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July / August 2010
Volume 22, Number 4
 |
Quotations of interest that may affect counties |
EARLY LEARNING
The state’s public schools have more and
more low-income kids and persistently high
dropout rates — and unless that changes,
the future of Texas will contain more longterm
unemployment and poverty — and
more folks depending on food stamps,
Medicaid and CHIP, [Rice University
sociology professor and demographer
Steve] Murdock said. Higher incarceration
rates also can be expected.
If nothing changes, average Texas
household incomes will be about $6,500
lower in 30 years than they were in 2000,
according to Murdock’s projections. That
number is not adjusted for inflation, so it
would be worse than it appears.
He sees only two solutions: Texas must
do more to prepare preschoolers and must
boost grants to provide financial help for
college. “The data seems to show that if
a kid walks into a learning situation for
the first time when they are 5 or 6, that’s
probably too late,” he said.
— The Houston Chronicle
STOP SIGN DESIGN
In an Internet parody called “The
Process,” a designer is given a corporate gig
with a simple brief: to design a new stop
sign. “We’re seeing reports that people
don’t know what to do at an intersection,”
he is told, and from there it descends in an
absurd spiral of tweaks and redesigns, with
the designer’s creative vision cast against the
slow strangulation of groupthink.
In reality, the design of the stop sign,
however seemingly settled, is not necessarily
ideal. In 1998, for example, there were
more than 700,000 crashes at intersections
marked — or “controlled,” as engineers say
— by stop signs. More than 3,000 of these
were fatal.
Gary Lauder, a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur, was just the latest to propose
a redesign of the stop sign during a recent
and much-discussed TED presentation.
Using the example of a three-way
intersection in which a minor road ended
in a “T” at a major road, with stop signs
all the way around, Lauder calculated
that the stopping led to a collective yearly
loss in fuel and time valued at roughly
$112,000. Why not just use a yield sign
on the minor approach? Well, at certain
times of the day a queue backs up there,
and cars have trouble making the turn. So
Lauder proposed a hybrid “stop-yield” sign,
simply labeled “Take Turns,” paired with
the instruction: “If cars are waiting please
stop and alternate.”
— Slate
2050 PREDICTIONS
A poll released today by the Pew Research
Center asked 1,546 adult Americans to
look 40 years into the future to imagine
what life will be like in 2050.
Some highlights of the Pew poll:
- 71 percent probably/definitely believe
that a cure will be found for cancer;
- 50 percent believe we will find evidence
of life elsewhere in the universe;
- 48 percent believe humans will be
cloned;
- 48 percent believe that computer chips
will be embedded in Americans for
identification;
- 54 percent believe there will be no
more gas-powered cars;
- 58 percent believe there will be another
world war;
- 31 percent believe an asteroid will hit
the earth; and
- 41 percent believe that Jesus Christ
will return.
—The National Post
TEN YEARS LATER
On June 26, 2000, two scientific teams
announced at the White House that they
had deciphered virtually the entire human
genome. An enthusiastic President Clinton
predicted a revolution in “the diagnosis,
prevention and treatment of most, if not
all, human diseases.”
Now, 10 years later, there have been some
important advances, such as powerful new
drugs for a few cancers and genetic tests
that can predict whether people with breast
cancer need chemotherapy. But the original
hope that close study of the genome would
identify mutations or variants that cause
diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart
ailments — and generate treatments for
them — has given way to realization that
the causes of most diseases are enormously
complex and not easily traced to a simple
mutation or two..
—The New York Times |
