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.