Contributing to U2 awareness:

An expert commission of African leaders today announced their plan for comprehensive reform of music band U2. Saying that U2’s rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2’s slide towards impending crisis.

In other local corruption news, my senator is selling her vote on health care for $100 million.

The city I live in:

Evelyn Holden admitted in federal court that she conspired with former senior Baton Rouge City Court prosecutor Flitcher Bell and others to fix criminal and traffic matters in City Court.

The mayor's sister is one thing. Corrupt police bother me even more:

Former Baton Rouge police Sgt. Darrell Johnson has admitted he took bribes to cause dismissal of criminal charges in City Court over a 19-year period. Johnson retired before pleading guilty.

Former Officer Leonard P. Jackson, who recently resigned from the Baton Rouge police force, admitted he sought and took bribes in a scheme to fix criminal and traffic charges in City Court.

I now officially don't trust the police in Baton Rouge, which is a terrible thing.

Fraud in the humanities and in the sciences:

Most interesting is that Schön’s frauds actually benefited from rigorous peer review at elite journals, much as earlier forgers benefited from the advanced techniques of text-obsessed humanists. The critiques and suggestions that Schön received in referee reports told him exactly what it would take to convince skeptics about new findings. If his amazing plastics really did show evidence of superconductivity, reviewers pressed, had Schön checked for such and such effects or measured this or that parameter? Schön could then deliver those results right back, in perfect keeping with expectations.

I also like the takeaway:

The relentless rat race to produce new results quickly in order to secure the next round of funding or promotion is not without consequences. The cozy relationship between prestigious scientific journals like Science and Nature and journalists—who receive prepublication copies of “hot” articles under special embargo, allowing them to prepare accompanying news coverage—entangles scientists, laboratories’ press relations staff, journal editors, investors and others in dizzying webs of potential conflicts of interest.

Give coffee addicts coffee and then have them do a challenging task. Tell half of them that caffeine is known to improve scores on the task, and tell the other half that it's known to have a negative effect. Independently, half get decaf and half get regular, but they all think they're getting caffeine.

Finally, no-one who got the decaf noticed that it didn't actually contain caffeine, and the volunteer's ratings of their alertness and mood didn't differ between the caffeine and placebo groups. So, this suggests that if you were to secretly replace someone's favorite blend with decaf, they wouldn't notice - although their performance would nevertheless decline.

Caffeine's not just a placebo, it does affect their scores - but the subjects don't notice it.

Recessions. Ten-percent unemployment. Wars. Shootings. No decent sidewalks or bike paths. But not everything is getting worse:

We estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006. The corresponding total number of poor has fallen from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006.

They also find that global inequality has decreased.

More about pedestrians and sidewalks:

Cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam—pedestrian paradises both—are proposing limiting entire tracts of the city to 30 kph (that's 18.6 mph, folks), and in places like the "Skvallertorget," or "Gossip Square," in Norkkoping, Sweden, the legal right of way is shared equally, and safely, among pedestrians and drivers, without clear markings, because car traffic has dropped to human speeds.

I'm on a quest to discover why there are no sidewalks in Baton Rouge. This is a start:

Take The Millennium Towne Center apartment complex on Jefferson Highway. It has no way for residents to actually walk to the shops at Towne Center just two-tenths of a mile away.

“That should never have been built without a sidewalk,” says Metro Council member Alison Cascio, a former Planning Commission staff member. “You can’t even take a back pedestrian walkway.”

Bunch explains the Planning Commission approved the development with a 5-foot sidewalk along Jefferson Highway. As to why it’s not there, he can’t say.

The article is long, and boring in the way that only local politics can be. But it's just a little interesting.

It's transportation week at the Evil Line. Today, Slate asks if bicycles should obey traffic laws:

"If there weren't cars, we wouldn't need stop signs," says Andy Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. "They're not there for bicycles." Bikers can safely slow down, look both ways, and proceed without sacrificing the momentum necessary to keep cycling, says Thornley. Lawmakers tend to favor the full-stop, in part because not all cyclists are skilled enough to judge the safety of proceeding through an intersection. During a debate in the Oregon state legislature, one representative admitted that he doesn't like stopping at signs. "But I do it because it's the law," he said. Plus, if bikes can cruise through stop signs, why not cars? Why do bikes deserve special treatment?

This piece also has an interesting distinction between "vehicularists" and "facilitators". I think I'm a vehicularist, but I can see both sides.

The London congestion toll is working. But people hate it:

London Mayor Boris Johnson recently conducted a survey on expanding the London Congestion Charge Zone and found that 67 percent of respondents were opposed.

This is a problem with shared space traffic control, also. It works, but people don't like it. They like their cars, and like not having to pay attention when they drive.

Also on the transportation beat, mass transit may not be quite as green as you might think.

Readers will know that I'm a fan of Bruce Schneier. His best blog entry to date was yesterday.

Improve education by making the geek culture the cool culture:

"The driving force in the life of a child, starting much earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit in," Grodd told the group. "And pretty universally, it's cool to rebel." In other words, prepare for you and your netbook to be jeered out of the room. "The best schools," Grodd told me later, "are able to make learning cool, so the cool kids are the ones who get As. That's an art."

It's hard. You do it, according to the article, by breaking the youth culture - having lots of adults around all the time, everywhere.

This is why I read Slate:

Going to prison is a little bit like heading off to college. The first step is finding an institution that's right for you. Then there's a lot of anxiety: Who will be your roommate? Where is the library? What time does the dining hall close? How do you make a good impression with the people in charge? Will you make friends? A prison consultant addresses these concerns.

A new approach to development aid:

The idea is simple: The payment of a basic monthly income, funded with tax revenues, of 100 Namibia dollars, or about €9 ($13), for each citizen. There are no conditions, and nothing is expected in return.

An approach like this says that the people you're trying to help are productive, hard-working, and smart, and that they know better what they need than you do. If they get drunk, you're wrong, if they start businesses, you're right.

The main barrier to bike commuting is bike parking:

On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking. Surveys have shown that the leading deterrent to potential bicycle commuters is lack of a safe, secure parking spot on the other end.

The math building here at LSU doesn't seem to have a single bike rack, and that's on a college campus. Sad.

You've got sensitive data on your laptop, or you don't, but either way you don't want customs agents nosing through it. So you encrypt it twice, mail one key to a trusted friend near your destination, shred that key, use your laptop on the flight with the other key, and shred that key just before customs.

At this point, you will not be able to boot your computer. The only key remaining is the one you forgot in Step Three. There's no need to lie to the customs official; you can even show him a copy of this article if he doesn't believe you.

This idea from, who else, Bruce Schneier.

PowerPoint is evil:

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. "The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions," said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.