Fill'er Up?
IdaClaire
8 years ago
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8 years agoIdaClaire
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The elusive hummingbird
Comments (6)Wayne, hate to break it to you, but hummers don't mate for life like cardinals and some other birds. They don't even stay together to raise their young. The female does it all ... nest building, incubating, and caring for the babies. The male will mate with any female that he can attract to his territory. We're fortunate to have hummers year round in our yard. Ruby-throateds in the spring through fall and western migrants like Rufous, Calliope, and Black-chinned in the fall through early spring. I grow a lot of hummer plants and keep 7-8 feeders up all the time....See MoreWeekend Trivia -- Sunday
Comments (24)lol, Bobbie, made me laugh. OK, didn't think this would be easy, but I didn't think it would this hard, either. Obviously my clues were not great. To quote the Mother Jones article: In 1994, Rick Nevin was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities. But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too? That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted. Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century. Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years. It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of - nothing. Nevin's paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it's easy to see why - Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What's more, a single correlation between two curves isn't all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s. A few hundred miles north someone was making the link. In the late '90s, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was a graduate student at Harvard casting around for a dissertation topic that eventually became a study she published in 2007 as a public health policy professor at Amherst. "I learned about lead because I was pregnant and living in old housing in Harvard Square," she told me, and after attending a talk where future Freakonomics star Levitt outlined his abortion/crime theory, she started thinking about lead and crime. Although the association seemed plausible, she wanted to find out whether increased lead exposure caused increases in crime. But how? Use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found. Long story short, between Reyes and Nevin continued independent research, shoring up the theory. Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one." So, there you go, every once in a while we do something right and reap even more benefits than expected!! I remember the wailing and the knashing of teeth when unleaded gas came into being. I remember old car guys saying vehicles would never run properly, and being able to buy tetraethylead additives at the auto shops. Now, even race cars no longer run on leaded gas, because of the high exposures to the pit crews. And we need to work on those small private planes, for the sakes of the children who live and go to school near these airports. But pat yourselves on the back, cause we did good!! Thanks for playing, no stars, right? See you next week - geez, I really didn't think this was a stumper!! Nancy. Here is a link that might be useful: Nevin's 2007 Paper...See MoreThe elusive hummingbird.
Comments (3)Hummers don't mate for life like cardinals and some other birds. They don't even stay together to raise their young. The female does it all ... nest building, incubating, and caring for the babies. The male will mate with any female that he can attract to his territory....See MoreOpen house (garden) Mothers Day weekend
Comments (3)My Saturday plans have changed, and my niece's shower is going to be followed by another family event. So... it seemed like such a good opportunity to see your garden and not have too far to drive, but it'll have to be another time. I'd love to see some pictures if you want to post them. Hope you get a good turnout! Mea...See MoreBunny
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