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Study shows US lags behind in transit safety programs for female riders
Posted by wideant in Social Sciences on March 6, 2010
A new study by UCLA professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris documents the gap between women’s transit safety needs and programs in the U.S. that respond to them.
Desolate bus stops and train cars, dimly lit parking structures, and overcrowded mass transit vehicles all represent stressful settings for many women. In a new study, UCLA’s Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris examines the gap between women’s well-documented transit safety needs and programs in the U.S. that respond to them. Read the rest of this entry »
Blue whales singing with deeper voices
Posted by wideant in Plants & Animals on March 5, 2010
Blue whales, the largest animals on earth, are singing with deeper voices every year, but scientists are unsure of the reason.
Whale Acoustics is a company that specializes in recording the songs of blue whales off the coast of California. According to their President, Mark McDonald, they have many recordings of blue whales, but each year they have had to recalibrate their song detectors to lower frequencies. Possible reasons include noise pollution at sea, new mating strategies, and changing population dynamics, but none of these theories is convincing.
McDonald, along with John Hildebrand and Sarah Melnick of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, have collected and analyzed thousands of recordings of blue whales from the 1960s onwards, from populations around the globe, and have found the tonal frequency of the songs has reduced by fractions of a Hertz every year. Read the rest of this entry »
UCSD Experts Calculate How Much Information Americans Consume
Posted by wideant in Social Sciences on March 5, 2010
U.S. households consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to the “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” released today by the University of California, San Diego. One zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes, and total bytes consumed last year were the equivalent of the information in thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska.
The How Much Information? project is creating a census of the world’s information in 2008. The study measured information consumed by U.S. consumers in and outside the home for non-work related reasons, and included the gamut of information sources, including going to the movies, listening to the radio, talking on the cell phone, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and reading the newspaper, among other things. Read the rest of this entry »