Wait a Second: Why 2008 Is a Long Year
December 31, 2008 on 7:30 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments OffThose who can't wait to see 2008 come to a close will have to endure an extra second — literally. On Dec. 31, just before 7 p.m. Eastern time, a leap second will be added to atomic clocks around the world to realign Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international standard for atomic clocks, with Earth's rotational period. The reason for the intermittent mismatch between these two measurements lies not with the clocks but with the movement of the planet, which is decelerating at an average rate of two milliseconds a day.
Space dust, magnetic storms, solar winds and the Earth's atmosphere all create drag, which slows down the planet. Even the amount of snow covering the polar ice caps adds to the rotational lag. But one of the main obstacles is tidal friction. Because the gravitational pull between the moon and the Earth is not uniform, the tidal force stretches the Earth — core, mantle, crust, oceans and all — producing bulges. The Earth's rotation pushes the tidal bulge slightly ahead of the Earth-moon alignment; the moon's gravity, however, yanks the bulges back to keep them in line. This tug-of-war — essentially a transfer of energy between the Earth and the moon — boosts the moon's orbital momentum, pushing it away from the Earth at a rate of 1.6 inches a year (the moon's distance from us will increase by the length of a football field over the course of 2,250 years), while reducing the Earth's rotational speed and lengthening the day.
No one could truly appreciate the global slowdown until the invention of the atomic clock, which uses the oscillation frequencies of atoms such as cesium, hydrogen or rubidium to mark the passage of time. According to Andrew Novick, an engineer with the time and frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), there exist three types of atomic clocks: primary standard clocks, which are state-of-the-art instruments owned by only a handful of nations, such as Germany, Britain and the U.S. (there's one at NIST); smaller, rack-mounted commercially available versions that can cost as much as $40,000; and widely available radio-controlled clocks, whose time is set by a daily radio signal received from a primary standard clock — usually the one at NIST's headquarters in Boulder, Colo.
Without the unerring measurement provided by atomic clocks, we couldn't have landed a rover on Mars, the Internet wouldn't be able to process data superfast and GPS navigation would be a fantasy. These clocks are so precise that they literally redefined time: Once tied to the mean solar day, the official measure of a second was changed in 1967 to refer to the duration of more than nine billion periods of radiation between two levels of the cesium 133 atom.
If scientists did not periodically correct the difference between the atomic clock and Earth's rotation, within a few hundred years the position of the sun in the sky would noticeably differ with the time on your kitchen clock, an aspect of earthly timekeeping that has caused much consternation historically, vexing everyone from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory XIII. So, in 1972, an international agreement decreed that instead of continually revising the definition of a second, atomic clocks would be adjusted by adding a leap second each time an appreciable discrepancy was detected by observations made at the International Earth Rotation Service in Paris. Since then, 24 leap seconds have been added, either on June 30 or Dec. 31; the last one was tacked on in 2005. At that rate, "it will be 5,040 years before we gain an extra hour," Novick says.
For now, you needn't worry about resynchronizing the clocks on your electronic devices; they'll adjust themselves. Cell phones, for instance, will receive a signal from a cell-phone base station, many of which often rely on commercially available rubidium atomic clocks. But if you would like to witness the leap second pass with your own eyes, log on to NIST's Web clock shortly before midnight Greenwich Mean Time, and watch as 23:59:59 changes to 23:59:60, a feat that only NIST's clock can achieve.
Cookbook Author Mark Bittman
December 31, 2008 on 7:30 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments OffMark Bittman, author of the wildly popular How to Cook Everything, is known for making food preparation as simple as possible, so it's no surprise that his new book has the plainest title imaginable: Food Matters. The content is equally straight-forward. Part eating theory and part recipes, Food Matters has something Bittman's earlier writings don't: A clear moral message on how meat over-consumption hurts the planet. TIME talked to Bittman about why buying local food isn't paramount, what his new wardrobe says about his eating habits and why sustainable agriculture advocates have reason to hope. (See the top 10 food trends of 2008.)
The subtitle of your book is "A Guide to Conscious Eating." What is "conscious eating"?
What I'm advocating is that people eat fewer animal products, less junk food and less super-refined carbohydrates. And in their stead, they eat plants. That's the simplest, most basic way to put it.
A lot of what you say sounds like [Omnivore's Dilemma author] Michael Pollan's edict — eat food, not too much, mostly plants. It's a very basic idea.
Yeah, and don't eat things your grandmother wouldn't recognize and don't eat things that have more than five ingredients. There's very little Michael says that I disagree with. Not to take anything away from him, but he doesn't do recipes.
If it's so simple to understand how to eat better, why aren't people doing it?
