Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography. A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states. ‘When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,’ says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School. However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. ‘Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,’ Edelman says. Political divide Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm. That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a […]
It looks like Bobby Jindal’s staff has been trying to do some damage limitation on that phony Katrina story — with some help from Politico. But it’s blowing up in their faces. Picking up on an earlier post at Daily Kos, we wrote a post yesterday that raised questions about a key anecdote in Bobby Jindal’s big Tuesday night speech. You can watch the key excerpt here, but here’s the transcript: During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go – when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I […]
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s budget proposal relies on the evidence when it comes to healthcare reform, using research done by government and other groups on the best ways to change the system and save money. It pulls heavily from reports by the Commonwealth Fund, Institute of Medicine and others that show extending health insurance coverage to more people will save money by preventing illness or catching diseases early, before they become expensive. About 46 million Americans have no health insurance. The nonprofit Commonwealth Fund has also published studies showing that moving from paper medical records and prescribing to electronic technology can save money. Health information technology is a cornerstone of the Obama healthcare reform plan. Studies show the reduction of errors caused by poor communication and scribbled prescription mistakes can save billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives every year, and Obama is gambling those savings will help the federal Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs. The budget also includes a controversial $1.1 billion measure for the federal government to get into the business of comparing medical treatments head to head. Government-supported studies have shown that older diabetes drugs such as […]
Two intriguing developments today in the ongoing saga of the vanishing American newspaper: Hearst Corp. will launch a wireless e-reader later this year, and the Long Island daily Newsday plans to end free Web content and charge readers for its online edition. Hearst has a stable of magazines including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Popular Mechanics, Seventeen, and SmartMoney, as well as 20 or so newspapers, some of which are on life support. Things are so bad that Hearst may shut down two money-losing dailies, the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, if it can’t sell them; the prospect of selling both newspapers is next to impossible in this economy. Can the Hearst e-reader save the daily? Details are sketchy at this point, but the device will reportedly have a large screen that’s better suited to print articles and ads than the Amazon Kindle, but similar to the Kindle in features: low power consumption and an electronic ink display. The Kindle screen’s dimensions are roughly those of a paperback book; Hearst’s e-reader would be larger than that. And since the Hearst reader and its underlying technology would be available to other publishers, the gadget seems like a last-ditch […]
WASHINGTON — Footprints found in Kenya that resemble those left in wet sand by beach goers today show that 1.5 million years ago a human ancestor walked like we do with anatomically modern feet, scientists said on Thursday. The remains of the footprints found in sedimentary rock near Ileret in northern Kenya most likely were left by a human ancestor called Homo erectus, also known as Homo ergaster, an international team of scientists wrote in the journal Science. The scientists found a series of footprints, including one apparently left by a child, left by individuals walking on a muddy river bank. Judging from stride length, they estimated the individuals were about 5-foot-9 (1.75 meters) in height. ‘It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site,’ archaeologist David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview. ‘These could quite easily have been made on the beach today,’ Braun added. The footprints show that […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
