What I'm reading ed. 100103

Happy New Year, everybody! I’ve highlighted my top 3 4 reads.

• Know thy food: Beef Filler Processing (nyt)
  

  Mr. Roth and others in the industry had discovered that liquefying the fat and extracting the protein from the trimmings in a centrifuge resulted in a lean product that was desirable to hamburger-makers.

  The greater challenge was eliminating E. coli and salmonella, which are more prevalent in fatty trimmings than in higher grades of beef. …

  Mr. Roth eventually settled on ammonia, which had been shown to suppress spoilage. Meat is sent through pipes where it is exposed to ammonia gas, and then flash frozen and compressed — all steps that help kill pathogens, company research found.

  Untreated beef naturally contains ammonia and is typically about 6 on the pH scale, near that of rain water and milk. The Beef Products’ study that won U.S.D.A. approval used an ammonia treatment that raised the pH of the meat to as high as 10, an alkalinity well beyond the range of most foods. The company’s 2003 study cited the “potential issues surrounding the palatability of a pH-9.5 product.”

  … Beef Products acknowledged in an e-mail exchange that it was making a lower pH version, but did not specify the level or when it began selling it.

Environment

• Packaging waste statistics
  

  Nearly 10% of a typical product’s price is for packaging.

  The global packaging market is worth $429 billion.

  Nearly 1/3 of Americans’ waste is packaging. Just 43% is recycled after use.

  In 2007, Americans threw away 78.5 million tons of packaging—520 pounds per person. That’s a 71% increase from 1960.

  A 2008 bill written by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) would have required the EPA to find ways to reduce packaging waste by 30% in a decade. It died with no cosponsors.

• China’s role in killing the Copenhagen deal.

Science

• The Year in Science 2009
• See through goldfish (!)
• A gorgeous version of powers of 10 (positive only)

   

Society

• Journey into Whitopia
• The World’s Hardest Language (economist)
• Cell phone usage patterns across various cultures (economist)
  

  The best way to grasp Japan’s mobile culture is to take a crowded commuter train. There are plenty of signs advising you not to use your phone. Every few minutes announcements are made to the same effect. If you do take a call, you risk more than disapproving gazes. Passengers may appeal to a guard who will quietly but firmly explain: “dame desu”—it’s not allowed. Some studies suggest that talking on a mobile phone on a train is seen as worse than in a theatre. Instead, hushed passengers type away on their handsets or read mobile-phone novels (written Japanese allows more information to be displayed on a small screen than languages that use the Roman alphabet).

• Spanking vs not-spanking
  

  What she discovered was another shocker: those who’d been spanked just when they were young—ages 2 to 6—were doing a little better as teenagers than those who’d never been spanked. On almost every measure.

• Life as a quadrapalegic: Tony Judt
  

  There is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably—as it now appears to me—by those not exclusively dependent upon them. Much the same can be said of well-meaning encouragements to find nonphysical compensations for physical inadequacy. That way lies futility. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. My nights are intriguing; but I could do without them.

Jeremy Lin: The ABC basketballer (time)

It’s been 64 years since the Crimson appeared in the NCAA tournament. But thanks to senior guard Jeremy Lin, that streak could end this year. Lin, who tops Harvard in points (18.1 per game), rebounds (5.3), assists (4.5) and steals (2.7), has led the team to a 9-3 record, its best start in a quarter century.
…
Less than 0.5% of men’s Division 1 basketball players are Asian-American.

Development

• Most shameful events of 2009

Economy

• Food stamp usage in the recession
• 10 principles of economics
• Sweden’s eco-vangelism
  

  There’s even an official name for the Stokeses, along with three other households in Northern Virginia: They are Climate Pilots, guinea pigs in a Swedish experiment aimed at helping U.S. citizens understand that a lifestyle that curbs greenhouse-gas emissions is not necessarily oppressive, just different. Whether Americans are willing to follow their example is part of the political calculation lawmakers have to make as they consider imposing nationwide limits on emissions in legislation making its way through Congress.

• The Finance Committee: How Wall St Wins on the Hill (HuffPo)
  

  The question was simple: Should the lending practices of auto dealers be regulated?
  …
  The clerk called the roll, starting from the top. Senior Democrats roundly rejected Campbell’s amendment. It appeared as if the Democrats would beat back the effort and apply the same standard to car dealers that was applied to everyone else.

  Then came the bottom two rows, the place where reform goes to die. Despite the disapproval of the powerful chairman and nearly every consumer group in the country, the Campbell amendment passed by a 47-21 margin.

• Food Stamps Usage Soars (nov) (dec) (nyt)
  

  Now nearly 12 percent of Americans receive aid — 28 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Latinos and 8 percent of whites. Benefits average about $130 a month for each person in the household, but vary with shelter and child care costs.

Healthcare

• Relative magnitudes: they’re important. (medical)
  

  But in the case of anticancer drugs, a phenomenon known as omission bias appears to be at work. People tend to worry more about a low risk of harm from something they do (like taking a pill or a vaccine) than about a higher risk of harm from doing nothing.

  In a seminal 1994 study of vaccination trends for whooping cough, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that parents gave far more credence to hypothetical concerns about side effects than about the very real danger of an unvaccinated child’s becoming severely ill with the disease.

• A primer on the problems with healthcare and one solution proposal (Atlantic)
  

  A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing.

Wow, what a deal! $15 for 700 Placebos!

There are a lot of spoof sites about placebos out there. This isn’t one of them! We actually sell placebos. Just click on the Buy Placebos button.
…
We make absolutely no therapeutic claims for our placebos – they are made of sugar; they are not drugs – but we offer them, with love and with a sense of fun, as triggers and inspiration for the placebo effect.

Fun

• Darth Vader Opens Wall Street…Surreal, but does anyone know why they open the market to such fanfare _every_single_day_ anyways?

   

• Colbert on his White House Press Corp Dinner and Glenn Beck
  

  Added Colbert: “We felt like we were throwing joke Molotov cocktails, and then the room burst into flames.”

• Barry Obama as a third grader
  

  Scott Inoue and Barrack Obama, 1969

Photos

• Inside the Secret Service
• Chinese business in Africa (Photos)
• 20 motorcycle concept drawings
• 2010 celebrations