I guess you could say brainwashing, habit, tradition. I guess you could say people are so confused and desperate for magic bullets and tricks that something as simple as this is sort of hard to swallow.
People in the United States eat something like 200 pounds of meat, fish and poultry per year on average and something like 600 pounds of dairy products. People are getting 80 to 90% of their calories from animal products. Think about eating 70% instead. I don't know how to make anything simpler than that. It all goes back to eat your vegetables.
Barack Obama just nominated former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as his agriculture secretary. What reform would you like to see in the USDA?
I'd like a re-examination of the Farm Bill. I would like to see the Department of Agriculture clarify its message, so that it was saying eat more plants and fewer animals. I would love to hear that blared from the rooftops. I'd like to see stricter enforcement of antibiotic and hormone use in animals. In this country, you can't blame people for figuring out clever ways to make money, but if you charge industrial livestock producers for the environmental and health damage they're doing, meat becomes more expensive and so they can't sell as much. Eventually, everybody will be happier and healthier.
You talk in the book about losing weight when you cut meat out of your diet. How did you feel before you started this new way of eating versus how you feel now?
I don't think there's like a spring in my step. And I'm not going to give you some line about how I'm a new man, but I lost 15% of my body weight. I've been a runner practically my whole adult life and when I got heavy, my knees started to go and I started to feel slower and slower. When I run now I feel 15 years younger. And I do sleep a lot better and I did have to buy a new wardrobe, so that was very cool. Another sort of hidden benefit is that my eating has become even simpler. Yesterday I made vegetable soup. It took like 10 or 15 minutes to throw it together and it was really good. It's not that I wouldn't have done that before, but I would have thrown in a sausage or some bacon or a bunch of croutons and now it's like five ingredients: Carrot, potatoes, fennel, onion and split peas, plus barley and water.
How important is it to have really great ingredients when you're cooking simple food?
This stuff was completely not great ingredients, trust me. The split peas and the barley came from the cupboard and the vegetables are just from this place that's not very good and is a rip-off, but I walk past it on the way home. I'm not too cheap to go to the farmer's market, I'm just too lazy.
But isn't buying local touted by the sustainable food movement?
I just don't think it's realistic. We should be eating as locally and seasonally as possible — no argument there. But someone who says we should eat only foods from within 100 miles - that's stupid. I don't want asparagus from Peru in December; I want collard greens from North Carolina because I consider that local. It can be better without us being extreme in our demands.
Why did you scale back the meat recipes in your new edition of How to Cook Everything?
I sat there thinking, do we really need 200 chicken recipes? Maybe 125 to 150 is enough. A really key moment was also a report I read that said 18% of climate changing gases are directly or indirectly caused by industrial livestock production. If you take it seriously, it's mind boggling. Do you want to torture animals? Do you want to spew filth into the environment and into the air? Do you want to eat in a way that's really unhealthy?
How much influence can cookbook authors really have over the way people eat in America?
I've always thought if you could get people to cook, they would eat more sanely. That's kind of where it's at for me. To me it's incredible that something like instant oatmeal exists when normal oatmeal takes six minutes to cook. Starbucks is now selling what amounts to instant oatmeal for four bucks. People can make oatmeal for 20 cents. Just getting people to make themselves oatmeal in the morning — I think that's a pretty noble goal.
Do you think we're on the cusp of a revolution in how we eat?
My gut tells me we're in the best place we've been in my lifetime. For the first time, the pendulum has been moving the other way. I have watched the world of restaurants and cooking and chefs for 30 years now. And at the beginning, I was a decent journalist and I could write, but basically [editors ] wanted me to interview chefs and write about food as art and all this other crap. I've seen the move to simplicity. I'll be disappointed if five years from now, we're not having this discussion in a different way.
Putting Bernie Madoff On The Couch
December 31, 2008 on 7:30 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments OffThere are a lot of things that make the life of a con artist a dubious career track — not the least being the risk that you'll get caught. No matter how grand your ill-gotten Bentley or your cooked-books villa, they have to be hard to enjoy when you know that at any moment the jig could be up. The hope — and the thrill — is in the fact that that's only one possibility. The other is that the scam is so good you'll never be nabbed.
But what if your con is certain to fail? Why would any self-respecting scoundrel pick a scheme that's guaranteed to end in handcuffs and a perp walk? That's what a lot of people are asking as 70-year-old Bernie Madoff cools his heels under house arrest, charged with masterminding a decades-long, $50 billion Ponzi scheme that has incinerated wealth around the world. (See the top 10 scandals of 2008.)
