago, for instance, someone lectured us on how wonderful such an approach is, how it can produce perfectly behaved animals, children, and spouses—as long as we have the means to bribe or coerce them into the desired behavior. Alfie Kohn has collected mountains of research in his books—Punished By Rewards, No Contest, Beyond Discipline (a good, short summary), and What to Look for in a Classroom. We may also mention one of many technical scientific studies Kohn draws on in his books: Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s book, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. The jury is in that rewards and punishments are destructive to the human psyche. Nor does it take rocket science to understand why: 1)Rewards and punishments teach power-over relations. That’s the model. And when being on the receiving end of this model gets tiresome, we begin the mad race to be on top. 2)Rewards and punishments corrupt human relationships, starting with the relation between those "higher" and "lower" in the reward-punishment hierarchy. Those under can’t tell the truth to those above them for fear of how "bad news" might further reduce their underling status. Even more commonly, those above don’t want the truth to be told. A May 1999 Frontline on the military career of Admiral Leighton "Snuffy" Smith, for instance, featured Smith confessing that during the Vietnam War (when he was a pilot), his superior wouldn’t let him report that he had failed to achieve his bombing objective. The higher-ups didn’t want the truth; they wanted only "we’re winning the war" reports. 3)Rewards and punishments teach image management. Appearing to be good is more important than being good. ... and much more. (01/19/04)
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 ECO writes: Much of humanity has, over the past 2 thousand years at least, suffered from a severe disconnect from the earth and its natural systems due to both the influence of religious beliefs and the Global Monetocracy System. Heretofore, native cultures were closely aligned with earth systems as hunter-gatherers and as early agriculturists -- they understood clearly that the earth was their life support system and thus revered it. The result of our disconnect is a deep pathology called 'dissociation' the symptoms of which are: anxiety, stress, depression, and loss of contact with reality among others; and which manifest in a collective society as aggression in the form of addiction, war, terrorism, excessive consumption, loss of ethics, and disregard for human and earth values among other things. Our turn toward an increasingly artificial world denies us the nurture that we formerly obtained from earth culture. In fact, if we go back and review Jay Earley's model for social evolution with regard to the planetary crisis, we see much of the same hypothesis as he argues that certain ground qualities were inherent at the beginning of our social evolution, e.g., community, vitality, equality, belonging, and natural living. And that as we evolved over time, emergent qualities developed to give us greater power over the world, e.g., technology, rational thinking, and social structure (social systems in the form of governance, economics, education, religion, etc.) And, in the process, the ground qualities became subordinated to the emergent qualities, however, at the expense of our health and wholeness. In fact, if we really look at our situation today, The Global Monetocracy System, our form of economics in the modern world, along with technology clearly dominates our thinking and dictates our lifestyle. Since it so clearly deviates from what is 'healthy' in terms of earth and human values, the GMS is clearly an aberrant system to which we have become addicted. And, in so doing, we have created aberrant lifestyles. Money has clearly become the drug of choice for many. And, we've developed technology far beyond what is within our capacity to manage for our benefit in terms of the reality of today. (01/19/04)
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 BBC Health -- Scientists have developed a treatment which could prevent asthmatics' chests becoming clogged with mucus. Tests on mice who had asthma showed giving them a protein stopped the build-up of mucus in airways. Writing in Nature Medicine, North Carolina State University researchers say the treatment could help asthmatics and others with respiratory diseases More than 100 million people around the world have asthma, and around 18,000 die from the condition each year. Asthmatics experience recurrent attacks of wheezing and breathlessness as their airways narrow and secrete large amounts of mucus when they are exposed to an allergen, such as pollen or dust mites. The mucus can damage the airway lining, making patients more susceptible to bacterial infection and respiratory failure. A team led by Dr Kenneth Adler found a key molecule in mucus-making cells in the wall of the airways. They developed a protein called a MANS peptide which could block the action of the key molecule They tested the peptide on mice suffering from asthma-like symptoms - when they were exposed to an allergen, their airways swelled and the production of mucus increased fivefold. But it was found that giving the mice a single dose of the drug 15 minutes before an induced asthma attack, prevented the build-up of mucus. Asthmatics already use drugs that help relax the airways, but there are no medications for reducing mucus. (01/19/04)
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 BBC Environment -- Modern farming in Europe has reduced the numbers of 24 common bird species by a third in a quarter of a century, a report by European ornithologists says. The authors include staff of the UK's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and of BirdLife International. They say the declines were steepest in countries in north-west Europe, in the regions of most intensive agriculture. They say the 10 countries due to join the European Union on 1 May must learn from the example of its older members. The study on the population trends of wild birds, by the RSPB, BirdLife and the European Bird Census Council, is known as the farmland bird indicator. It includes information for 24 common and widespread species of farmland bird from 11 present members of the EU, five which will join in May 2004, and Norway and Switzerland. The indicator shows that across Europe, from Spain to Poland (including the UK), the species' numbers, including skylarks, lapwings and yellowhammers, have crashed by a third since 1980, and says this is because of intensive farming. The RSPB says: "These declines have been severest in countries in north-west Europe. In the UK, for example, between 1970 and 1999, the skylark declined by 52%, the yellowhammer by 53% and the corn bunting by 88%. (01/19/04)
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 BBC Technology -- Digital cameras don't only eliminate the cost and hassle of film processing, they should help do away with bad holiday snaps and see us all become better photographers. The scenario will be familiar to most of us. Having retrieved your photos from the chemist, you dart into a damp shop doorway and hurriedly rifle through the prints one by one, hoping to magically rekindle memories of a recent holiday. And what do you get instead? A disappointing crop of pictures which bear little resemblance to the mental snap shots you filed away at the time. Exposure problems, poor focussing, bad composition, flash flare and "red eye" are the most common problems experienced by amateur snappers. Many such headaches are a symptom of traditional cameras and film. But news that Kodak is quitting sales of 35mm and APS cameras in Europe and the US, in favour of digital, is a sign of things to come. While some professionals still swear by the quality of film over digital, the new format is taking over. As more and more holiday-makers pack a digital camera in their suitcase, disappointing pictures should become a thing of the past. (01/19/04)
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 BBC Technology -- Without doubt the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most important telescopes ever built. Its clear view of the cosmos, above the turbulent and distorting atmosphere, has changed our understanding of the Universe in which we live. Hubble has been a spectacular success Its science is remarkable, its images iconic and it had much more to give. So why is it being abandoned? ... The main reason is safety. It is said that the decision was made solely by Nasa's chief, Sean O'Keefe, and that it was not related to President George Bush's new space plan for a return to the Moon and missions to Mars. Money was not an issue. Following the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in February last year, all shuttle fights will now be to the International Space Station (ISS). This is so that the shuttle crew have a lifeboat in space if there are any problems. But Hubble is not in an orbit from which it is possible to get to the ISS. New safety and inspection procedures would have had to be developed just for this one mission and it was deemed unfeasible. Hubble's next servicing mission was due in 2005. During the flight, two major instruments - the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrometer - would have been installed. They would have been magnificent additions to Hubble, significantly boosting its performance. Now they are not going the scientists concerned will be devastated and will want to explore other ways to get the instruments into space. Even if they are successful in flying them, it will be on a smaller mission and they will not benefit from Hubble's extraordinary ability to intercept light from the cosmos. (01/19/04)
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5:59:38 AM 
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© TrustMark
2004
Timothy Wilken.
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2/2/2004; 6:15:30 AM.
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