"A 2007 study of the terms “schizophrenia” and “schizophrenic” in the UK national press found that 11% of references were metaphorical, with broadsheet papers more likely to deploy such phrasing than tabloids. By contrast, cancer was only used in this manner in 0.02% of cases."
OCD, bipolar, schizophrenic and the misuse of mental health terms (BBC)
happy Mental Health Awareness Week, peeps!
(via tooyoungforthelivingdead)
The coalition’s changes to the electoral registration system will lead to a sick democracy, with fewer registered voters and lower turnouts.
If you care about representative democracy, then this may be of interest to you?
Nobel Peace Prize winners. From left to right: President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia (AP Photo); Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee (AP); Yemeni Tawakul Karman who head the organisation Women Journalists Without Chains (AP).
They were awarded the prize for “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.” Johnson-Sirleaf is Liberia’s first elected female president and has acted as a reformer in her time in office. Gbowee organized a group of Christian and Muslim women to stand up to Liberian warlords. Karman is a Yemeni journalist who is both a women’s rights activist and a leading protest organiser in Yemen’s Arab Spring uprisings.
This is so great.
Brilliant unaired Fox interview from Occupy Wall Street.
Scores of protesters were arrested in Manhattan Saturday as a march against social inequality turned violent.
Hundreds of people carrying banners and chanting “shame, shame” walked between Zuccotti Park, near Wall St., and Union Square calling for changes to a financial system they say unjustly benefits the rich and harms the poor.
At least 80 people were carted away in police vehicles and up to five were hit with pepper spray near 12th St. and Fifth Ave., where tensions became especially high, police and organizers said.
The National Lawyer’s Guild, which is providing legal assistance to the protesters, put the number of arrests at 100.
Witnesses said they saw three stunned women collapse on the ground screaming after they were sprayed in the face.
A video posted on YouTube and NYDailyNews.com shows uniformed officers had corralled the women using orange nets when two supervisors made a beeline for the women, and at least one suddenly sprayed the women before turning and quickly walking away.
Footage of other police altercations also circulated online, but it was unclear what caused the dramatic mood shift in an otherwise peaceful demonstration.
“I saw a girl get slammed on the ground. I turned around and started screaming,” said Chelsea Elliott, 25, from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who said she was sprayed. “I turned around and a cop was coming … we were on the sidewalk and we weren’t doing anything illegal.”
Police said 80 protesters were arrested or ticketed at multiple locations for disorderly conduct, blocking traffic and failure to obey a lawful order but the number could rise.
If the NYPD’s excuse for this disgusting behavior — which should make decent police officers anywhere cringe with shame — is that the protestors didn’t have a permit, then fuck that. Of course, Mayor Bloomberg is probably off in Bermuda on his usual weekend getaway, so neither he nor his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, won’t have to be held accountable for these wanton acts of police brutality until Monday. At least.
For shame.
(Photo: Jefferson Siegel / Daily News)
If you can look at this picture and say cops are necessary and good then you really need to do a re-evaluation and don’t even bother calling yourself a social justice advocate.
I mean, obviously I agree with the sentiment of this, but we’ve gotta be careful to not make it sound like it’s because of this incident, or any stand-alone incident, that people disagree with the police as an institution.
even if the policing was lovely and friendly at a demo, the problem is the overarching way in which the police serve to protect property and moneyed interests over citizens, and how the “just following orders” logic will always eventually lead to situations like this.
or something.
This deeply upsets me.
RAGE.
Fucking with Einstein: the recent “faster than light particles” story
I’ve been explaining this story to a lot of my friends recently, so if you’ve got any questions, then send me an ask!
I thought it’d be useful for peeps if I shared some of the better stories about it I’ve read:
Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? (Cosmic Variance blog)
The things you need to know about this result are:
- It’s enormously interesting if it’s right.
- It’s probably not right.
By the latter point I don’t mean to impugn the abilities or honesty of the experimenters, who are by all accounts top-notch people trying to do something very difficult. It’s just a very difficult experiment, and given that the result is so completely contrary to our expectations, it’s much easier at this point to believe there is a hidden glitch than to take it at face value. All that would instantly change, of course, if it were independently verified by another experiment; at that point the gleeful jumping up and down will justifiably commence.
Scientists Question Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos (Ars Technica on Wired Science)
The end result is that the OPERA team doesn’t see any obvious problems in its measurements. All of the errors, when added up, shouldn’t be able to account for anything close to the 60ns gap between the neutrinos’ arrival and the speed of light. The difference between their speed and that of light is very statistically significant, and the neutrino data itself looks excellent. The team has recorded over 16,000 events now, and the profile of events over time very closely matches the structure of the proton bunches that created them.
Faster-than-light neutrino claim bolstered (New Scientist)
But only time will tell whether the result holds up to additional scrutiny, and whether it can be reproduced . There is still room for uncertainty in the neutrinos’ departure time, Plunkett says, because there is no neutrino detector on CERN’s end of the line. The only way to know when the neutrinos left is to extrapolate from data on the blob of protons used to produce them.
Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed (New Scientist)
Sher also mentions a third option: that the measurement is correct. Some theories posit that there are extra, hidden dimensions beyond the familiar four (three of space, one of time). It’s possible that the speedy neutrinos tunnel through these extra dimensions, reducing the distance they have to travel to get to the target. This would explain the measurement without requiring the speed of light to be broken.
fucking science, folks
Roll over Einstein: Law of physics challenged
what the fucking shit. I approve of the immense skepticism that comes across in this or the Al Jazeera version of the story.
if this is true… holy crap
Whaaaaat?!
This morning we heard that term extension in sound recordings has gone through the EU Council. Term extension is a cultural disaster. It means that it will be harder to publish older works, and many will remain out of print. Research showed that around 90% of the cash windfall from copyright levies will fall into the hands of record labels.
Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation.