A Ponzi scheme — as anyone smart enough to engineer one knows — is a plan that is uniquely without an exit strategy. It requires a constant infusion of new investors to pay off a growing body of existing ones, and ultimately it becomes impossible to find enough suckers. When that happens, the scam collapses. Sure, you could always flee the country before the roof caves in, but many scammers don't and Madoff famously didn't. The reason lies in the personality — or, more accurately, the personality disorder — that drives them to such frauds in the first place.
Forensic psychologists studying Madoff-type minds start with the usual menu of personality disorders, particularly narcissism. "These people get real enjoyment from doing what they do," says forensic psychologist Michele Galietta of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. "They feel good pulling the wool over other people's eyes."
Other conditions such as bipolar or manic disorders may be involved as well, particularly since they are characterized by grandiosity and impulsiveness, with little regard for consequences. But grandiosity and impulsiveness can also be self-limiting, and lead to smaller-bore crimes that don't require the patience and plotting of a Ponzi scheme. Madoff, says Galietta, "was very planful."
Such deliberateness requires a whole different type of disorder, one that may rise to the level of true psychopathy. In the popular mind, psychopathy is an impossibly broad term that more or less means crazy. But psychologists see it differently and have devoted no shortage of energy to defining just what the condition is. The researcher who may have come closest is psychologist Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, author of numerous books including Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work.
Many criminals, Hare explains, suffer from some form of antisocial personality disorder, a condition that causes them to behave impulsively and aggressively and generally commit violent crimes. Within that group, a subset also exhibits psychopathy, a coldness and lack of empathy for the people they hurt. They are the ones most likely to commit repeat violent crimes. The smallest group of all is the people who suffer from psychopathy alone — indifference to others, without the violence. These, says Galietta, are the "white-collar psychopaths." And that group is an incubator of Madoffs.
Of course, a non-violent willingness to hurt other people for your own enrichment describes every mortgage bundler or junk-bond scammer who's ever forged a balance sheet. What distinguishes the Ponzi artist is the sheer scale of the scam.
The same exponential multiplication of funds that makes a Ponzi scheme impossible to sustain also means that, at first, it makes you very rich, very fast. "The financial payoff is so much larger," says Minnesota-based forensic psychologist Steven Norton. "The money comes in, the power comes in and that pushes them." What's more, says Galieti, the pyramid structure of a Ponzi scam means that there can be only one person at the pinnacle — an appealing idea for a narcissist who would just as soon not work invisible frauds inside a big investment bank.
It helps too, Norton says, if while you're picking your investors' pockets you can also convince yourself that you're justified in doing so. Maybe you grew up poor; maybe you've been cheated yourself. Or maybe, as with Madoff, the phony dividends you're paying are initially benefiting charitable foundations. You're actually doing the groups a lot of good — at least until you bankrupt them.
When the collapse inevitably happens, someone like Madoff is so drunk on the power and the wealth and the illusion of do-gooding that he truly may not have seen it coming. "There was no living in the future," says Galieti. That's just as well. For a 70-year-old man facing 20 years in prison, the past is all that's left.
See TIME's Person of the Year, People Who Mattered, and more.
Do Virginity Pledges Work?
December 31, 2008 on 7:30 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments OffThe debate over sex education has long been a heated one. A new study released Dec. 29 found that a popular method of promoting abstinence — pledging to remain a virgin — doesn't appear to be the answer. To reach this conclusion, Janet Rosenbaum, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health, analyzed information gathered from nearly 1,000 teenagers, of which approximately 30% took a virginity pledge. Parsing the data, Rosenbaum found that the teenagers who took chastity vows were just as likely to have premarital sex as their peers—and significantly less likely to use protection. TIME talked to Rosenbaum, whose study appears in the January 2009 issue of Pediatrics, about her findings.
Can you walk me through how you did this?
The data I analyzed was from a federal study commissioned by Congress in the early 1990s. They collected data in 1995, 1996 and 2001. I analyzed this data using a statistical method that lets me compare pledgers with similar non-pledgers.
[Between the two groups, I measured, among other factors,] whether they'd feel guilty if they had sex; how often they go to church or attend religious youth groups; whether they identify as born-again Christians; their level of sexual experience; their friends' risk behaviors; whether they think their friends know how to use condoms; and their knowledge of condoms and birth control [as demonstrated by] a quiz that was part of the survey.
And what common threads did you discover?
I found that five years later, pledgers and non-pledgers don't differ at all in their sexual behavior. That includes oral and anal sex, which previous studies had speculated might be used as substitutes for vaginal intercourse. In this data, that seems not to be upheld. They don't differ in their age of sexual initiation; both groups initiated around 21 years old. That shows that this is quite a conservative group, because that's four years later than the American average. And they don't differ in number of lifetime partners. Each group had about three partners by age 21.
What aspects of your findings struck you as most surprising?
