Sociology and environment stuff from the week 28/5 - 3/6/12

Individuals who enjoy more involvement in the running of businesses feel better from the engagement, but feel worse when they perceive their effort to not be appreciated.
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-engagement-loyal-employees-jaded.html

Despite sentencing guidelines, cultural prejudice causes women to receive shorter sentences than men for the same crimes
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-female-sex-criminal-justice.html

I, for one, would rue being classified as a Windsorian or Elizabethan. As a social kind of guy, i am sternly against any authoritarianism, and therefore also monarchies of any kind.
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-tudor-england-myth.html
Child abandonment - the concealed consequence of non-contraception/abortion?
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-child-abandonment-europe-neglected-issue.html

For a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea, spatial representation of time is not the future-forward/past-backward construction that it is to us - the future is uphill, and the past is downhill
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428675.400-time-flows-uphill-for-remote-papua-new-guinea-tribe.html

You don't need poisonous weed-killers to get rid of weeds - boiling water, steam, or fire will work - you just have to be thorough
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-blanch-weeds.html



56 years of US tornado tracks:
Brightness is proportional to damage done
(Tornadoes don't really move in straight lines, though)
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-stunning-visualization-years-tornadoes.html

The Great Smog of London is often upheld as a time when pollution reached appalling levels: over a four-day period in December 1952, the capital came to a standstill, cars were abandoned, airports closed and over 4,000 people died due to respiratory or cardiovascular problems. But what might come as some surprise is that roughly the same number of people died as a result of pollution in London in 2008
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-pollution.html
The current rate is 43 deaths per day, across a population that has actually fallen. I count that as an urgent problem to sort!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London

Pharmaceutical pollution
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-environment-pharmaceuticals-personal-products-big.html

Ben Fogle's preparing for a 3000 mile swim across the Atlantic!
As part of the expedition, he will become a human research vessel, carrying micro-sensors on his body, to monitor temperatures, dissolved gases, and algae in the thin surface layer of the ocean, as he swims.
http://www.thegreatatlanticswim.com/science/
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/2107/

Well - here are some prizes i'd never heard of before - the Kavli Prizes - $1,000,000 each, awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science with the Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research
The prizes go to:
David Jewitt and Michael Brown (Astrophysics) for discovering and describing the Kuiper belt
Cornelia Bargmann, Winfried Denk and Ann Graybiel (Neuroscience) for elucidating the way brains process stimuli to make decisions
Mildred Dresselhaus (Nanoscience) for providing insight into how energy flows around nano-scale environments
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-scientists-million-prizes.html

A US survey's found that car drivers there care more about fuel efficiency than any other factor in the purchase of a new car:
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-fuel-efficiency-tops-new-car-buyers.html
However, for all the increases in efficiency that have already happened, the total mass of the vehicles have negated any overall reduction in emissions
http://phys.org/news/2012-01-case-gas-mileage.html

A French court has said yes to YouTube being a safe harbour for broadcasters, and no to profiteering interests
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-french-court-youtube-obligated-content.html