The fact that there was a difference in birth control use — especially in condom use — was really surprising. It's problematic for public health. Pledgers are 10 percentage points less likely than similar non-pledgers to use condoms.
Do you think that your findings will inform the debate over allocating federal or state resources to abstinence education?
States have actually already started to move away from requesting abstinence funds. We're down to about half of them that request funds currently. I think that they'll continue to move away unless the federal program changes. It's currently defined so that abstinence education is required to give the advantages of abstinence and the disadvantages of sex, which means that we can't teach birth control. The whole idea of abstinence education comes from this idea that if you teach birth control, that's going to cause kids to have sex. That's been tested probably over 100 times — certainly dozens of times — and it's never been shown as having any basis in reality.
Do you expect pushback from groups that advocate virginity pledges?
I see myself primarily as a researcher, not as an advocate. They're free to dislike the research but they can't dispute it unless they have a specific statistical basis on which to do so.
I ask because this is such a contentious issue.
I don't see myself as part of a culture war. I don't feel any particular glee in finding that virginity pledges don't work. Certainly it would be great if we had something that caused teenagers to delay sex. We do actually have these programs, but they're all sex education programs that actually teach birth control.Stepping back from your role as a researcher, what method would you advocate schools or parents teach to get kids to delay sex?
Parents are absolutely crucial. They have to talk to their kids at every teachable opportunity. It can't just be one conversation, but repeated efforts. These have to include teaching kids to use condoms, which is something many are reluctant to do. Even parents who approve of premarital sex are still afraid that if they teach their kids to use condoms, it might be misconstrued as encouraging sex. And there's no basis for that.
Lack of Sleep Linked to Heart Problems
December 31, 2008 on 7:30 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments OffNo one likes to walk into work after just a few fitful hours of sleep. But now there's evidence that not getting enough sleep may have more serious consequences than dark circles under your eyes the next morning. Researchers at the University of Chicago report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that too little sleep can promote calcium buildup in the heart arteries, leading to the plaques that can then break apart and cause heart attacks and strokes.
The University of Chicago team documented for the first time exactly how much of a risk shortened shut-eye can be — one hour less on average each night can increase coronary calcium by 16%. Among a group of 495 men and women aged 35 to 47, 27% of those getting less than five hours of sleep each night showed plaque in their heart vessels, while 11% of those sleeping the recommended five to seven hours did, and only 6% of subjects sleeping more than seven hours each night showed such atherosclerosis. "We were surprised by the findings," says Diane Lauderdale, a professor of health studies at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study. "We really were not expecting to find an association at all, and certainly not one that was this strong." (See the Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs of 2008.)
Lauderdale and her team had reason to be skeptical. While the connection between sleep and heart disease is of growing interest to researchers, earlier studies had been inconclusive, and plagued by biases, including the fact that most of the trials relied on people's self-reported accounts of their sleeping habits. The scientists knew that teasing apart the myriad processes that contribute to sleep, and then drawing scientifically sound connections between them and the host of things that can trigger heart disease, would be difficult at best. So the Chicago team isolated the most common confounding variables that could explain both poor sleep and heart problems, such as smoking, alcohol, and other medical conditions, and also found a way to record, as accurately as possible, the amount of sleep that the subjects got each night. Each volunteer wore a wrist monitor that measured and recorded activity at 30 second intervals; when the monitor was quiet, the subject was asleep.
While Lauderdale acknowledges that her results are far from the last word on sleep and heart disease, the study does suggest that doctors and patients should consider sleep in addition to the more familiar hazards for the heart such as high cholesterol, hypertension and diabetes. In Lauderdale's analysis, one additional hour of sleep was equivalent to lowering systolic blood pressure by 16.5mm Hg. "We have enough evidence from this study and others to show that it is important to include sleep in any discussion of heart disease," says Dr. Tracy Stevens, spokesperson for the American Heart Association and a cardiologist at Saint Luke's Mid-America Heart Institute. "We talk about the traditional risk factors, and now the other important thing we need to include is sleep." (See pictures of how animals sleep.)
Exactly how a lack of sleep is feeding plaque in the heart arteries isn't yet clear, but one explanation may involve inflammation. Too little sleep can raise cortisol levels, which fuels inflammation that can destabilize plaques. Once these deposits rupture, they can block vessels in the heart or brain, causing a heart attack or stroke. While the Chicago team did not track levels of cortisol to test this theory, future studies might.
A simpler explanation might involve blood pressure. In general, blood pressure dips during sleep, and over a 24 hour period, people sleeping less will have shorter periods of lower blood pressure, thus increasing their tendency to dislodge any unstable plaques.
Whatever the reason might be, the results of this study make it clear that sleep isn't just for dreamers. Getting enough sleep might just save your heart.
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